Three items were moving through Mobile’s political conversation in the first week of March 2009. None of them was a full-blown story on its own. Together they said a good deal about the mood of the city.
Where is the mayor?
Mayor Sam Jones had been notably scarce around City Hall for several weeks, and the absence had begun to raise eyebrows.
The explanation offered by the mayor’s allies was straightforward: Jones had chosen the Mardi Gras period, when much of Mobile’s official business slows to accommodate the parades, to take an extended vacation. It is a defensible choice in a city where the civic calendar genuinely does bend around Carnival.
The explanation, however, did little to quiet the rumors, which had drifted toward speculation about an unscheduled departure. The chatter had reached a volume at which an official statement clarifying the situation seemed likely to be forthcoming, if only to put the matter to rest.
Jones, elected in 2005 as Mobile’s first African-American mayor, had governed through a period of considerable strain, including the budget fight over public financing for the Gulf Coast Classic and the recession that arrived with 2008. An extended absence at such a moment invites questions whether or not there is anything behind them, and in local politics the questions tend to expand to fill whatever silence is available.
The Thomas camp promises a reply
Allies of former Circuit Judge Herman Thomas signaled that a response to recent allegations against him should be expected in the coming weeks.
Thomas had been the subject of a detailed article in Lagniappe, and by early March his camp was letting it be known that silence would not be the strategy. The promised reply was described in terms that left little doubt about its intended force. “Think Enewetak,” said one ally — a reference to the Pacific atoll used in testing the hydrogen bomb.
What form that response would take, and whether it would address the specific allegations or the motives of those making them, was not indicated. Thomas resigned from the Mobile County circuit bench in October 2007, a step that halted a public trial on judicial misconduct charges before the Alabama Court of the Judiciary and left the accusations against him formally unresolved.
Carroll calls a Leinkauf meeting
On the more workaday side of city business, Mobile City Councilman William Carroll set a District Two community meeting for Thursday, March 5, at Leinkauf Elementary School, 1410 Monroe Street, beginning at 6:30 p.m.
Carroll said key city department heads would attend — the detail that distinguishes a useful neighborhood meeting from a symbolic one. Residents with questions about drainage, streets, police response or code enforcement would have the people who actually direct those functions in the room, rather than a promise that the questions would be relayed.
The Leinkauf neighborhood, one of Mobile’s historic districts just south and west of downtown, sits in a part of the city where the housing stock is old, the trees are old, and the infrastructure beneath both is older still. Meetings of this kind are where much of the actual work of a council district gets done, well below the level of anything that would ordinarily be called news.
Taken together, the three items sketched a city government in an odd posture that spring: a mayor conspicuously absent, a former judge preparing to fight back, and a councilman doing the unglamorous business of showing up at an elementary school on a Thursday evening.