To the average citizen, the city of Mobile’s production of “As the Budget Turns” must have seemed like a greased-pig chase — the numbers so slippery that nobody could get a grip. As the new fiscal year approached, elected officials and respected community leaders found themselves disagreeing by tens of millions of dollars over how much money the city actually needed.
The mayor’s position
The logical place to begin was the mayor’s office, since Mayor Sam Jones was responsible for presenting a balanced budget for the City Council’s approval. Jones’ administration said it had cut, conserved and delayed as much as it could and still faced a projected $29 million shortfall for fiscal year 2012-13. His remedy was a temporary reinstatement of an additional one percent sales tax, which would have lifted the total tax on purchases within the city to 10 percent, a rate consistent with many municipalities across Mobile and Baldwin counties.
Counting the votes
Most council members began as skeptics of the mayor’s doom-and-gloom forecast. Over time, Council President Reggie Copeland and William Carroll eased close to the Jones camp and its call for the tax. Joining the mayor’s most ardent allies, Fred Richardson and Jermaine Burrell, those moves advanced Jones to within a single vote of the $30 million annual boost the tax represented.
But the last mile can be the hardest. Councilwoman Bess Rich was never in play. That left Councilman John Williams, who signaled he was even further out of reach than Rich, and Councilwoman Gina Gregory, whose earlier turn as the “swing vote” was probably not her fondest memory. The skeptics, lacking the mayor’s resources, pegged the deficit closer to the $10 million to $13 million range — a gap of $16 million to $19 million from the administration’s figure that many households would find less than confidence-inspiring.
Committees upon committees
At the impasse, Copeland appointed a blue-ribbon committee of community leaders to study city finances. That Copeland alone named all its members immediately drew suspicion of a rubber stamp. Instead, the panel did not simply endorse the one percent tax; it initially recommended a temporary 1.5 percent increase — $45 million a year — to address both the near-term shortfall and long-deferred infrastructure needs, before ultimately settling on the more muted $30 million figure in line with the mayor.
Then a second, standing committee was suggested and adopted by most council members, excluding the mayor’s amen corner. Its members — Page Stalcup, Paul Wesch, Bill Ishee, Ken Germany, John Thompson, C.J. Small and Richardson, who appointed himself — carried real credentials. The early word was that there was no real deficit at all, or one so small as to be negligible, perhaps $2 million.
The politics of it all
So the city arrived at a remarkable spread: elected officials and experienced men and women of business disagreeing by as much as $45 million on the revenue needs for a fiscal year just weeks away. Complicating matters, Wesch, who chaired the standing committee, had advocated a half-percent sales tax over three years to generate $45 million dedicated to economic development incentives — money to help Mobile compete for as many as 10 major employers expected to supply Airbus, with rivals from Pensacola to Biloxi also in the hunt.
With municipal elections less than a year away, every vote carried political risk, and Gregory again loomed as the likely swing vote. In the end, the saga boiled down to the same thing legislative politics always does: compromise. Whether the parties could find middle ground — perhaps splitting a three-year, half-percent tax between economic development and the city’s capital needs — remained the open question as the council prepared to meet.