Politics have no relation to morals.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
55 years.
Collectively, this is roughly how long the current Birmingham City Council has been in office. I emphasize the word “current,” because despite their collective belief that they ascended to their high offices in accordance with the latter-day municipal equivalent of the divine right of kings — this remarkable, if presumptuous, assurance is apparent in their general attitude toward the citizens they serve and the other public employees with whom they share our City Hall, and the unending variety of self-aggrandizing ways they find to waste public money — they are at bottom simply the latest iteration of Birmingham’s ongoing experiment with a fully participatory democracy.
So yeah, 55 years. That’s over a half-century of collective service (if I may use that term loosely) that works out to an average tenure of just over six years per councilor — or, to put it another way, about a term-and-a-half each.
I’m doing all of this math because I’m wondering how it is that it took all of that time for the Birmingham City Council to discover that it has an obligation to our city’s neighborhoods. That, at least, is the message I get from the ballyhoo that has emanated from the council since it finally passed a budget for the fiscal year that actually began on July 1, in which was included some $6.5 million for weed abatement and the demolition of abandoned houses in Birmingham’s neighborhoods.
More about that in a moment. But first, this seems like an appropriate place to acknowledge the increasingly attractive work environment this council has cultivated for itself. Lots of free travel to exciting locales across the nation and world; an ever-expanding central staff to handle the gargantuan task of making you look good; contracts to hand out to consultants who perform only “mental work;” the ability to vote yourself, as the council did recently, a whopping salary increase (which, to be fair, doesn’t kick in until after the next election, in 2017); completing an essential task six weeks late and then congratulating yourself as if you just moved Red Mountain in six hours using only a teaspoon.
It’s good to be a Councilor. Shoot, if you want to, you can even throw yourself a big party. Or several. Which they do, on a regular basis.
But it’s the $6.5 million “for our neighborhoods” — as the council put it on the payee line of the giant ceremonial check displayed its August 11 meeting — that I want to focus on here. According to the council, this was the reason it took them so long to pass the city’s budget: They were fighting Mayor William Bell tooth-and-nail on behalf of the city’s long-neglected neighborhoods (yes, pretty much the same ones that have been neglected for each and every one of the collective 55 years the council has had the opportunity to do something “for our neighborhoods” prior to two Tuesdays ago), and finally, through the grace of God, the mayor was vanquished and agreed to council’s unyielding demands.
Don’t take my word for it, though. Just look at the recent press release out of the council office, proclaiming that “Birmingham City Councilors have been adamant since the budget process began about putting the funding and tools in place to revitalize our city neighborhoods and bring life back into the communities. Councilors stood true on their promise to revitalize each district…”
Ignoring the point that the councilors will not have “stood true on their promise to revitalize each district” until each district actually is revitalized, the actual purpose of the press release was to announce that the council will spend four evenings this week (August 17-20) taking victory laps. Actually, the announcement is of the council’s “post-budget tour,” four public meetings at which councilors will “inform citizens on how they plan to make sure that each project is followed through.”
Now, this is just me, but I would suggest that the best way to make sure that each project is followed through is by making sure that each project is followed through, rather than holding four meetings at public expense to tell people that that is what you intend to do. Report on results, rather than wasting people’s time expounding on a process over which the council has virtually no control. Their job was to pass the budget; implementing the projects contained it that budget is an administrative function, meaning that those projects will get done when the mayor wants them done.
All the council can do — collectively or individually — now that the budget is in place is complain if a particular project isn’t moving quickly enough to suit one or more of them. Granted, they are very good at complaining — though it’s usually about some perceived lack of respect shown them or some slight perpetrated against them by the mayor, the mayor’s staff, certain neighborhood or community leaders, the news media or whomever else might offend their delicate sense of themselves on any given day — but that really is just about the extent of their powers at this point.
So what? you might be asking — especially if you’re one of the cheerleaders who have suddenly popped up to sing the council’s praises on social media, in mysterious conjunction with their post-budget, post-pay raise charm offensive. The council deserves to congratulate itself. They stood up for the neighborhoods. They fought the mayor and won.
Which would be fine, if that actually was true. But it is not. What actually happened was that Mayor Bell, as Machiavellian an elected official as we’ve ever had in these parts, used the promise of neighborhood funding to get the only thing he really wanted out of the FY 2016 budget: A $2 million increase in the budgetary allocation for his office (to put that in perspective, the mayor now has over $11 million to spend just about any way he pleases over the next 11 months, meaning that Birmingham will spend more on the mayor’s office than it does to provide bus service through the Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority).
For that matter, the $6.5 million for neighborhoods — $3.5 million for weed abatement, $3 million for demolition — wasn’t even the council’s idea. It was requested by the city’s planning and public works departments earlier this year, during the pre-budget hearing process. One could — in fact, should — ask why the council didn’t pick up the banner of “our neighborhoods” at that time.
But they did, at long last — after the mayor’s office “found” the money to pay for it. Or at least that moved the negotiations along. The clincher — again, my hat’s off to Mayor Bell for knowing what it really takes to get the council interested in something — was that the mayor also “found” an additional $450,000 to offer the council for its discretionary use. Yes, that is $50,000 per councilor to spend on whatever they please (advice to those who do “mental work”: polish up those resumes).
In addition to the post-budget tour, the council’s most recent move to ingratiate itself with the public it has largely ignored for those collective 55 years is its passage, on August 18, of a resolution increasing the minimum wage in the city. I’ll have more to say about this in a future column, but I’ll go on the record here to say that, while I am in general agreement with the idea, I have some reservations about the way the council went about this — and about their motivation for doing it at all.
I’ll say this as well: If you think that the Birmingham City Council raised the minimum wage because it was the right thing to do for the citizens of Birmingham, I encourage you to take a closer look at this iteration of the Birmingham City Council. I don’t wish to spoil it for you, but you will find no better illustration of the idea that politics has nothing to do with morality.
