State Rep. Joseph Mitchell, D-Mobile, offered a blunt account of how the Alabama Legislature actually works, and an equally blunt warning about what its silence on coastal insurance would cost.
The Alabama House, Mitchell wrote, though it held a Democratic majority, was not a democracy — and even within that majority, democracy was not how business got done.
‘When things don’t happen, it is deliberate’
“In reality only a small group — nowhere near a majority and by no means uni-partisan — decide what will be important for legislative consideration,” Mitchell wrote. For everything that any member thought important to actually be considered, he observed dryly, “would be too much like … well, like representative government.”
Members who had served more than a term, he said, learned “to feign either intelligence or stupidity” in the hope of cajoling House leadership into supporting their local bills, simply to get them onto a calendar for consideration by the full House and then the Senate.
All of which gave a sharper meaning to the description of lawmaking as a deliberative process. “In short,” Mitchell wrote, “when things don’t happen, it is deliberate.”
The insurance question
His immediate grievance was specific. The Speaker of the House had inquired whether members were interested in a special session. The Mobile House delegation, Mitchell reported, had not even met to discuss it. On homeowner and business insurance legislation — the issue that had come to dominate coastal politics after Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina — “not a mumbling word has been heard.”
That, he said, was unfortunate. Borrowing and adapting an old adage, he wrote: “The Speaker may not always be right, but he is always The Speaker.” And that cut both ways, he argued, since he had voted for the Speaker precisely so that the Speaker would serve his interests and, by extension, his district’s.
“To purposefully avoid a special session on insurance reform is a deliberate affront to South Mobile County,” Mitchell wrote — which, from his perspective, meant “that part of Alabama that starts just south of the center line on Government Street.”
The Legislature, he added, had yet to offer anything beyond what passed through the state’s Department of Economic and Community Affairs from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He drew a pointed comparison: when a tornado touched down in north central Alabama, legislators spent days deliberating how to help. “Another natural calamity occurs and state leadership cannot see a need to meet? And since when was a consensus needed to ignore doing the right thing?”
He closed with something between a promise and a threat. “It is not a threat to expect that the next regular session will not go smoothly,” he wrote, “as South Alabama folk just-south-of-center-line-Government Street help in the deliberation.”
A parting shot about the floodplain
Mitchell appended a postscript about a proposed development along the Three Mile Creek floodplain in Mobile, and it was not a friendly one.
“Who do you think will insure homeowners in the proposed development along the Three-Mile Creek flood plain?” he asked. “Who will be able to afford to live there at some astronomically high flood insurance price? Do you think the GM&O building will ever get maximum tenants?”
The questions landed at the intersection of the two issues that most defined Mobile’s politics in that period: the cost of insuring anything near the water, and the fate of a downtown whose landmark structures — the old Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Railroad terminal among them — kept waiting for the tenants that redevelopment plans promised.
Context
Mitchell represented House District 103 in Mobile. He wrote as Gov. Bob Riley was announcing that he would not call a fall special session, blaming Democratic leaders for refusing to take up ethics reform and an end to annual property appraisals. Coastal legislators of both parties had wanted a session on insurance; they did not get one.
The insurance crisis Mitchell described did not resolve itself. Premiums on the Alabama coast continued to climb, insurers continued to withdraw from the market, and the Legislature returned to the subject repeatedly in the sessions that followed, eventually passing measures on transparency in rate-setting and incentives for fortified construction — years after the coastal delegation first demanded that Montgomery meet about it.