MOBILE, Ala. — Two days after Tuskegee University edged Fort Valley State University 24-23 at Ladd-Peebles Stadium, the game they played — and whether Mobile taxpayers should keep paying for it — became the first significant flashpoint in the City Council’s review of Mayor Spiro Cheriogotis’s proposed budget.
Cheriogotis said Tuesday he is open to discussions that could lead to the Port City Classic continuing next year, even as his fiscal year 2027 spending plan eliminates the game’s dedicated funding. At the same time, he argued that his budget actually increases the city’s support for the organization that stages the event.
Both claims can be true at once, and understanding why requires looking at how Mobile budgets for events in the first place.
What a performance contract is
The money at issue moves through a line in the city budget known as “performance contracts.” These are annual appropriations the city makes to a range of events and nonprofit organizations, and together they account for more than $8.7 million in the city’s budget.
The structure is common in municipal government. Rather than running festivals, tournaments and cultural programs itself, a city contracts with outside organizations to deliver them, on the theory that the resulting visitor spending, hotel stays and sales tax collections return value to the public that exceeds the appropriation. The word “performance” in the name refers to the contracted party performing services under an agreement — but it also invites the obvious question of whether those services are performing in the economic sense, which is exactly the question now being pressed at City Hall.
Because these are annual appropriations rather than long-term obligations, each budget cycle is a fresh decision. An event funded in one year has no automatic claim on the next year’s money. That is what makes the annual budget the moment when a line like the Port City Classic’s is most vulnerable, and it is why the debate has surfaced now.
The numbers behind the disagreement
The proposed FY2027 performance contracts include $600,000 for Brothers Working Together, the organization that sponsors three events involving historically Black colleges and universities: the Port City Classic, the Gulf Coast Challenge in early October, and the Bridge Builders Classic basketball game in January.
Cheriogotis said that appropriation is $100,000 more than last year’s $500,000 — a 20% increase to the organization.
But the 2027 proposal also eliminates funding for the Port City Classic, which received $400,000 in last year’s budget. The Bridge Builders Classic, which received $100,000 last year, is likewise set to be eliminated.
Put the figures side by side and the picture clarifies. The organization’s own line grows by $100,000. Two separate event lines totaling $500,000 disappear. The mayor’s statement about increased funding for the sponsoring organization and the objection that the city is cutting HBCU event support are describing different rows in the same document.
The city’s other football commitments provide the comparison that council members have begun to draw. Mobile provides $500,000 annually to the Senior Bowl and $500,000 annually to the 68 Ventures Bowl, as listed in the city’s budget. Those are the figures against which the treatment of the HBCU games is now being measured.
The call for a standard that applies to everything
The most substantive proposal to emerge Tuesday was not about restoring one line item. It was about creating a common yardstick.
Robert Clopton, president of the Mobile chapter of the NAACP, told the council that the mayor’s staff should establish a “performance standard” for every event that uses taxpayer money.
“We need to apply it to every major event,” Clopton said during the council meeting, pushing back against proposals that would eliminate the Port City Classic next September.
“If an event is not performing, fix it, review it, or reconsider the investment or eliminate it,” Clopton said. “It’s not about politics. It’s about transparency.”
That formulation is notable because it does not defend the Port City Classic on the grounds that it should be exempt from scrutiny. It accepts elimination as a legitimate outcome — provided the same test is applied to everything else the city funds. The argument is procedural: whatever the standard is, it should be written down and used uniformly.
Councilman Cory Penn made a parallel case, urging the mayor’s office to find a way to evaluate every football game the city supports through the performance contracts line.
“I think we need to have an evaluation of all the games before we cut any of the games to make sure we understand the economic impact,” Penn said. “We are working on that process. Until then, let’s restore (the Port City Classic’s funding). If we don’t meet the (expectations), then we have to move on.”
Penn’s position amounts to a sequencing argument: measure first, cut second. He said he would like to work with the mayor’s administration to restore funding for the Port City Classic while the city conducts what he called a “performance review for all the football games we have.”
The dispute over economic return
Last month, Cheriogotis said he did not believe the game’s attendance, hotel-room nights, and sales tax generation justified the city’s annual investment. Those three metrics are the standard currency of event-funding arguments in tourism-dependent cities, because they map onto the revenue streams a municipality actually collects.
