Great Falls Native
Joe Briggs was born and raised in Great Falls and has been a Cascade County resident his entire life. Joe is the youngest of three children born to James “Jiggs” Briggs and Florence Briggs. With the exception of attending college in St. Louis, home was always 3227 9th Ave. South for Joe. After returning from college with fiancée Kathy, Briggs purchased a home at 5900 Western Drive, where the couple lives to this day.
Joe is a product of the Great Falls School district, having attended Lincoln Elementary and East Junior High. He attended the first Great Falls Central his freshman year and then transferred when the first Central ceased operations and is a 1976 graduate of Great Falls High. Briggs was active in a number of extracurricular activities, including Band, Football, Scouting and the National Honor Society.
Janice, Joe’s sister, returned to Great Falls over thirty years ago with her husband Hartwig Moeller to enjoy time with her niece and nephew. She enjoyed a career with the American Red Cross prior to retiring, and Joe’s brother-in-law is a retired doctor of chemistry. Joe’s older brother, James, was killed in a car accident in 1968 at the age of sixteen.
Joe’s father, James, better known as Jiggs, was raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana but moved to Great Falls following his discharge from the Army after W.W.II. He met Florence Polich of Black Eagle while working at Rice Truck Lines. They married and settled first on the West Side of Great Falls and then moved to the residence on 9th Ave. South. Jiggs was well known in the trucking industry as the Shop Foreman for Rice Truck and Equipment and later as Maintenance Manager for Transystems. He was also very active in Boy Scouts as a Cub Master, Scout Master and Troop Committee Chairman. Florence was a homemaker and a very dedicated member of the St. Peter and Paul Parish Community, having served in the Altar Society, St. Bernadette Circle and on the Parish Council for many years.
Joe’s father, Jiggs, believed that everyone in a family had a role to play in the success of the family.
In the case of the children, their primary job was to get an education. Good grades were not optional. They were expected, and the children rose to the challenge.
Secondly, Joe and Janice were expected to earn money for college and help around the house. Jiggs had quit school in 9th grade and started working in a logging camp to help support his family during the depression. When the war broke out, he enlisted in the Army-Air Corps and, as such, never graduated High School. It was perhaps the one thing that he always regretted in life, and he made certain that his children would go to college, an ideal passed on to his son.
Joe began working after school and on weekends when he was thirteen years old and is no stranger to hard work. Initially, he performed such glamorous tasks as pulling weeds, cleaning and painting truck wheels and branding tracking numbers into truck tires. While in high school, he was trained as a grease monkey/tire man and spent his summers out on highway construction sites throughout Montana and Wyoming. Following college, he accepted a management position at Transystems and ultimately became the Manager of the Information Technology department.
Family Man
Family is central to Joe’s life, and he takes great pride in his family. Joe and his wife Kathy were married in St. Peter and Paul Parish in Great Falls in 1981 and have two children, Jessica and James. He is a strong believer that it is in the home that values are taught and the future is crafted. Kathy and Joe are strong advocates of both formal education as well as education in the home. There is an extensive collection of books in the Briggs’ household covering a broad range of fields of study and interests. The availability of materials matched with the example of parents who love to read has created a second generation of avid readers in the Briggs’ household.
Eldest child and daughter, Jessica, is a graduate of the University of Idaho, where she earned a double degree in History in Political Science with a minor in International Relations in 2009. She went on to complete a Masters degree in International Relations and Contemporary Political Theory at the University of Westminster in London. She took advantage of her year abroad by traveling extensively throughout Europe while working on her Thesis. Upon returning to the United States, Jessica served as an Ameri*Corp VISTA, Volunteer in Service to America, at the Red Lodge Area Community Foundation, where she worked to develop programs to address local poverty and build capacity for local organizations for three years. She then returned to Great Falls and is the volunteer coordinator for the local AmeriCorp Senior program with United Way of Cascade County. Jessica is also an avid writer and has self-published eleven books, with six others awaiting their turn. She is the webmaster of this website.
Son, James is a graduate of Rocky Mountain College with a double degree in English and Education with a minor in Physics. Like his sister, he is a CMR graduate where in addition to his studies, he was involved in a number of extracurricular activities, including Varsity football and Boy Scouts. Jim is an Eagle Scout, a Brotherhood Member of the Order Of the Arrow. He completed his first year of teaching at Poplar High School on the Fork Peck Reservation and is currently the Head of the English Department at Conrad High School. James is an avid gamer and reader, passions that he enjoys sharing with students and makes frequent trips back to Great Falls to visit the family.
