MOBILE – The 2009 municipal election season began to take visible shape in February, as one incumbent on the Mobile City Council announced her intention to seek a third term and a candidate in another district started the slow work of introducing himself to voters.
Hudson goes for a third term
Councilwoman Connie Hudson announced her bid for a third four-year term in a letter to supporters. She framed her candidacy around fiscal restraint and basic services.
“It is my utmost desire to continue to serve the citizens of Mobile with an emphasis on conservative fiscal management of tax dollars, an agenda that prioritizes public safety, public service and infrastructure improvements, and the recruitment and expansion of jobs and job programs for our area,” Hudson wrote.
The letter arrived with a self-addressed envelope for contributors, the traditional opening move of a municipal campaign in a city where council races are won on modest budgets and long memories.
Hudson’s emphasis on “conservative fiscal management” was not chosen at random. The council spent the winter of 2009 arguing over money: the city’s revenues were falling with the national recession, and members were being asked to justify appropriations – among them the money that had gone into the Gulf Coast Classic football game – that looked considerably harder to defend than they had a year earlier.
Wallace opens his campaign in District 3
In District 3, Ron Wallace, who had announced his candidacy for the council seat, said he would hold his first community meeting on Thursday, Feb. 26, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Dauphin Island Parkway branch of the Mobile Public Library.
Wallace urged residents and business owners in the district to attend and to bring their ideas for improving the district and the city. The choice of venue was itself a statement. The Dauphin Island Parkway corridor – known to nearly everyone in Mobile simply as DIP – had spent years as a byword for disinvestment, with vacant storefronts, aging housing stock and crime worries that dominated any candidate’s mailbox.
The shape of the summer
Mobile’s municipal elections were scheduled for that summer, with all seven council seats and the mayor’s office on the ballot. Mayor Sam Jones, elected in 2005 as the city’s first Black mayor, would be seeking a second term.
The council that emerged from those elections would inherit an unusually hard set of problems: a shrinking sales tax base, a police and fire budget that could not easily be cut, an economic development strategy staked on the aerial refueling tanker contract that Northrop Grumman and EADS hoped to build at Brookley Field, and neighboring Prichard’s deepening financial crisis, which threatened to spill across Mobile’s borders.
Against that backdrop, the candidates’ opening statements – a promise of fiscal conservatism from an incumbent, a community meeting in a library branch from a challenger – were the first small signals of a campaign that would be conducted almost entirely on the question of who could be trusted with less money than the city had before.