The Progress-Index PETERSBURG – The nearly five-year tenure of City Manager Aretha Ferrell-Benavides comes to a close this week, after which she will return to her home state of Texas to fill the same role in the City of Duncanville, a suburb of Dallas. She arrived in 2017 to a Petersburg in disarray. The city had recently discovered that its cash reserves had plunged into the red, sitting at negative $7.7 million months before her arrival, which prompted the hiring of the Robert Bobb Group, a Washington D.C.-based consulting firm to steady the city’s operations. In Tuesday’s discussion of the city’s most recent yearly financial audit, Mayor Samuel Parham described the city’s culture at the time of Ferrell-Benavides' arrival. He called it an atmosphere of “anything goes,” where “everybody (can) have a car, anybody can just spend at their will and we'll figure out how to pay it later.” He said she was successful in turning around that culture.