Running a city is hard work, and it’s even harder when there aren’t enough resources to cover basic service and infrastructure needs. More and more cities are finding themselves in this tricky spot, and it’s easy for city leaders to feel overwhelmed.

In this episode, we talk about the challenges facing city administrators (as well as their staff) who are increasingly stretched thin by their city's growing resource gap. Then we discuss what they can do about it.

There are plenty of tools (related to land use, growth management, economic development, etc.) that cities across the country are using to become more fiscally viable. But these involve changes to the status quo, and change often generates pushback. This episode is about clarifying and communicating your city's resource gap so that you can build consent for taking measures that cultivate greater financial resilience.

We discuss:

• The importance of quantifying your city's real resource gap.

• How you can use fiscal strength as the common language for framing your community's decisions on planning, development, housing, economic development, street design and maintenance, and more.

• How you can put fiscal analysis to use to communicate the resource gap to the broader community—and the 3 options it presents you with.

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The Go Cultivate! podcast is a project of Verdunity.

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