CEO of Greater Greenville and a Forward Thinking Visionary By Jack Criss  •  Photography by Johnny Jennings Daniel Boggs is a living refutation of Leo Derocher’s famous statement that “nice guys finish last.”     First of all, you couldn’t meet a nicer man than Boggs, currently the Chief Executive Officer of Greater Greenville—what he has shortened from the “official” names of the three entities he oversees: Greater Greenville Housing & Revitalization Association, Inc., the Greater Greenville Development Foundation and Main Street Greenville.  Second, far from being last, Boggs has overseen the revitalization of his adopted home of Greenville in ways that, twenty years ago, might have been unthinkable or beyond realization. So, no, this nice guy doesn’t finish last. Not at all. And he won’t stop working until he puts Greenville, Mississippi first, as a matter of fact. Surprisingly,  the work Boggs currently puts his heart and soul into—essentially economic and community development—was not what he initially envisioned at all for a career path. That would have been as a landscape architect. “Yes, it’s true,” laughs Boggs. “When I graduated from Mississippi State in 2004 with my Landscape Architect Degree, I immediately moved to Miami, Florida to pursue my career, a place where I could get involved in really cool, interesting projects. And I did. I worked on two Super Bowl projects, the Florida Everglades restoration project, the West Palm Beach bridge, the redevelopment of several well-known boulevards in Miami—and other really fun and challenging deals.” Boggs says that in Miami, as in other major markets, landscape architects can thrive in their careers. That is not so true in Mississippi though, as Boggs soon discovered. “I returned to Mississippi as part of the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts,” he says, “but I knew sustainable design techniques and some engineering through my education at MSU with my degree and community development and planning fits into that, as well. That’s why, now, I simply tell people that my profession is a developer.” When Boggs says he returned to Mississippi, he’s referring to his birthplace of Florence, located just south of Jackson in Rankin County.  “When I was growing up there, the population