Meet Julie Gibson Coonce, newest appointed member to the BZA
“Iwas really attracted to Rappahannock, like most people, for the unique beauty of it,” said Julie Gibson Coonce, the newest appointee to the Board of Zoning Appeals. “It’s really unadulterated, if you will.”
Coonce, who moved to the county in 2016, will replace outgoing Hampton representative Chris Bird.
“My hope … for the next five years is just really [ that I can] do my part in keeping it the way it is,” Coonce said. “I think we have something really unique and special here and I hope it will stay that way.”
Originally from Houston, Coonce has described herself as a “hyper-focused overachiever.” She made a career in computer engineering and holds two masters degrees: one in Systems Architecting and Engineering from the University of Southern California and another in So ware Engineering from
University of Houston-Clear Lake.
In an interview with the Rappahannock News, Coonce confessed that growing up she “actually always wanted to be a lawyer. But I used to play in a local poker game in Houston and all of the other guys in the poker game were lawyers and I hated them all,” she laughed.
Coonce changed her mind and instead pursued a computer certi cation course. “It kind of went from there,” she said.
She took a job with Boeing as soon as she graduated from college, becoming the youngest engineer on the space shuttle program in Houston. “My job [at Boeing] primarily was to … test so ware maintenance and upgrades to the so ware,” Coonce said.
“My job was to make sure [an upgrade] didn’t break the functionality of the system. So I would get to run ight simulators and try to purposely break it in some way, like ip the switches in the shuttle and see what would happen in ight simulations.”
And Coonce was very good at it. To the astonishment of her colleagues, she nished her work in record time. “I would just get bored,” she said.
“So my boss said, ‘Julie, just go get another degree or something,’ and that’s how I ended up getting my second Master’s degree. And that’s when I had my rst child, too.”
Coonce’s career eventually carried her to work for the credit reporting agency TransUnion, managing their Department of Defense and Intelligence program. I do more than sell credit reports and it’s really cool and really fun and that’s all I can say,” she said with a smile.