Cover Story

Just over a year ago, Sam Jones took over the mayor’s office in Government Plaza, following the long-tenured and very popular Mike Dow.

Jones recently took time to sit down for a Q&A with Lagniappe, looking back on his first year, addressing a criticism or two and talking about some of the big issues and initiatives facing Mobile right now.

L: What were your top priorities over this first year?

SJ: Well, I think that when I initially got here one of the first things we had to do was to do some assessments as to where we saw the city being in terms of accountability management, budget needs, infrastructure needs, public safety, public works, all those things. After assessing a lot of that, what we really found was that we had some very serious infrastructure needs that really had been put off for a number of years, so we proposed addressing those through a $26 million bond issue, but the way we proposed it was somewhat different than its been proposed in the past because it was not done by council districts. It was actually done by engineering data. It was probably the first time in a long time that the city’s needs had been addressed based on the priority of the needs and strictly engineering data.

And then the council approved that, and that project is ongoing now. Most of it is drainage. Some is street improvement, but most of it is drainage needs that we’ve had for some time before that’s really caused neighborhoods to flood, so we’re very pleased with that program taking place.

And we did start on a campaign to clear our courts of people selling drugs and people just completely violating all of our laws as to what it takes to operate a vehicle in the state of Alabama, meaning proper registration, insurance and invalid driver’s licenses. We were amazed at our first checkpoint. We were just amazed at what happened at our first checkpoint. We had one checkpoint where we stopped over 200 people, and over 90 of them didn’t have proof of insurance or valid driver’s licenses.

As we continued to do them the numbers really hadn’t gotten much better since then, and so we continue to from time to time. On the Labor Day weekend, we issued 2,600 citations in one weekend, and that was over checkpoints we had that weekend. We’ve had some council members say we are just doing this in certain areas of the city to certain people, so our process is when we have a checkpoint, we have seven. We have one in every council district, so it’s kind of equal opportunity, and what has happened as a result of that is we’ve changed some things as relates to people riding around with illegal fire arms, drugs, and alcohol. A lot of that had changed, but we still are getting far too many people not having valid insurance and driver’s license when we stop them on these checkpoints, so they continue.

We also have beefed up our traffic division. We’ve hired eight new officers and we’ve bought eight new motorcycles, so now the city of mobile operates at twice the capacity of motorcycles. We only had eight; now we have 16. Those will be delivered in about 60 days; the new ones will be for both our traffic patrols as well as litter patrols. These guys will also be issuing citations for people who throw debris out of car windows. They, we think, will enhance a whole lot of what we’ve been doing.

When I look at the management system, I didn’t think that we’ve had proper amount of accountability in the management system, so we started looking at various programs throughout the country that require a lot of accountability and efficiency and wound up in Baltimore looking at their CitiStats program. CitiStats is really a management tool that requires a whole lot of accountability. We are about a week from starting CitiStats. It’s a system that requires department heads to come in every two weeks and come before the CitiStats board, the mayor, chief of staff, finance director, and the human resources director, and kind of talk to us about their department. We require the heads to give us a lot of data on their department including employee data, production, those kind of things. We try to find out what the weaknesses are in the department and set goals to improve the department and then develop the very best management system we can possibly have. At that meeting we look at budget over time costs. We look at all those issues that affect the services that we render to the general public.

We look forward to that starting October first, and the people here look forward to it. They are real excited about it because what we really sell it as is we think we can be not just like Baltimore; we think we can be much better than Baltimore. We think we can be the best city in America if we can actually implement our program of accountability. We think it’s going to make a tremendous difference in the service to the citizens and the employees for the city of mobile.

Now we have been dealing with an issue that many people say is a good issue to have to deal with: preparing enough workers to fill the jobs we have, so workforce development has been a real priority of mine. Trying to make sure that we connect our local business and industry needs of employees with training institutions and service and various training arms that provide technical training and higher education. That is really a challenge we have to achieve because it is going to cause us some problems as we see the expansion of existing industries.

L: How do we achieve that?

SJ: Well, one of the things that we have is we have all the tools to do that; they’ve just not been coordinated. So we are actually having a meeting on Oct. 19 in which we are putting together a strategic plan for workforce development in the Mobile area, which is going to be put together with all the universities, the technical training schools, K through 12, the various industries in our community, AIDT, and all the other training agencies will all come together, sit down, and ask the industries, “what do you specifically need from us?”

L: What are we looking at in long-range jobs?

