Businesses want in. Families want in. Tax revenues are strong. Trussville’s next challenge is making sure growth pays its way instead of leaving residents to deal with the consequences.
By Austin Kilpatrick
Trussville has achieved something many American cities would envy: People want to be here.
The city added 7,340 residents from 2010 through the 2025 estimate, an increase of about 36.8%. Growth since 2020 has been considerably slower: about 4.4% measured from the decennial Census count.
The population has climbed from 19,933 in 2010 to an estimated 27,273 in 2025. Median household income is around $123,000. Retail activity is substantial, new restaurants and businesses continue to arrive, and city finances remain strong. By late August, Trussville had collected roughly $26.7 million in sales taxes for the fiscal year, about $1 million ahead of projections, while the city was projecting a year-end surplus substantially larger than originally budgeted.
This is not an economic-development failure.
But success has a way of creating its own problems, and Trussville is beginning to encounter them.
The question facing the city is no longer simply how to attract development. Trussville has proved it can do that. The better question is whether each major development makes the city stronger after accounting for traffic, infrastructure, public services, schools and the long-term character of the community.
That requires a different economic strategy.
For years, Trussville has benefited enormously from retail growth. Sales taxes help finance city government, and Alabama’s municipal tax structure gives cities an obvious incentive to pursue stores and restaurants. In Trussville’s FY2025 budget, sales taxes accounted for nearly 64 percent of the combined operating revenue in several major city funds.
So when another restaurant or retailer opens, the benefit is real. It creates jobs, gives residents another option and generates tax revenue.
Still, there are only so many chicken sandwiches a city can sell itself into prosperity.
A restaurant opening is not economically equivalent to a corporate headquarters, medical office, professional-services firm or light-industrial employer. The latter can bring new income into the community, create higher-paying jobs and diversify a tax base that remains heavily dependent on consumer spending.
That is why the redevelopment of the old Gold Kist property may matter more to Trussville’s long-term economy than some flashier announcements. Plans for the property include relocating Milam & Company’s corporate headquarters and making additional land available for future industrial development.
More of that would be useful.
Trussville should certainly continue attracting retailers. But the next generation of economic development should place greater emphasis on employers and productive investment, particularly on properties that can be redeveloped without simply pushing the city farther outward.
Downtown offers another encouraging example.
The entertainment district and surrounding redevelopment have helped turn downtown Trussville into more of an actual destination. Restaurants, public spaces, entertainment and pedestrian activity reinforce one another in a way that scattered commercial development cannot.
The city recently expanded its Downtown Overlay District across the railroad tracks toward Watterson Parkway. Done carefully, that can encourage private investment while creating a more coherent downtown.
City government’s role here should be important but limited: build good streets and sidewalks, establish predictable zoning, maintain public spaces, solve parking and access problems, and then allow entrepreneurs to figure out what customers want.
Government should build a good stage. It does not need to write every line of the play.
The harder issue is traffic.
Anyone who regularly travels Highway 11 hardly needs an economic study to know that Trussville’s transportation network is under strain. ALDOT’s roughly $70 million I-59 widening project should eventually improve interstate capacity, but widening I-59 will not magically fix every intersection, feeder road or bottleneck inside the city.
And traffic is more than an annoyance. It is an economic cost.
Congestion consumes time, complicates emergency response, makes businesses harder to reach and eventually reduces the quality of life that attracts residents and investment in the first place.
This is where Trussville needs to change the order of operations.
Too often in growing suburbs, development comes first and infrastructure follows later. Houses get built. Businesses open. Traffic increases. Then government begins figuring out how to widen a road or improve an intersection.
By then, somebody has to pay for it.
The recent controversy over the proposed Camp Coleman Road and Praytor Road development shows why residents have become skeptical. The proposal involved approximately 235 homes, along with land for greenways and a potential future school site. Residents and officials raised concerns about traffic and surrounding infrastructure.
The City Council ultimately pulled the proposal and requested a full traffic-impact study, environmental testing and stronger legal protections before reconsidering it.
That was the right instinct.
It should also become standard procedure.
For substantial developments, Trussville should determine transportation, drainage and public-service requirements before final approval. If a project creates the need for a turn lane, signal, intersection improvement or other infrastructure, those obligations should be settled in writing while the city still has negotiating leverage.
Developers should not be forced to repair every infrastructure deficiency that existed before they arrived. But existing taxpayers should not automatically receive the bill for infrastructure made necessary by new private development either.
Growth should pay a reasonable share of the cost of growth.
The same discipline should apply to economic incentives.
Earlier this year, the city approved an agreement involving a proposed grocery-anchored development near Main Street and Watterson Parkway. The project represented more than $25 million in anticipated private investment and potentially substantial taxable sales. The incentive structure would return a portion of sales-tax revenue generated by the project to the developer, subject to limits.
Such arrangements can make economic sense. If an incentive causes an otherwise impossible project to happen and the city receives more revenue and infrastructure than it gives up, taxpayers can win.
But Trussville should remember its negotiating position.
This is not a distressed community desperately searching for somebody willing to open a grocery store. It is a growing, affluent suburb with considerable purchasing power.
Developers want access to this market.
That means incentives should have to pass a demanding test: Would the project probably happen without them?
The city should publish a straightforward cost-benefit analysis for major incentive agreements, including projected tax revenue, public costs, infrastructure commitments, performance requirements and what happens if the developer fails to deliver.
There is another wrinkle. New retail sales are not necessarily new economic activity.
If a new store generates $10 million in annual sales but much of that money previously would have been spent at another Trussville business, the project has moved economic activity rather than created all of it.
Ribbon cuttings rarely include that calculation.
They should.
Housing presents an even more difficult balancing act. Residents are understandably concerned that hundreds of additional homes will mean hundreds of additional vehicles, more students and greater demands on public services.
Those concerns are legitimate.
But simply shutting the door on housing carries costs too. In a desirable community, restricting supply can push prices higher, make it harder for young families to enter the market and leave older residents with fewer opportunities to downsize while remaining in the city.
The sensible alternative is not unlimited growth. It is selective growth tied to infrastructure.
Some locations can support more density. Others cannot. Senior housing, smaller homes and carefully located mixed-use projects may meet needs that another sprawling subdivision does not.
The city’s new comprehensive plan therefore matters enormously. Trussville’s previous comprehensive plan dates to 2006. The community has changed dramatically since then.
The new plan should answer questions that individual rezoning fights cannot: Where should the city grow? Where should it remain less dense? Which roads need investment before more development occurs? Where should commercial and employment centers go? What infrastructure will be required five, ten and twenty years from now?
Then the city should actually follow the plan.
That last part sounds obvious. In local government, it occasionally qualifies as radical thinking.
Trussville should also publish an annual economic-development scorecard. Residents deserve more than announcements about what is coming soon. Show them what happened afterward: tax revenue generated, private dollars invested, jobs created where reliable figures are available, infrastructure commitments fulfilled, incentives paid and major projects completed.
Economic development should be judged five years after the ribbon cutting, not five minutes after it.
None of this amounts to an argument against growth.
Trussville’s ability to attract families, businesses and investment is an enormous advantage. Cities that stop growing altogether often discover that stagnation has plenty of inconveniences of its own.
But the economic question facing Trussville has changed.
Twenty years ago, much of the challenge was making Trussville a place where people and businesses wanted to invest. Today, the city has considerable evidence that they do.
Now comes the harder job: deciding which growth deserves a yes, which deserves a no, and what conditions should accompany the answer.
The goal shouldn’t be to build the most Trussville possible.
It should be to build a better Trussville.
