As four west Mobile neighborhoods prepared to vote on whether to join the city, Mobile Mayor Sam Jones took his case door to door and hall to hall with a PowerPoint presentation titled “Annexation: Moving to the Future.” Its 29 slides amounted to the clearest public statement of what the city believed it was offering — and what it stood to gain.
Hemmed in on three sides
The presentation opened with the Mobile skyline, then moved to an overhead map of Mobile County’s municipalities. The image made the city’s geography plain: blocked to the east by Mobile Bay and to the north by a chain of smaller municipalities, Mobile could grow only west and south.
The next slide showed Jefferson County, where Birmingham sits ringed by as many as 20 separate municipalities — a cautionary picture of a city that had run out of room.
The service argument
The heart of the pitch was public safety. One slide mapped average police response times across the city: strong downtown, good in midtown and north Mobile, and progressively worse west of Interstate 65, where response to incidents in the northwest and southwest approached 20 minutes.
Another highlighted four fire stations stretching north to south through west Mobile — Freeman, Tapia, Edwards and Cypress Shores. Against a department goal of arriving within four minutes on 90 percent of calls, the success rates cited were 39 percent at Freeman, 38 percent at Tapia, 32 percent at Edwards and 25 percent at Cypress Shores.
The city said it had three goals in drawing the plan: neighborhood voting, a unified commercial corridor and success.
How the map was drawn
Four original study areas were laid out between Cody and Schillinger roads: Ziegler Boulevard south to Airport Boulevard; Airport south to Hitt Road; Hitt south to Grelot Road; and Grelot to Cottage Hill. A later slide showed the four voting areas as finally configured, pairing the Mobile Terrace residential area with the commercial activity along Schillinger Road and Airport Boulevard — the pairing that would become the central grievance of the plan’s opponents.
The money slide put estimated sales tax revenue from the proposed annexed areas at $10,145,140, based on 2006 collections, with business license revenue projected at another $100,000.
What it would cost
The city acknowledged substantial expense. Initial capital costs were put at nearly $16 million: $2.55 million for police, almost $6 million for public works, $2.35 million for fire, and $5 million for a police and fire building and fuel depot. New recurring annual costs approached $7.5 million — nearly $3.1 million for police, including 70 new employees; $1.75 million for public works; and $2.77 million for fire, including 51 new firefighters and medics.
Property taxes were addressed directly. The city would collect none in the annexed areas for five years. After that, a 7-mill tax would apply, meaning $21 a year on a $30,000 home, $35 on a $50,000 home and $70 on a $100,000 home.
To sharpen the comparison, one slide listed the annual cost of private garbage service then paid by residents: Waste Management, $264; Allied Waste, $297; McClure, $240; and Disposall, $252. The slide noted there was no private residential trash pickup at all.
The list of benefits
The city’s promised package included:
- free garbage and trash pickup;
- free street lighting and street sweeping;
- zoning to address junk and blighted property, with current property uses grandfathered in;
- a new police precinct;
- a new fire station staffed by 51 new firefighters and medics;
- paving of dirt streets and improved drainage;
- improvements at the Brewer Center and a new neighborhood park.
The final benefit listed was less tangible: the chance to “participate as a citizen on one of America’s great cities.”
If all four areas approved, the city would gain 4,029 residents and 1,891 voters. The presentation closed as it began, on the Mobile skyline, with a single word: “Questions.”
Voters in the four areas were scheduled to decide separately on Sept. 18, 2007 — a structure that supporters called neighborhood self-determination and critics called a map drawn to guarantee the outcome the city wanted.