Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson’s administration is preparing to make another run at annexing thousands of West Mobile residents into the city, reviving a fight that has simmered for months over who should provide police and fire protection just outside the city limits.
The Mobile City Council put off a vote on the broader police jurisdiction question until at least next month, giving Public Safety Director James Barber time to lay out what he described as a four-part plan he believes has the backing of Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran.
Under Barber’s proposal, the city would first move to annex roughly 13,000 residents living in an unincorporated stretch of West Mobile. In later phases, city police and fire coverage would end in the outer mile-and-a-half of the three-mile police jurisdiction that surrounds Mobile, while the city and county would work together to help residents in the areas no longer served by the city establish their own fire districts.
“This is a way to transition the area away from city services that doesn’t put anyone at risk,” Barber told council members.
Sheriff Cochran has pushed back hard against any plan to pull city services from the jurisdiction. During a council committee meeting earlier in the month, he warned that if the city scaled back its footprint, he would move to hire away most of the 44 Mobile police officers currently working beats in the jurisdiction so the sheriff’s office could bring on enough deputies to cover the area. Cochran argued the sheriff’s office already loses many new deputies to the Mobile Police Department because the city pays about $500 more per month on average.
Councilman Fred Richardson, one of three council members who voted against the city’s last annexation attempt, criticized the administration for already scaling back fire protection for residents in Theodore, calling the move illegal.
Barber countered that no state law bars the change, and that the city ordinance governing fire service in the jurisdiction does not require Mobile to hold primary call responsibility in areas like Theodore where a separate fire district already operates. The city still provides backup coverage there when needed, he said.
Pressed further by Richardson, council attorney Wanda Cochran told members the underlying legal question is “fraught,” since state law on fire districts within police jurisdictions remains unsettled. She confirmed that state law requires the city to spend, within the jurisdiction as a whole, an amount equal to what it collects there in business license fees — but that the obligation applies jurisdiction-wide rather than to any single neighborhood.
The debate grew testy at one point during the council’s pre-conference meeting, when Councilman John Williams interrupted Richardson to ask how much longer he intended to speak.
“You spend an inordinate amount of time on each subject,” Williams told him.
Richardson replied that Williams simply objected to what he was saying, not how long he took to say it.
“Bess talked way more than I did, but she was saying what you wanted to hear,” Richardson said, referring to Councilwoman Bess Rich.
Annexation also surfaced during a separate discussion of traffic enforcement at the same pre-conference meeting, after residents Michael Gewin and David Chaillot were scheduled to address the council about speeding and red-light running in their neighborhoods.
Stimpson used the traffic discussion to argue that council inaction on annexation was limiting the city’s options on public safety more broadly. He reminded members that had five councilors voted to annex the 13,000 West Mobile residents when the issue last came up, the city would have gained an additional $2 million to $5 million a year in revenue and access to federal grant options that could support hiring up to 45 new officers. Annexation, he said, would also free the city to reassign many of the 44 officers currently patrolling the police jurisdiction to beats inside the city limits.
Richardson responded that Mobile Police Department leadership had already used money saved elsewhere in the department’s budget on raises rather than new hires. Stimpson said he found the claim confusing, prompting Richardson to reply, “You want me to be confused.”
Gewin urged the council to prioritize additional traffic patrols, telling members that too many drivers in the city display a “cavalier attitude” toward traffic laws. Barber said he supports installing red-light cameras at Mobile intersections, though he noted that a previous city effort to use the cameras was blocked by the state legislature. He said the administration is now studying Montgomery’s program, which operates cameras through a local ordinance.
Chaillot raised concerns about congestion on Airport Boulevard and other heavily traveled corridors, including Dauphin Street, Old Shell Road and Springhill Avenue. Councilman Joel Daves praised recent signal upgrades on the stretch of Airport Boulevard in his district between Sage Avenue and the Pinebrook Shopping Center, saying he had been skeptical the new technology would make much difference but that traffic has since flowed more smoothly between those two points.
Executive Director of Public Works Jim DeLapp told the council that additional signal upgrades are planned for other busy corridors, including Government Street and Dauphin Street, over the next three years.
In other business, the council voted to approve closing off a portion of Richardson Drive to allow residents of the Rosswood Subdivision to eliminate one point of access into their neighborhood. Rosswood Homeowners Association President Kip Sharpe told the council all 65 residents in the subdivision supported the change. The measure passed following a public hearing, over Richardson’s objection that it should have gone to committee for further review.