Prescott Arizona News and Events - Read It News Magazine

Part 1 - Introduction

Arizona continues to face revenue shortfalls and the need to cut its budget.  Those revenue declines affect Prescott, both from less revenue flowing from the state and local sales tax revenues that continue to decline. We monitor our sales tax revenues closely and they are still continuing to decline. I am particularly interested in the trend line, which is still showing a downward slope – we have not yet reached the bottom. 

The City of Prescott has taken a number of measures to balance our budget given these revenue shortfalls.  We have frozen most positions on city staff and we have laid off a number of people.  We have prepared contingency plans for additional layoffs.  Our previous cutbacks have been largely invisible to most of our citizens, but future layoffs will be visible and will hurt. As an example, we may need to close the library on Saturdays.

Given the current dismal economic situation at the national, state and local levels, it would be easy to say our hands are tied and we do not have any options to promote economic development.  I prefer the “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” approach.  We completed a major economic development planning effort earlier this year with the publication of the Focused Futures II document under the direction of Jane Bristol, our Economic Development Director.  It looks at our strengths and weaknesses and lays out tactics for augmenting our strengths while working on our weaknesses.

When a new mayor takes office, all the advisory committees of the previous mayor are automatically dissolved.  I formed my Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Economic Development the day after my inauguration in November 2007.  As a new mayor, I brought a different perspective and approach to how I wanted that committee to operate. I appointed Dr. Charles Grantham as chair of that committee (see http://www.thefutureofwork.net) and Chris Hoy as vice-chair.  Chris is retired but had previously worked on rural Internet deployment statewide in Nebraska. His focus is on how we can better support entrepreneurs.

From the information in Focused Futures II and a review of other economic information, we soon identified a series of inhibitors to future economic development in this area.  We coined the phrase the “Swiss cheese holes in Economic Development” for this set of inhibitors.

It was a “sticky” catchphrase – that helps us capture the economic development inhibitors in our mind.  The inhibitors we identified were:

1. Lack of a four-year university program
2. Lack of airline connectivity
3. Lack of Internet broadband capacity and redundancy
4. Lack of Affordable Housing

Inhibitors will cause a firm looking at locating in the area to cross us off their list of potential locations.  Another way of describing inhibitors is as “knock out conditions” or roadblocks.

Once we had identified the inhibitors or roadblocks to successful economic development, we then had specific areas we could focus on.  This series will continue with in-depth articles on each of these areas.  Each will discuss the basic inhibitor (or Swiss cheese hole) and our approach to solving it (or filling the hole).

I believe in the value of gaining input from across the community as good ideas can come from anywhere.  Hence, I encourage your constructive comments and suggestions.

Send the Mayor your input by calling 928-777-1270, or sending an e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  .

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