Joe’s wife, Kathy Briggs, is the manager of Family First Federal Credit Union and a past member of the Board of Directors of the Treasure State Credit Union. She is a former member of the St. Joseph’s parish Finance Council and has been active in a number of professional associations. Kathy was born in Missouri, but prior to meeting Joe at College in St. Louis, she called Birmingham, Alabama home. She is the youngest of four children and holds a bachelor degree in Earth and Planetary sciences. Given the shortage of NASA jobs in our area requiring her degree, Kathy turned her attention to finding a career path rather different from her field of study. Ultimately, she took an interest in Credit Unions and has worked her way from a part-time teller position at Great Falls Telephone Employees Credit Union to her current position of manager / CEO at Family First Federal Credit Union.
We recently said goodbye to our beloved basset hound Sophia who was an excellent supervisor for the family as the best puppies are.
Community Volunteer
“Government does not define a community; its people do. It is what we as individuals do or choose not to do that creates the community in which we live. The government’s role is to provide a safe and secure environment for its citizens, nothing more and certainly nothing less. What sort of community we create within this framework is entirely up to us.” It is this philosophy of government that drives Joe to be an active volunteer in Great Falls. If you recognize that civic improvement is the responsibility of each and every one of us, you have no choice but become involved. In Joe’s case, he has been involved in a wide range of activities in Cascade County but has a particular interest in working with the youth of our area.
Joe’s community service resume includes the Optimist Club of Great Falls, where he has been a director and officer of that organization, as well as chairing their primary fundraising event, the Can-Am Antique Show. In addition to raising funds for a number of youth activities through the Optimist Club, Joe also served as a volunteer leader in the local Boy Scouts.
He has previously served in several positions on the Lewis and Clark District Committee, most recently as its Chairman. In recognition of his years of service, he was awarded the BSA District Award of Merit in 2005 and the outstanding scouter award in 2010. In addition to his activity with the youth of Cascade County, he has also been active in the Great Falls Chamber of Commerce, serving on the Committee of 80, the Military Affairs Committee, Blue Coats Committee, as a member of the Board of Directors from 1992-1998 and as the Chairman of the Board in 1997.
Joe is once again on the Chamber Board of Directors as well as serving on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of Great Falls Development and is the immediate Past President of a five-county Certified Regional Development Corporation, Sweetgrass Development. The associations gained through his Chamber involvement have to lead to many other volunteer activities ranging from the formation of “Great Falls Positive” and the annual “Christmas Day Dinner at the Heisey”. Additionally, Briggs now serves as a member of the Executive Committee for the Central Montana Defense Alliance and is Chairman of the Montana Association of Counties’ Community, Economic Development and Labor Committee.
In September of 2011, he was elected 2nd Vice President of the Montana Association of Counties and is Chairman of the MACO Conference Committee for 2012. He was recently appointed to the National Association of Counties Telecommunications and Technology Steering Committee, which sets legislative policy for the National organization’s congressional lobbying efforts. He is the recipient of numerous volunteer awards from both national and local organizations, including the “Good Apple” award from the Great Falls School District for his pro-bono work automating the libraries at both Great Falls and CM Russell High Schools.
Trained to Find Solutions
Joe’s profession prior to becoming a Cascade County Commissioner was the owner and operator of Briggs Computer Consultants. Computer Consultants are paid to analyze the operations of an organization and find methods by which processes and procedures can be streamlined and costs reduced. The solutions created generally include everything from staff training, the redesign of paper flow, changes to computer software systems, network and system integration and computer hardware changes.
Every solution crafted is unique, as every organization is unique. There is no “one size fits all”. The same is true in county government. Although there are many similarities between Cascade County and other county governments, each is unique and deserves individual attention. Joe Briggs has brought the years of training and management insights he learned in the private sector to county government and has put it to use every day to improve Cascade County. The citizens of Cascade County deserve both accountability and efficiency from their government, and Joe works every day to provide both to our citizens.
Joe’s reelections in 2010 and 2016 allowed him to continue to use those skills coupled with over twenty years of private sector management experience and six years of direct experience as your commissioner. A great deal of progress has already been made, but much more can be done to make Cascade County a better place to raise our families and make our homes.