Surprise! At the first meeting in March, for the first time in months, the high-rise ordinance wasn’t on the Daphne City Council’s agenda. They are having another work session to consider the ordinance, so it can come up at the second meeting, or in April, May, or who-knows-when. This, of course, left us without the usual entertainment of seeing the council creep up on actually doing something with the ordinance, but then, at the very last moment, veering away from the commitment of a real vote on the measure.
“Real” in this context means when the council votes on the ordinance, the vote actually counts. Recall that somehow, clearly by accident, they recently voted on the ordinance (and the majority voted against it). They were so shocked at having committed the issue to a vote that President Greg Burnam called for a recess. When the council returned, they withdrew the motion and invalidated their vote. Now in the second year of considering a high-rise ordinance, the council’s non-action could be called by some as prudent, some could call it confused, but everyone should call it INEPT.
While this momentous decision affecting Daphne’s future was left for a future day (hopefully within the lifetimes of at least some of those present), further south things were happening in Fairhope.
The citizens’ group, “A Fair Hope of Success,” which has taken on the challenge of stopping Wal-Mart, called for a visible demonstration of how much the big-box retailer isn’t wanted in Fairhope. And before the anal-retentive, nit-picking engineer types gets their drawers in a bunch: yes, the spot they picked is in the county, but it is within throwing distance of the city limits. This location allows the store to avoid the impact of the city’s “No Big-Box” ordinance. However, it doesn’t allow the city to avoid the impact of the retailer’s being on their doorstep. (But I digress).
To do this they organized “A Chain Against Chains.” On a bright March Saturday morning, group leaders Karin Wilson and Dean Mosher and their small team got residents and other supporters to form a human chain along Fairhope Avenue from Greeno Road to the intended Wal-Mart site on State Highway 181. Their goal was 1,000 participants. Purportedly this would be enough to get into the “Guinness Book of Records” for Wal-Mart protests, or something along those lines.
Based on a video of the entire chain, they had close to a thousand folks – and a slightly smaller number of dogs. It was, as described by anti-sprawl activist Al Norman, “likely the largest single, outdoor event against Wal-Mart I have seen in the past 13 years.” (And now another digression).
For the benefit of the aforementioned engineer-types: the distance the human chain was to cover is about 10,500 feet (according to Keith Map Service). If we assume that the chain is linked at the fingertips, an average participant would occupy about 5.5 feet of that distance. To go the distance without gaps would have required about 1,900 adults, almost twice as many as the still impressive “nearly one thousand” who were reported as there. (And now back to the story-line).
Regardless of the head-count, the movement has momentum and growing political support. Although Mayor Kant and most of the city council seemed surprised and uncertain about the Wal-Mart elephant on their doorstep (surprised at its being there and uncertain over what to do about it), council member Cecil Christenberry took action. He organized the first town meeting in recent years in order to consider how to get control over Fairhope’s future growth. He recognized that the problem was broader than just Wal-Mart and Fairhope and he saw to it that political decision-makers from the state and county were at the meeting.
And things are happening. The unincorporated areas of Baldwin County around the city are now all going through the various steps of establishing control over land use. Planning zones are on their way to happening. But while others considered how to address the threat of Wal-Mart, Mayor Kant’s staff didn’t give it a thought or hesitate for a minute. They approved Wal-Mart’s plans and issued a permit to build. When the quality of the water runoff study came into question – an adjacent subdivision is already flooding during summer storms, even before adding runoff from Wal-Mart – Christenberry asked that the permit approval be suspended.
This would allow a further look at the project’s impact. He then set up another special meeting to have Fairhope residents briefed by experts on the studies that supported the decision to issue the permit. He even nudged the city staff into making the studies publicly available – and before the meeting, yet. Wow, a seriously open meeting! Not only access to the decision-makers, but even to the back-up materials and sufficiently beforehand to have a chance to read them.
It’s not clear that any of this will achieve the objective (maybe “wish” is a better word) of stopping Wal-Mart held by people like Cecil Christenberry and Karin Wilson and Dean Mosher and the near-1,000 individuals who were links in the “Chain Against Chains.” But something very important is being accomplished in all this. The community as whole is learning that growth cannot be treated as a business-as-usual proposition.
It has to be studied and understood and realistic plans established to handle more people, more houses, more traffic and more services. And to be successful, all this has to be done while making sure the very qualities that first attracted people to Fairhope are not lost while accommodating them.
Contact Pete Gleszer at jubilee@lagniappemobile.com.
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