Mobile County Commission President Merceria Ludgood told her fellow commissioners this week that while she is willing to hear their views, she does not plan to create a formal process for gathering their input before she casts votes on the Alabama Gulf Coast Recovery Council, the multi-county body distributing hundreds of millions of dollars in oil spill recovery money along the coast.
The council, created under the federal RESTORE Act of 2012, was established to direct local recovery funding that Alabama received from civil penalties levied against BP and Transocean for their roles in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Its membership is drawn from the cities and counties most affected by the disaster. Mayors from Bayou La Batre, Dauphin Island, Fairhope, Gulf Shores, Mobile and Orange Beach hold permanent seats tied to their elected offices, but Mobile and Baldwin counties instead rotate their commission presidents onto the council, a practice that has taken on new significance as major funding decisions approach.
In Mobile County, Commissioners Connie Hudson and Jerry Carl have each previously held the council seat, but with the panel poised to prioritize hundreds of proposed projects in the coming months, Hudson asked Ludgood this week how she and Carl could best make their views known as Ludgood represents the county.
The immediate issue is a Feb. 17 deadline by which each member of the recovery council will submit a slate of projects for further evaluation. Any member may put forward as many projects as they like, but only those backed by at least four of the council’s ten members can advance. Projects that clear that bar will be considered for the council’s first multi-year implementation plan, and once the U.S. Department of the Treasury signs off on that plan, the projects within it become eligible for individual grant funding.
A complete list of the projects submitted for potential funding is available through an online portal maintained by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
Ludgood said most council members favor building either a three-year or five-year implementation plan, meaning the first round of approved projects could ultimately be worth somewhere between $117 million and $170 million. Regardless of the plan’s length, the council has already agreed that its first round of funding will emphasize economic, infrastructure and planning projects.
Mobile County, like most local governments along the Gulf Coast, has submitted a slate of projects that fit those priorities. Ahead of a Jan. 13 deadline, the county put forward ten projects in total, nine of which were submitted by Environmental Services Director Bill Melton. Those proposals include land acquisitions, park restorations, a sediment reduction program and a major road project along Highway 98 in Bayou La Batre.
The tenth project, submitted directly by Hudson, would have revived a previously abandoned plan to build a $40 million soccer and aquatic complex in Mobile. That proposal was debated for more than two years before Ludgood cast a deciding vote against taking on debt to finance it in 2016, effectively ending the project. Some of the county’s other submissions remain viable, while others have since been dropped or funded through different means, such as the $10 million Emergency Operations Center that broke ground late last year.
Ludgood said she has been working with the county’s engineering department to compile a prioritized project list ahead of the deadline, and that she incorporated proposals her fellow commissioners had expressed strong interest in, though she declined to specify which ones made the cut.
Even so, Ludgood made clear she does not intend for the three commissioners to approach the council presidency as a joint effort. She said she would prefer that voting on RESTORE Act matters remain the responsibility of whichever commissioner is serving in the role at the time, rather than a group decision.
“We can’t come back here every single time for me to query the two of you about how to vote on a particular item, and that’s how I envision this role working for any of us,” Ludgood said. She added that she expects to hold the seat for now, with the role likely rotating to Hudson by the time the council begins accepting formal grant applications.
Alabama Gulf Coast Recovery Council Director Eliska Morgan said in January that some of the proposed projects could reach the grant application stage as soon as sometime in 2018, though she cautioned that timeline was a “very optimistic” estimate.