MOBILE — The Ann Bedsole campaign for mayor staged the grand opening of its main headquarters on Monday, June 13, 2005, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., in the strip shopping center at the northwest corner of University Boulevard and Cottage Hill Road.
The event was pitched to families as much as to activists: mini-hamburgers, mini-hot dogs, soft drinks, balloons and an inflatable Space Walk. The campaign said it would also establish satellite offices around the city for the convenience of prospective voters — a signal of the scale of the operation Bedsole intended to run.
The message she was carrying
In public appearances over the preceding month, Bedsole had worked to sharpen what a Bedsole administration in City Hall would actually mean, and the answer she gave was a careful balancing act.
She was an ally and staunch supporter of the outgoing four-term mayor, Mike Dow, and she regularly praised the initiatives of recent years that had begun to revitalize the city — the downtown investment, the convention center, the civic projects that had reshaped Mobile’s self-image during the 1990s. She was not running against that record.
What she was running against was its cost. Her campaign argued for fiscal conservatism and a likely trimming of the administrative overhead of city government. Specifically, Bedsole pledged to:
- Bolster the police department, which she described as undermanned.
- Restore merit raises for city employees.
- Reduce the sales tax, warning that without a cut, businesses would continue fleeing Mobile’s city limits for the suburbs and unincorporated county.
- Trim administrative costs in city government.
Bedsole described herself as a believer in supply-side economics — the proposition, as she framed it, that lower taxes and increased revenues can and do go hand in hand.
The sales tax problem
That last plank was not an abstraction in Mobile in 2005. The city’s sales tax rate had become a recurring complaint from retailers, who argued that shoppers and businesses alike were simply crossing the line into unincorporated Mobile County or over the bay into fast-growing Baldwin County. Sales taxes were, and remain, the backbone of municipal revenue in Alabama, which lacks the property tax base that funds cities in most other states. That structural fact makes any Alabama mayor’s budget unusually dependent on retail activity within the city limits — and unusually vulnerable when that activity moves a few miles away.
A candidate promising both a tax cut and more police officers was therefore making a bet that growth would cover the difference. Bedsole made that bet explicitly.
The candidate and the race
Bedsole was a former state senator with deep roots in Mobile’s civic and philanthropic life, and she had been the first Republican woman elected to the Alabama Legislature. She had also run for governor in the 1994 Republican primary, and her enthusiasm for the party had been the subject of periodic debate among GOP activists ever since.
She was one of four principal candidates in the Aug. 23, 2005, municipal election, the first open contest for mayor since 1989. The others were Mobile County Commissioner Sam Jones, City Councilman John Peavy and former Councilwoman Bess Rich.
Jones won the election, becoming the first Black mayor in the city’s history, and served two terms.
The headquarters opening captures something about how city campaigns worked in that era: a strip mall storefront on a busy west Mobile corner, a Space Walk in the parking lot, and a candidate explaining supply-side economics over a plate of mini-hot dogs.