SJ: We expect we’ve got the project with EADS, Airbus and Northrop Grumman, which will require a number of workers. We’ve got expansion in Austal. We’ve got employees who are needed in Mobile Aerospace, Atlantic Marine, now we’ve got International Shipholding coming in, and we’re really trying to prepare our community for that and prepare a workforce pool for them.

L: Is our workforce shifting? Are we shifting our economy?

SJ: We are shifting, but people who have traditionally had service jobs and hospitality industry jobs, some are getting better employment in some of the other industries, so we’ve got to back up some of those and at the same time continue to train for the other industries. So it’s a good problem to have because what we wind up doing is raising the per capita income in Mobile. That will be a benefit to the total community in Mobile and Baldwin County because our workforce comes from both areas. The chamber is working with us, the various institutions have cooperated, and the industries have really cooperated with us.

The one thing that I’ve been keyed on since I’ve been here is how we manage the city’s resources, how we manage our funding and how we manage projects in the city. For instance we have suggested and recommended that we do away with discretionary spending, so what we’ve done is in the beginning of the budget year we allotted each council member $500,000 in capital money for the beginning of the year.

They named all their projects; we did the estimates on them and put them in the budget. Once the budget is approved, we’ll go with our approval and will work to do those projects, but during the year we don’t have projects where anyone just puts together a project and put it out, so now we’re in a better position to manage both our budget and our departments and help them achieve all these projects that people put together. That’s something that we think provides a lot more accountability for our funding.

We’ve at the same time tried to establish a reserve, so we will start building a reserve to the point where we’d like to get one month operating cost into a reserve, which is almost $20 million for the city of Mobile. So we’re working toward that. This year we were able to pull 1.4 million into it. If we get in any reimbursement from FEMA for the hurricane, I’d like to put some of that into the reserve. It just doesn’t make sense for a city on the Gulf Coast not to have an operating reserve. The city of Mobile only had what was required by law, which is two percent.

L: Is that primarily because of hurricanes as far as having an operating system?

SJ: No, we think we need one anyway because the economy shifts so much up and down, and it also has to do with our bond market, our borrowing. When we get ready to borrow money the thing they look at is whether you have a stable economy and an operating reserve. If you do, you get a much lower interest rate and you don’t have to buy insurance. If you don’t then you get a much higher interest rate and you have to buy insurance, so we’d rather be in a position where we don’t have to do that and establish a more sound foundation, financially sound foundation for the city.

L: Attacking litter is a priority for you. How are you going to attack the litter problem?

SJ: From twofold: one of the things we’ve done already for the abandoned lots, people illegally dumping in abandoned lots, actually the police department now has some guy that work exclusively on that, and we’ve already arrested some folks on that. We even go through trash we find out their neighbors, all of the trash that’s on the lot, and we found out who brought it to the lot.

Another thing we’re doing is we hired some environmental officers who actually go out when people put trash out the days the shift is out when people blow leaves into the drains. We have some enforcement officers now that really handle that. They issue MOTs, which are municipal offense tickets. They’ll be issuing them. We also have ordered some trash containers to go throughout the city, all over the city, and those trash containers will be, what we want to do is get those trash containers out before we start doing this enforcement because we don’t want anybody to say, “Well, there wasn’t anywhere for me to put it,” so we’re doing that also.

It’s Keep Mobile Beautiful playing an integral part in that as well as other organizations, other community groups doing community clean up. That’s a real priority for us because we think that the city is just too beautiful to be littered all the time.

L: It’s an amazing problem around here. I’ve even called Keep Mobile Beautiful hotline sometimes, watching people throw garbage out of their car.

SJ: They do that. If we can just get our motorcycle police to catch a few of those, the fine is $250, so if we can just catch a few of them and make an example, and I think we have a leverage to do that once we get those other eight officers on the street, we expect that to be much better when we get them on.

L: You’ve been in office for a year now. Looking at this first year, what do you think your major accomplishment has been? Is there one thing you look at or a couple things you look at and say, “I’m really happy the way that turned out?”

SJ: For instance, I like the cooperation between the city council and this office and the employees in this office at all levels, whether its public safety, public works, court system. We’ve just had tremendous cooperation from all of them. They’ve worked real hard to make sure that we were doing what we’re supposed to do. Being able to get some projects approved on infrastructure that weren’t politically based, I thought that was something just major for me because there were things that we needed to do in our city and when we first started I didn’t know how it would be received. There was some opposition to it, but not any major opposition, but that worked real well for us. And us being where we are as far as implementing an accountability management system for the city. I think those were the major accomplishments that we’ve had. I just can’t say enough about cooperation; we’ve had a whole lot of cooperation from everybody.

