Covington native Jay Fossett is a former City Manager and City Solicitor for the City of Covington who is currently serving as the City Administrator for the City of Dayton, Kentucky, a position from which he will retire in 2026.

As Covington City Manager, Fossett served as the city’s Chief Executive Officer. As Dayton City Administrator, he serves as the city’s Chief Operating Officer under the mayor. In both positions, he advised the mayor and legislative bodies on policy formulation, prepared and administered operating and capital budgets, directed city operations, managed city employees, led housing and economic development, and performed other executive and legal duties at the direction of and on behalf of the mayors and legislative bodies of these cities.

Fossett grew up in Latonia — or “East LA,” as he likes to say — the portion of the neighborhood that’s east of Decoursey Avenue. He grew up in a house his grandparents constructed in 1924 on the corner of Glenn Avenue and East 38th Street, between the CSX railroad tracks and Twin Oaks Golf Course. He attended Eighth District Grade School (where the Colony Apartments are now located) before graduating from Holmes High School in 1977.

Fossett also has lived in the Covington neighborhoods of Wallace Woods, when he was a young newspaper reporter at The Kentucky Post, and Old Seminary Square, when he attended law school and worked as a young lawyer. In 2023, Fossett and his wife, Barbara, returned to Covington as empty-nesters after rehabbing a 150-year-old house in the Historic Licking Riverside neighborhood. They have three children — Meredith, Alyson, and Jack — and one grandson, Archie, with another on the way.

Fossett attended the University of Kentucky, where he studied journalism and political science. After graduating from UK in 1981, he worked as a newspaper reporter for five years before leaving journalism to attend law school.

Fossett worked as a lawyer in private practice for 15 years before becoming Covington’s first full-time City Solicitor in 2001. After serving in that position for four years, the Covington City Commission appointed him to serve as Covington City Manager in July 2005, a position in which he served until July 2009.

After leaving the City of Covington, Fossett and his friend, former Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Patrick Crowley, founded Strategic Advisers, LLC, a public relations and government affairs agency in September 2009. For five years, Strategic Advisers was located in the Republic Bank building at 6th and Madison in Covington. In March 2021, he left the company to become City Administrator in Dayton.

Fossett is a 1987 graduate of Salmon P. Chase College of Law at Northern Kentucky University, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Northern Kentucky Law Review, and a 2010 graduate of the Haile/U.S. Bank College of Business at NKU, where he obtained a master’s degree in Executive Leadership and Organizational Change.

From 1980 to 1985, he worked as a newspaper reporter at The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Cincinnati Enquirer, and The Kentucky Post. He also served as editor-in-chief of Star magazine in Lexington, Ky., while attending UK, and was founder and editor-in-chief of The Paper Chase, Chase Law School’s independent student newspaper. He also served at editor-in-chief of the Northern Kentucky Law Review during his final year as a law student at Chase.

After law school, Fossett worked as a law clerk to Ohio Supreme Court Justice Craig Wright, before joining the Cincinnati law firm of Strauss & Troy as an associate. In 1992, he and Mark Ogle founded Fossett & Ogle in Covington, and in 1993, he became a founding partner in Fossett, Howe, Wessels & Ogle, PSC, which merged with the Cincinnati law firm of Cors & Bassett in 1998.

Fossett served as an adjunct faculty member at Chase Law School for 10 years, where he taught trial advocacy. He served four terms on the Kentucky Academy of Trial Attorneys  Board of Governors and also served as the editor-in-chief of KATA’s bi-monthly magazine, The Advocate. He has published articles in three law reviews, written several articles for The Advocate, and authored “Legally Speaking,” a monthly column that appeared in The Kentucky Post.

Fossett was appointed to the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance by Gov. Paul Patton in 2003 and to the Board of the Kentucky Local Distribution Fund Oversight Committee by Gov. Ernie Fletcher in 2006. He served as a city council member on the Fort Thomas City Council from 2012-2014.

In 2007, he received the “Great Neighbor Award” from the Center for Great Neighborhoods of Covington, which recognized “his visionary leadership and efforts to mobilize residents and stakeholders for Covington’s future” in developing the city’s citizen-driven strategic plan. In 2017, he was inducted into the Holmes High School Hall of Distinction.

Fossett currently serves as secretary of the Tom Ellis Athletic Memorial Foundation, which supports student-athletes in Covington Independent Public Schools; as a board member of the Covington Business Council, where he served as its chairman from 2022 to 2024; and as a board member of the Gateway Foundation, which supports the Gateway Community and Technical College.

Other boards Fossett has served on include The Hillside Trust, Literacy in Northern Kentucky, Salmon P. Chase College of Law Alumni Association — organizations where he served as the board’s president — and the Northern Kentucky University Alumni Council, the ELOC Advisory Board, the Vision 2015 Urban Renaissance Committee, Quest: A Vision for Northern Kentucky, Northern Kentucky Volunteer Lawyers Association, the Northern Kentucky Division of the American Heart Association, and the Woodson Bend Property Owners’ Association.

Click to view Jay’s resume.