Attendance is the rawest measure and the least directly tied to city revenue: a full stadium of local residents generates ticket sales for the promoter but comparatively little new municipal money. Hotel-room nights are the metric closest to what cities care about, because visitors staying overnight generate lodging tax and spend on meals, fuel and retail across several days rather than a few hours. Sales tax generation attempts to capture that broader spending.
The mayor’s remarks prompted the game’s CEO, Kevin Ball, to counter that the Port City Classic provides a healthy economic return for Mobile. Cheriogotis said he has since met with Ball. Ball could not be reached for comment.
Clopton argued that the Port City Classic is just as viable as other events the city funds, particularly from an economic development standpoint. He said the HBCU games generate “millions of dollars in economic activity” for the city through hotel room nights and spending by visiting teams and their fan bases.
What the public record does not yet contain is a common set of figures. The reported exchange includes the mayor’s judgment that the metrics do not justify the investment, and the assertions from Ball and Clopton that the return is strong. It does not include a published analysis applying the same methodology to the Port City Classic, the Senior Bowl, the 68 Ventures Bowl and the Gulf Coast Challenge. That absence is precisely what Penn and Clopton are asking the administration to fill.
Why economic impact figures are hard
The difficulty in resolving this kind of dispute is not usually a shortage of numbers. It is that different methods produce different numbers, all of them defensible on their own terms.
The central methodological question in any event impact study is what counts as new money. Spending by someone who traveled to Mobile specifically for a game, stayed in a hotel and would not otherwise have visited is new economic activity. Spending by a local resident who bought a ticket instead of spending the same evening at a restaurant is largely money that would have circulated in the local economy anyway. Studies that count all spending at an event produce far larger totals than studies that count only spending attributable to visitors who came because of it.
A second question is what the city compares the appropriation to. Total economic activity is one figure; the tax revenue the city itself collects from that activity is a much smaller one. An event can generate millions in local spending while returning a fraction of its appropriation to the municipal treasury in direct tax receipts, and reasonable people disagree about which figure should govern the funding decision.
None of this is unique to Mobile or to these particular games. It is the standard difficulty in every city that funds events, and it is the reason a written, uniformly applied standard — the thing both Clopton and Penn asked for — would change the terms of the argument regardless of which events ultimately survive the review.
Where the process stands
Tuesday’s session was the first meeting of the City Council’s finance committee on the mayor’s proposed spending plan, which is set to take effect Oct. 1. That timing gives the council a limited window: the budget must be settled before the new fiscal year begins.
Cheriogotis said during the finance committee meeting that he is willing to have a broader conversation about performance contracts. That is a meaningful opening, though it is short of a commitment to restore any specific line, and it leaves open whether such a conversation would happen in time to affect the FY2027 budget or in the year that follows.
This year’s Port City Classic has already been played. Tuskegee’s one-point win over Fort Valley State on Saturday at Ladd-Peebles Stadium was decided under the current funding arrangement. The proposals at issue concern next September’s game.
What to watch next
Several questions will determine how this resolves.
- Whether an evaluation framework is actually created. Both Penn and Clopton asked for a standard applied to all city-funded events. Whether the administration produces one, and whether it covers the Senior Bowl and 68 Ventures Bowl alongside the HBCU games, is the test of whether this becomes policy or stays rhetoric.
- Whether the Port City Classic’s $400,000 is restored. Penn wants it restored pending a review. The budget as proposed eliminates it.
- What happens to the Bridge Builders Classic. Its $100,000 is also set to be eliminated, and it has drawn less attention than the football game.
- How Brothers Working Together allocates its $600,000. With the organization’s own appropriation rising while two event lines are cut, how the organization deploys the larger sum across the Gulf Coast Challenge and any surviving events becomes consequential.
- The Oct. 1 deadline. The budget takes effect at the start of the fiscal year, which constrains how long the council can leave these items unsettled.
The larger question raised Tuesday is not really about one football game. It is whether a city that distributes more than $8.7 million a year through performance contracts has a consistent, transparent method for deciding which contracts to keep — and whether that method will be written before the next round of cuts, or after.