“The whirlwind is in the thorn tree…”
— Johnny Cash, “When the Man Comes Around”
Some years ago, I traveled to Chattanooga as part of a contingent from Birmingham. We spent the better part of a day talking with various influential folks — elected officials, corporate executives, educators, directors of nonprofit organizations — about some of the programs and initiatives that were driving the transformation of that city from a dirty, gritty, little-regarded backwater of Tennessee to one that was being hailed as one of America’s great success stories in urban revitalization. That the narrative of growth and progress our group heard continues today (and I do mean “today”; preparing to write this column, I Googled Chattanooga roughly five minutes after The Chattanooga Times Free Press posted word that the city is a finalist in Outside magazine’s “Best Town Ever” contest) only underscores what I have to say this week.
Among the people we met that day were three members of the Chattanooga City Council. I have a vivid recollection of those conversations — not so much the specific content, of which I actually remember very little, as of the impression that each of those councilors made on me. Here, I thought in each case, was the kind of person you’d like to have as a mayor, or a member of Congress — intelligent, informed, witty and highly articulate both in touting their city’s good points and acknowledging and discussing the challenges it faced in maintaining and building on the momentum that had been generated there.
Why don’t we have any city councilors like this in Birmingham? I thought. And I was not alone; for most of the two-and-half-hour ride home, the predominant topic of conversation was the collectively sorry state of our city’s own governing body. Among other statements, I remember one of the group — who, because they remain in a position that requires them to deal with the Birmingham City Council on a regular basis, shall remain nameless here — referring to the Birmingham council chamber as “the place where progress goes to die.” I asked if anyone could imagine any member of our council representing the community in a higher office, and you’d have thought I’d just told the world’s funniest joke.
Of course, much has changed in Birmingham since then. A lot of that change has been for the better — but not all of it, as the only thing that has changed with the Birmingham City Council in the intervening years is that it has become progressively worse. Back then our council was a mere embarrassment. Today it is nothing short of a clear and present danger to every hope and dream we have of Birmingham’s becoming a great city.
Pick a meaningful issue — education, housing, mass transit, public health, economic development — and tell me what the Birmingham City Council has done about it, in terms of bringing innovative, workable ideas and solutions to bear. Instead they bicker. They obfuscate. They self-aggrandize. They complain about Mayor Bell, even as they do their best to match his office dollar-for-dollar in expenditures on parties, on staff, on out-of-town travel and other trappings of office to which they regard themselves as entitled. They treat the public like something stuck to the bottom of their shoe. They demand respect, which to them means freedom from oversight or criticism from the people who elected them, without moving themselves to do the first thing to earn it.
Oh, and they hand out money. Tons of it, in quantities large and small, for everything from neighborhood “fun days,” at which they show up to claim credit for having made possible through their generosity, to pet projects favored by key supporters, to almost anything that at least five of them become convinced will make the council appear to be a functional governing body with a collective concept of the greater good.
Most recently in the latter category, the council committed $2.5 million over the next five years to the (presumably) soon-to-be-restored football program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Regardless of where you stand on the subject of UAB football, if you think that $500,000 per year from a city that is verging on fiscal disaster — and in which the rate of poverty exceeds 30 percent — to an institution with an annual budget that even without UAB Hospital is well over $1 billion is a prudent expenditure of public funds, then perhaps you are getting the government you deserve.
But the rest of us aren’t.
And now the council has inserted itself into the issue of cost overruns from the construction of Regions Field, the city’s new baseball park, which opened in 2013. The city’s failure to pay up has been one of the worst kept local “secrets” in recent memory (Weld first made note of it in April of last year), and at last the council decided to see whether they could do anything to make it worse.
In this much, they may have succeeded. Earlier this week, they held a meeting with representatives of the developers and construction companies that built the ballpark, to get more details about the debt, about which they say that Mayor Bell has been less than forthcoming with them, and discuss a settlement proposed by the mayor.
The problem is, it’s really none of their business — meaning not that they should not care about the city’s debts, but that the resolution of the issue (or the lack thereof) is an administrative matter, which according to the Mayor-Council Act of 1955, the governing document under which the City of Birmingham operates, is the sole purview of the mayor. The council can ask the mayor’s office about the dispute. If they are not happy with his responses, or with the proposed settlement, they can even, if they choose, use their subpoena power to conduct an investigation of the matter. What they cannot do is resolve it on their own.
To make matters worse, the council appears to have violated Alabama’s “sunshine” law regarding public meetings by conducting a closed-door session. In addition, as reported by Al.com’s Joseph Bryant, Council President Johnathan Austin forced the only representative of the mayor’s office present, chief of operations Jarvis Patton, to leave the meeting.
Let me say here that, having been in closed rooms with Patton myself during my time at City Hall, I can understand the desire to eject him. But that doesn’t make Austin’s action right, at least according to City Attorney Ralph Cook, who, Bryant reported, sent the council a memorandum to that effect, also stating his opinion that the meeting itself was improper.
The council’s attorney, Freddy Rubio, disagrees. If that surprises you, then you don’t know much about Birmingham politics.
Here, you might be questioning the need for the council to have its own attorney, when the City of Birmingham employs an entire department of lawyers to represent its interests. It’s a highly valid question, to which the answer is, there is no need — which is why the city managed to function for roughly 128 years absent such an arrangement.
For this one, however, you can’t blame the council for anything other than its lack of intellectual curiosity and its contentment with doing things the way they have been done since roughly October 1999, when one William Bell went back to being president of the city council, following three months as interim mayor and being defeated in his bid for a term in his own right.
In one of his many fits of pique at being denied the mayor’s chair, Bell promptly appointed a separate attorney for the council — at that time, mostly to enable his transfer of control of the assets of the Birmingham Water Works from the city to the Water Works Board. He also ballooned the size of the council staff, in essence creating a shadow government to work against the city’s administrative branch, and generally created the current culture in which the council regards itself as some kind of royalty.
As his relations with the city council continue to deteriorate, then, Bell for the most part has only himself to blame for sowing the whirlwind of mediocrity, petty behavior and outright ineptitude that the council has become. Unfortunately, it’s the citizens of Birmingham who are reaping it.