Juanita Collins brings more than three decades of finance and operations experience to her role as Director of Finance for the City of Elsa — a position she has used to modernize how the city manages its public funds, trains its staff, and serves its residents. But behind the systems, the processes, and the spreadsheets is a leadership philosophy that has taken a lifetime to develop.
Collins joined the city in 2015 after a career that spanned aerospace procurement at Honeywell, human resources and bookkeeping at a regional pharmacy chain, and financial planning roles across multiple industries. Decades of experience positioned her to implement lasting structural improvements to the city’s financial operations — and taught her something equally important along the way: that technical expertise alone does not make a leader.
“Anybody can succeed as long as you have that work ethic,” she said. “But you have to want to be here for the right reasons.”
A Leadership Philosophy Shaped by Experience
Collins traces her leadership style to the people and environments that challenged her most. Early in her career at Honeywell — a global aerospace company with operations spanning the United States, Mexico, China, and Malaysia — she worked alongside leaders who invested in her potential before she fully recognized it herself.
“They saw that I was willing to learn,” she said. “Coming through everything that I did — moving cities, raising kids on my own — they gave me confidence. And I think that’s why I am where I am today.”
That experience shaped a core belief she carries into every professional relationship: that people rise to meet the investment others make in them. It is a belief she has put into practice throughout her tenure in Elsa, training staff from the ground up, building institutional knowledge across her department, and pushing the people around her to grow beyond what they thought possible.
She also credits a colleague closer to home. Delmira Yanez, a longtime city employee with decades of municipal experience, has been one of the most significant influences on Collins’s leadership journey.
“If you really want to know how a city works, sit down with Del and sponge off of her,” Collins said. “She showed me from the beginning. She’s become a really good friend, and a wealth of knowledge.”
It is a dynamic Collins tries to replicate with her own team. She sets high standards and holds people to them. But she is equally committed to making sure the people around her have everything they need to meet those standards.
Building Systems That Last
Since joining the city, Collins has implemented electronic accounting systems, brought payroll fully in-house, and established standardized processes across the finance department. The systems she has put in place are designed to function independently of any single employee — a leadership decision as much as an operational one.
“I try to make sure that if somebody leaves, somebody else can just pick up and go,” she said.
She points to a period when she temporarily left the city and returned to find her systems and processes fully intact — her team had carried everything forward without missing a beat.
“Everything was still in place,” she said. “That made me proud.”
Workforce Development as a Leadership Priority
A significant part of Collins’s tenure has been dedicated to building the capacity of the people around her. Through years of hands-on training, she developed a team capable of managing accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, and financial reporting independently.
For Collins, this dynamic is central to her definition of leadership.
“My long-term goal is to make sure that when I leave, everything I know has been passed along,” she said. “Not just the technical knowledge, but the mentality. This is how a city should be run. This is what transparency looks like.”
She is equally candid about the qualities she believes leadership requires — and the ones she is still working to strengthen.
It is the kind of self-awareness, she argues, that separates good managers from genuine leaders — the willingness to ask hard questions about yourself and act on the answers.
Transparency as a Leadership Value
For Collins, sound financial management and public accountability are inseparable — and both are fundamentally questions of leadership.
“It’s not our money,” she said. “It’s the taxpayers’ money. And they deserve to know it’s being handled right.”
That belief drives everything from how the department communicates with elected officials to how Collins answers questions from residents who walk through the door. Public trust, she believes, is not given — it is earned through consistency, openness, and a willingness to be held accountable.
“I want people to say that we actually improved the way they lived,” she said. “That we set things in place that stayed. That’s the standard I want to leave behind.”
Technology and the Future of Municipal Leadership
Collins is an outspoken advocate for the use of technology — including artificial intelligence — as a leadership tool in municipal operations. She currently uses AI to interpret contracts, analyze budget documents, and communicate more clearly with stakeholders, describing the efficiency gains as significant.
But she frames this not simply as a productivity issue — it is a leadership issue. Small municipalities like Elsa cannot always compete with larger cities on staffing or resources. Leaders who embrace technology, she argues, can close that gap and serve their communities more effectively in the process.
She also sees it as a model for the people she leads. “I’m a firm believer that you never stop learning,” she said. “I’m 62 and I’m still learning something new every day. That’s not going to change.”
Why Leadership Elsa
Collins joined the Leadership Elsa program to deepen her connections across the local business and civic community — and to keep doing what she has always done: learning from the people around her.
“The communities, the collaboration, the different businesses all coming together — I think it’s awesome,” she said. “You meet people you never would have met otherwise, and you learn things you can’t get anywhere else.”
Her advice to future participants is simple and direct.
“Attend. Show up. Take advantage of what it offers.”
It is the same principle she has lived by throughout a career that has taken her from an aerospace executive’s office in Colorado to the finance department of a small South Texas city — always willing to learn, always ready to lead.
