Mayoral Deficit Management
Misty L. Bruce
Liberty University
GOVT 327-Professor Heather Piedmont
August 16th, 2021
There is no guarantee that any elected official can right set a deficit, reduce a crime rate,
or negotiate community resources in a manner that creates equitable access; however, the right
candidate approaches with a strategic plan and leverages the subject matter experts on his or her
team. For better understanding, a hypothetical scenario will be utilized. The scenario is one that
finds a small town Mayor faced with the challenge of adding a new state of the art facility to the
town but has a structural deficit of $100,000. The town, Hopewell Valley, has an annual town
revenue of $1,200,000, and this year outlays are topping $1,300,000. And your annual
projections only get worse. There are there are multiple contributing factors to the structural
deficit. Problems stem from the local teacher’s union and their insistence upon a raise, a 1%
unemployment increase, and the skillset of current residents to man a high tech facility. The first
step is to create a steering committee or project management team to assist with identifying
outliers, solution seeking and implementation.
Project Management Team
As the Mayor, it is important to establish a team that can focus on this project, as there
will be multiple other tasks and duties that stem from city management that will require
attention. The Project Management Team will work to create a strategic plan, “to produce a
better understanding of the situation” and to provide a format for an exchange of ideas that lead
to the “implementation of ideas that contribute to economic growth [ CITATION Ann18 \l
1033 ]. Once this critical first step is complete, the discussion around potential facilities, the
contributing factors to the deficit and potential solutions to workforce challenges and funding
can be discussed. Additionally, the strategic planning committee will work to establish a set of
goals that does not lose sight of the community culture and values by hosting townhalls.
Identifying the Ideal Solution
To address major deficit concerns the strategic planning team, after extensive research,
has proposed three possible solutions that might assist with additional revenue. First, increasing
taxes moderately will help to cover the teacher’s request for a raise, reducing the number of full-
time city employees, and potentially leveraging a less expensive form of healthcare for
employees, such as health savings accounts should reduce expenses substantially.
Due to the town’s steep history in agriculture and rural nature, rather than outsourcing
employees, the Mayor has selected to embark on building a high-tech greenhouse. This new
technology would warrant the use of multiple “green” grants from the local utility company, and
a partnership with the University System to cover grants in exchange for an internship program.
Additionally, local investors will be solicited within the local community to cover any
shortcomings in budget.
The Hopewell Valley Greenhouse Project will boost the town’s employment rate and
stands to offer the opportunity to be employee owned. Hopewell Valley’s facility will closely
mirror a venture taken in a small town in Kentucky. “Morehead Kentucky, where roughly one in
three people live below the poverty line, a company called AppHarvest is constructing a massive
new 60-acre high-tech greenhouse will be constructed that is designed to bring back local jobs
while shrinking the environmental footprint of delivering food to cities like Washington, D.C.
and Nashville” [ CITATION The19 \l 1033 ]. Capitalizing on the current skillset and culture of
the town will help to ensure the success of the project and reinvest in the community.
[ CITATION The19 \l 1033 ] reports the greenhouse would require the use of 80% less diesel due
to the need to ship from Mexico in trucks diminishing; furthermore the project “will grow
tomatoes and cucumbers using hydroponics, a growing system that grows plants in a nutrient
solution rather than soil, using 90% less water than farming in a field, and will rely entirely on
rainwater stored in a retention pond on-site, and eliminates the need for pesticides, and saves on
energy due to combined power sources” [ CITATION The19 \l 1033 ]; furthermore, a greenhouse
project of this size will provide, “100 construction jobs and 285 full-time, permanent jobs that
pay a minimum of $13 an hour plus benefits.”
Sustainability and Relevance
One of the greatest disasters in community improvement is implementing short term
fixes, this new technology should be both sustainable and relevant. “Wageningen University and
Research (WUR) are the primary architects of high-tech greenhouse technology and found that
the advantages of protected cultivation have a mostly better product quality with higher input
efficiencies and estimates that greenhouse horticulture establishments will provide 56.5-58.5
million hours of employment, of which more than 90% is for cultivation labor” [ CITATION
Jor20 \l 1033 ]. With the high tech ability of the greenhouse, the community can contribute to a
global need; thus, securing year over year grants for improvements, expansion, or modernization.
Research continues to support the need for sustainable food production with a minimal footprint,
“sustainability in food production is one of the major concerns of growers, consumers and
governments, including the need to reduce environmental impacts” (Samaranayake, P., et al.
2020). For the Christian public servant, it is important to remember that a preservation of the
resources provided by the Lord is worthwhile. The Bible teaches in John 1:3 [ CITATION
The84 \l 1033 ], ”through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been
made.”
References
Bowman, A., & Kearney, R. (2018). State and Local Government (10th ed.). Boston, MA:
Cengage Learning.
Samaranayake, P., Liang, W., Zhong-Hua, C., Tissue, D., & Yi-Chen, L. (2020). Sustainable
Protected Cropping: A Case Study of Seasonal Impacts on Greenhouse Energy Consumption
during Capsicum Production. Energies, 13(17), 4468.
http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.liberty.edu/10.3390/en13174468
Strickler, J. (2020, April 28). High-Tech Greenhouses Could Be The Future Of Agriculture.
Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanstrickler/2020/08/28/high-
tech-greenhouses-could-be-the-future-of-agriculture/?sh=231942bb380f
The Holy Bible, New International Version. (2018). Zondervan Publishing.
The Optimist Daily. (2019). A high-tech sustainable greenhouse is about to be built in coal
country. Retrieved from https://www.optimistdaily.com/2019/06/a-high-tech-sustainable-
greenhouse-is-about-to-be-built-in-coal-country/
