A Call to City Manager Elton Daniels: Bring Our Experts to the Table

I admire the fact that President Trump has repeatedly brought some of the country’s most accomplished business and industry leaders to the White House, drawing upon their knowledge and experience as his administration considers complicated issues.

Among those invited have been AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Michael Dell, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Safra Catz, people accustomed to making consequential decisions and looking well beyond the problems immediately in front of them.

There is a leadership lesson in this for Rocky Mount.

A good leader does not have to know everything. A good leader needs to know whom to ask.

And we have experts, too.

Every morning, men and women go to work in this area at Pfizer, Cummins, UNC Health Nash, Boddie-Noell Enterprises, Honeywell, Corning, ABB, Eagle Transport, Rocky Mount Mills and other significant businesses and institutions.

Within those organizations are people who understand large budgets and complicated balance sheets. They understand cash flow, debt, payroll, capital investment, purchasing, infrastructure, personnel and long-range planning. They know what it means to make difficult choices when the numbers demand them. They know how to look beyond this year’s budget and ask what today’s decisions will mean three years, five years and ten years from now.

So here is my call to action.

I am asking Rocky Mount City Manager Elton Daniels to bring a few extra chairs to the table.

Invite a carefully chosen group of our area’s CEOs, CFOs, financial officers, plant managers and senior executives to City Hall and ask for their expertise.

Keep the table small and purposeful. This would be the City Manager’s working roundtable, made up of invited business and financial leaders whose experience qualifies them for the particular task at hand. Its purpose would not be community representation, but professional expertise, new heads around the table, looking at Rocky Mount’s financial picture alongside the City Manager and for his benefit.

A WORKING ROUNDTABLE.

Bring together people accustomed to managing large budgets, weighing risk, setting priorities, finding efficiencies and making decisions whose consequences reach years into the future.

Put Rocky Mount’s financial picture on the table, the numbers, the obligations, the projections, the challenges. Give these experienced people the information they need to understand where we stand and where we are headed.

Then give them room to do what they do best: study the numbers, ask hard questions, test assumptions, identify concerns and opportunities, and offer the benefit of experience earned from managing complex organizations.

The purpose would be clear: to give the City Manager an additional circle of experienced financial and management minds focused on strengthening Rocky Mount’s financial future.

This proposal would not diminish the expertise within City Hall. It would add to it.

That is what good leaders do. They widen the circle.

The starting point for the roundtable:

Where are we financially today? Here are the books. Here is where Rocky Mount stands. What do you see?

Give them access to the information they need, and let their experience tell them what to examine, what questions to ask, what concerns them and where they see opportunity.

Then I would put one question in the center of the table and give everyone time to answer it:

If you were responsible for Rocky Mount’s financial future, what would you do first?

That is the question I want these experienced people to help answer.

They would not be asked to run the City of Rocky Mount, but asked to SERVE the City by bringing their experience to the table to look at our financial picture with fresh eyes.

Tell the City Manager what they see. Perhaps return for two or three additional working sessions as the questions become clearer.

This seems especially appropriate at this moment because Mr. Daniels is already demonstrating an emphasis on financial management. This spring he appointed CPA Kimberly Leonard, who has more than 25 years of experience in budgeting, organizational strategy and operational performance, as Rocky Mount’s Chief Budget & Strategy Officer. His proposed 2026–27 budget also emphasized fiscal responsibility and long-term financial stability.

I see this roundtable not as a departure from what the City Manager is doing, but as another step in that direction.

And I am asking the readers of Mainstreetrockymount.com to support the idea.

Talk about it. Share this post. If you know one of the business leaders or financial executives who could contribute, send the idea along. If you believe Rocky Mount should make greater use of the remarkable talent already here, say so.

I’m sure there are people who belong at this table whose names have not occurred to me. I hope there are. Finding them should be part of the exercise.

Some of the answers to our community’s challenges are all ready sitting in offices, plants, hospitals and businesses only a few miles from City Hall.

We don’t have to wait for experts to arrive in Rocky Mount. They are already here.

They raise families here, employ people here, invest here, solve problems here and make difficult decisions here every day.

All we have to do is invite them. I ask Elton Daniels to have the wisdom to pull up a few extra chairs and ask the right people to sit down.