Longtime City Employee Started In Public Works
By Joseph Haney
Dec. 31, 2025, not only marks the end of the calendar year, but, appropriately, marks the end of an era for the city of Lexington.
After serving as the city’s commissioner of revenue for more than two decades, Karen Roundy will be retiring at the end of the day, concluding a nearly 50year career with the city of Lexington.
Roundy told The News-Gazette earlier this month that she has “mixed emotions” about her pending retirement.
“The hardest thing is not seeing my citizens every day,” she said. “I know I’ll see people at Kroger or the post office … but I love them so much.”
Roundy began working for the city of Lexington in 1979 in the Department of Public Works where she served as the executive secretary. She served in that office until 2000 when she went to work for the city manager’s office as the clerk of council.
When then-Commissioner of Revenue Courtney Baker announced that she would be retiring at the end of 2001, Jon Ellestad – the city manager at the time – suggested to Roundy that she run for the office. After making sure that neither of the other two people working in the office intended to run, Roundy decided to do that, and was elected that fall. She was subsequently reelected five times, most recently in 2021.
Roundy said that one of the things she’s liked about her job over the years is being able to work with the citizens of Lexington.
“I like doing stuff to help people out,” she said. “I like that feeling that people trust you because they know you want what’s best for them. It’s not all roses all the time, but 99 percent of the time, it really is. It’s something I probably would have liked to do for the rest of my life.”
During her tenure as commissioner of revenue, Roundy worked to improve the functions of the office. One of the first things she did was to have each employee in the office learn at least some aspects of everyone else’s job, so that if someone was absent for whatever reason, at least some of the work could still be done. She also had employees take classes to stay up to date on the tax code. Roundy also took classes, receiving a masters designation in 2004.
Also under her tenure, the Lexington Commissioner of Revenue’s office received an accreditation from the Commissioners of the Revenue Association of Virginia in 2019, the first year that it was available. Such accreditations are awarded to offices that meet the 12 standards set forth by the association and have undergone an audit to ensure compliance with the standards. Lexington’s accreditation has been maintained in the six years since, meaning that the city has passed subsequent audits.
Roundy also worked to get updated software for the office. After connecting with representatives from Avenity, a Fairfax-based software company, at commissioners’ conferences and learning about software they were developing to help process taxes in Virginia, Roundy offered to beta test it and was able to get the software at a discounted price for the city. Over the course of six months between October 2006 and May 2007, Roundy worked with the program and tried to find out what it could and couldn’t do.
“What I would do is break it,” Roundy explained. “I would create scenarios and I would go and do those scenarios [in the program] and then would try to reverse engineer them and then they would find the weak links.”
That software, RevenueOne, is now available statewide and many localities are using it. Roundy was eager to spread the word about the software she’d help test. She even went so far as to set up a test area in the office that people from other localities could use to test the software for themselves.
“If I have something that’s good for my citizens and for my employees, I want other people to have it,” she said.
In November, Lexington voters elected Kelly Glass to take over for Roundy in January. Glass had worked in the Rockbridge County Commissioner of Revenue’s office since January 2020 and was the deputy commissioner in that office. Over the past two months, Glass has been working with Roundy to learn the ropes and help secure a smooth transition after the first of the year.
“I think the transition is going very well,” Roundy said. “I think Kelly will do very well because she seems to care a lot too, which is a good thing.”
