In the summer of 2008, with steel, aerospace and port announcements dominating the headlines, a simple question was put to a group of Mobile business owners, developers and executives: is Mobile business-friendly? They were promised anonymity, and they used it.
Yes, at the top
Several respondents drew a clean line between the city’s elected leadership and its bureaucracy. City government, one said, enthusiastically promoted business moving to Mobile, and the council generally worked as a team to sell the city despite its internal schisms. He added a point that outsiders often missed: unlike many Southern cities, Mobile did not carry racial divisions that frightened prospective employers, and its history of relative racial reconciliation had to be counted as an asset even where its educational attainment was not.
Another, whose firm worked in 28 states, called Mobile a pleasure to work in, credited outgoing Mayor Mike Dow with being proactive, and said the next mayor’s job was to build on that record while keeping the focus on public schools.
No, at the counter
The developers were harsher. Ask a city staffer whether Mobile is business-friendly and the answer is yes, one said; ask a contractor and you get a different answer. He complained of inconsistent code enforcement, slow plan review and a can’t-do posture from staff.
Another said the planning staff and other permit grantors frequently made it costly, slow and sometimes nearly impossible to bring forward anything new, whether a subdivision, a drugstore or a commercial venture — and noted that west Mobile residents had used exactly that reputation as an argument against annexation into the city.
One respondent described a study of permit turnaround times, department by department. Traffic, urban development, forestry and the rest, he said, all came in within a reasonable window of seven to 10 days. Engineering took roughly 30. “It’s gridlock,” he said. “It’s like they are scared to make a decision.”
Attitude, he argued, mattered as much as rules. Some Florida cities were far stricter and charged heavy impact fees, he said, but their message was still: we want you here.
The complaint about public money
The sharpest critique came from a respondent who answered the question with a jab. Mobile, he said, was absolutely friendly to government-supported business and development — the cruise terminal, the office tower built by the state pension fund with city help, the university research park, the master planning at Brookley. For a private developer competing against a tax-exempt public investor with no profit incentive, he said, the picture looked different.
He ran the arithmetic on downtown office space: roughly a million square feet, with 700,000 occupied and 300,000 vacant, into which a new tower was adding 600,000 more. No private developer could have built that project, he said, and no lender would have funded it. His prediction was that Mobile’s run-down downtown buildings would sit unrefurbished for years while capital chased the subsidized product.
The sales problem
Several respondents circled back to the same theme: Mobile did not sell itself. One recalled a magazine feature that credited Alabama and singled out Cullman, Montgomery, Huntsville and Baldwin County without mentioning Mobile at all. Another said the city had lost its last nationally connected economic development professional in the 1990s and had been paying for it since, comparing the recruitment effort to a company that fields inside sales staff but never sends anyone out on calls.
He recounted a corporate executive telling him the company wanted to extend its Mobile lease not for five years but for ten, because “we think Mobile is a well-kept secret.” His reaction was mixed. “Why are we a secret? Nobody knows we are here is the answer.”
Another respondent, comparing notes with a Birmingham businessman, said the region’s losses in paper and manufacturing explained part of the gap — but that petty politics in Montgomery over docks expansion legislation sent business exactly the wrong signal.
Still home
For all the frustration, the criticism came wrapped in loyalty. Mobile, one of the sharpest critics insisted, was the best place to live, raise a family and be raised. His worry was narrower and, in 2008, entirely fair: his daughters wanted to come home, and he could not tell them where in Mobile to send a resume.