BERLIN — For the last five years, students from one of the town’s schools have been among the winners of the Maryland Municipal League’s “If I Were Mayor…” essay contest and this year’s winner, Thomas Fager, is no different.

Fager, a fourth grader at Worcester Preparatory School, won with an essay that reflects his experience as a community member and also his appreciation that the core of genuine political responsibility is finding ways to build community and civic pride.

Mayor Gee Williams’ proclaimed May 9 this year to be Thomas Fager Day, adding that he was thankful the young man is too young to run for mayor.

When he sat to compose the letter, Fager said he just used the opportunity to give voice to several of the ideas he’d already been cultivating. He wants to make it easier to recycle and to have more events like Take Pride in Berlin Day when the community comes together to give the town a good picking up. Breakfast, he said, would be on him.

Fager also said he’d support a beach run and other healthful activities aimed as much as improving individual health as bringing people together.

“It’s important to keep people from leaving town,” he said. “You want to keep the population up.”

When he’s not planning on how best to run a mayoral administration, Fager is an avid lacrosse player and a mostly-avid surfer, preferring to surf through the summer and leave the February surfing to his older brothers.

The 10-year-old Bishopville resident said he looks forward to following his father, John, into the restaurant business. If that’s the case, it is likely he will be able to continue pursuing different ways of establishing community without having to go into politics, and it is just as well. Fager said he hasn’t the slightest aspiration toward political office.