He was a professional baseball player, a Democratic state legislator, a Mobile County commissioner and a saloon keeper, and his political career ended in the wreckage of a federal investigation. But before it did, Coy Smith left behind three rules that a fellow commissioner still quoted decades later.
Smith, long dead by 2007, had been a popular and successful local politician of an earlier Mobile until he was tripped up in a federal investigation of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act program, the federal jobs initiative of the 1970s that funneled public money through local governments and became, in more than one American city, a magnet for scandal.
Whatever his faults, said former County Commissioner Bay Haas, Smith understood how a small governing board actually works, and he was willing to explain it to anyone young enough to listen.
Rule one: never surprise your fellow commissioners
“You have to discuss every single item you bring up in a meeting with every commissioner before the meeting,” Haas said. “This avoids intentional embarrassment of any member.”
On a three-member board, the ambush is the most tempting weapon available and the most corrosive. An item sprung without warning forces colleagues to vote in public without preparation, which is precisely why it is done. Smith’s rule was a peace treaty: no member should ever have to learn about a proposal at the same moment as the audience.
Rule two: never commit your vote
“If someone asks you to support or oppose something, you never commit to support or oppose them,” Haas explained. “You may express favor or opposition, but the action you commit to is to take it up with your fellow commissioners. This encourages discussion and avoids isolating a member.”
The rule sounds like evasion and is actually its opposite. A commissioner who promises a vote in a private conversation has surrendered his judgment before hearing the arguments, and has cut his colleagues out of the decision. A commissioner who promises only to raise the matter with the board has preserved both.
Rule three: two votes is more than one vote
“What he meant was that no individual commissioner has any authority,” said Haas, who was among the commission’s first Republican members. “All of the power rests in the commission and none in the individual member.”
This is the hardest lesson for anyone who has just won an election. Voters elect a commissioner to do things; the law empowers him to do almost nothing alone. Roads are paved, contracts are let and budgets are adopted by a majority of the body, which in a three-member commission means two people who agree.
Why the rules survived their author
“The rules are really about how any board must operate in order to function effectively,” Haas said. “Coy expressed them with a little more color, and it took me quite a while to fully understand them. While we disagreed more often than not, he was a master in the art of politics.”
The endorsement carried a certain weight because of who was giving it. Haas, a Republican who was preparing to retire in June as executive director of the Mobile Airport Authority, had spent much of his public life on the other side of the aisle from Smith. He had also lived long enough in Mobile County government to know the difference between a politician who wins elections and one who can actually pass something.
A cautionary footnote
The CETA investigation that ended Smith’s career was a reminder that mastery of the art of politics is not the same as mastery of oneself. The program, created by Congress in 1973 to train and employ the jobless, put substantial discretion and federal cash in the hands of local officials, and federal prosecutors across the country eventually followed that money.
Still, the rules outlasted the scandal, passed along as an oral tradition among Mobile County officeholders:
- Never surprise your fellow commissioners. Brief everyone before the meeting.
- Never commit your vote. Commit only to raising the matter with the board.
- Two votes is more than one vote. Power lives in the body, not the member.
They are not a bad summary of how any city council, school board or county commission in south Alabama still functions, or fails to.