Nearing the six-month mark of her tenure as Martinsville City Manager, Aretha Ferrell-Benavides discussed the challenges facing the city and its residents, as well as her plans for moving forward.
Not surprisingly after multiple retirements, the biggest challenge the city is facing is stabilization, she said.
“We’ve had a lot of changes in our staff, you know we had a city manager, assistant city manager, public works director, police chief, community development director, we had a lot of vacancies, and we have a lot of new staff,” she said.
She said the city has now almost filled many of the positions through internal promotions and several other employees who were hired around the same time she started in October.
Ferrell-Benavides said part of the equation is starting to move forward as a business, especially as everyone learns their way and adjusts to their roles.
“I always remind people that while we are a government agency, we still have business-type operations. My goal in any organization is to create a high-performing organization, so that’s really assessing where we are and what we need to do to stabilize,” she said and added her starting points are policy, processes, and procedures, which are the foundation of any organization.
“The biggest challenge now is making sure that we have reviewed and updated our policies and making sure that they’re representing the best practices that are available in our field,” she said.
Ferrell-Benavides believes the biggest area the city can improve is economic development and looking at how it can spend more time focusing on the downtown area, “meeting with some of our retail community to focus” and identify “the things that we need to create that mix in that vibrancy.”
While she believes Martinsville has undergone a great transition process from its manufacturing history including Patrick & Henry Community College (P&HCC) and economic development, she notes that people want to see liveliness in the city.
“We see individuals coming into our city, young and old, and people may say it’s an age, but I see a lot of young people when you look at our restaurants and our places,” she said.
Ferrell-Benavides said the city needs to focus on the downtown vibrancy and look at what it can do to get and keep businesses in the city, in partnership with the Martinsville-Henry County Chamber of Commerce and economic development organizations.
Before she officially became city manager, Ferrell-Benavides said the council reestablished the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) to focus on internal economic development.
“They have named a group of individuals to serve in that role. They started out with touring the city and looking at opportunities where we can enhance our city government and enhance our economic development efforts,” she said.
For example, she said a group wants to move to the former Armory site and another site that’s asked for proposals (RPFs) and interest from other hotels who are interested in moving there.
“Bringing people here has been one of my big focuses because I think we need some outside ideas and some individuals to really take charge and start to look at what innovative things we can do, and what companies would be attracted to us,” she said.
Ferrell-Benavides said the city is currently working on its new strategic plan to help guide the city forward with its goals, while “refocusing on what is our vision, what is our mission, what are our key goals. We’ve identified several areas of focus but what I’d like to do is consolidate those into pillars of functions.”
Ferrell-Benavides said she prefers strategic planning to be done with both goals and measurements.
“One of the things that I plan to implement is, I’m revamping our entire budget and budget process, creating a more community-engaged process but also focusing our budget dollars around performance measurements and workload measurement,” she said.
The primary feedback from city staff thus far is that she brings a different perspective.
“Part of it is I told anyone when I got here, my transition plan focused a lot on listening and learning. So, I spent most of my first two months just understanding who the people are and what they’re doing,” Ferrell-Benavides said and added that another of her goals is organizational development.
“How do you develop your team to become high-performing? That’s by empowering them, listening to them, getting them used to knowing there are no bad ideas and having the opportunity to make mistakes and just learn from it,” she said.
Ferrell-Benavides said she decided to take the position in part because she wanted to move back to the East Coast.
After being in Texas for just over two years, Ferrell-Benavides said she had a desire to come back to Virginia.
“After my position in Texas was terminated, and I spoke with one of the recruiters here about opportunities, they mentioned Martinsville,” she said. Once she visited the city and met with the council and the mayor, Ferrell-Benavides said she was impressed with the community.
“I didn’t know a lot about Martinsville, but I came here for the interview, spent some time in the city for a couple of days, and really found it to be a wonderful place,” she said.
“When COVID hit, and because of COVID I had a couple of deaths in my family and decided I needed to go back home, make sure my grandmother and family were okay, which is what I did,” she said.