L: Are there things you’ve been disappointed with the first year?

SJ: Well like I said, my disappointment has been that I’ve not been able to do as much as I would like to do within this year. There are still a whole lot of things we’d like to address. We’d like to address the issue of changing the one-way streets to two-way in downtown, which is something that is quite expensive and is going to take some time to do. We do have Royal Street and Dauphin and St. Francis from Royal to Water Street that we’re going to be doing, but I’d like to do St. Louis Street all the way out to Springhill and make Springhill two-way so you can just so you can just keep strait off Springhill onto St. Louis and come into town from Springhill to St. Louis.

L: Why is it so expensive?

SJ: Signalization. Changing the signalization is very expensive to do, and the wiring for all of that downtown is expensive because most of it’s underground. So that’s the expensive side. I think we’ve got a price of almost $400,000 to change St. Louis Street, but now Royal Street, Dauphin and St. Francis are already funded. Those are projects that will take place within the next 60 days. They will be two-way streets, and that was in conjunction with the RSA tower, so that’s going to be done. I’d like to accomplish St. Louis Street by the end of this fiscal year. I’d like at least do it, and then we’ve got to address St. Joseph Street.

I think it was somewhat of a technical error to put the bus terminal where we have it at the GM&O because it tends to take people out of the inner city rather than bring them into the downtown area. So we’ve got do deal with that, and we’re looking for an area downtown to start staging buses and talk with the MTZ or the Wave at least about getting that done because we think that’s important to our downtown.

L: So we may see the buses come back downtown?

SJ: We may see them come back downtown because I think mass transit will be used a lot more in the future in Mobile.

It shifted up with the GM&O, and I understand what they were trying—well actually the idea was to put Trailways, Greyhound, all those up there, and those others decided they weren’t going there, so we just wound up with the city buses. Now we’re rethinking that and about to establish a place in the inner circle of downtown to bring those buses so we can make it more convenient for people to come down and shop and visit entertainment venues or whatever.

L: After your election you appointed 24 citizens’ task force subcommittees to help develop a formal strategic plan for the city. What kinds of things have come out of that?

SJ: One of them has been our finances. We’ve met with our transition finance committee and talked to them a little bit about our approach to how we want to be more accountable in finances. One of the things that they recommended was they were looking at the discretionary situation. That’s one of the things that we were able to accomplish. A reserve, they talked about that.

So we actually started on the reserve and started doing that. And another thing is that we actually had the budget this year passed earlier than it’s been passed in probably the last 10 or 15 years. It was passed very early. It usually doesn’t pass until the last week of September. But we gave it to them on Aug. 24, and they had the budget from Aug. 24 until about the second week of September.

L: Why do you think that happened?

SJ: I think because of the process. What we actually did was we planned the process. We gave the council information every stage of the process, gave them the budget to critique, and then responded to any questions they had prior to the meeting on the budget. So when we got the meeting on the budget we had already dealt with any concern they had already.

L: Any other things that came out of the task forces that you can think of?

SJ: Our public safety task force was one that we dealt with some in the selection of the police chief. We involved them in some of the selection committees and screening committees, and it worked quite well. We thought it went quite well. It was a quite extensive process. I didn’t get involved in the process until we got down to the last two applicants. Until then I saw none of the applications, didn’t talk to any of them. We got to the final four applicants and we got involved in interviewing them and making the selection of Chief Garrett.

That is one of the reasons we did the drainage. The public task force said that there should be a system of selecting the city’s needs based on actual engineering data and the severity of that need rather than just using the district system of allocating funds so that was how we actually put that funding together.

L: So that was one of the ways you kind of came about doing that?

SJ: Yes, they talked about that a whole lot because they thought that… the system has been, “OK, we have $7 million. We’re going to give everybody $1 million.” And everybody tries to find a project to spend it on. So what we’ve gone to now is actually doing a detailed assessment. Every project on that list has an engineer’s assessment attached to it where they can actually look and see that assessment.

L: How do you keep politics out of it though when let’s say three of the worst ones are in district one or district seven?

SJ: That’s a problem. When you talk about drainage problems, most of your drainage problems are going to be in the inner city because the city is built so everything flows down, so usually where you have the problems is at the base of the drains. So most of the drainage projects are in the south part of town here, some out in Midtown, some on the north side of town, but most of them are actually in the south part of town.

So if you look at dollar value, most of the projects are there, but then we also have projects like the Dauphin Street extension. Dauphin Street extension drainage system, if you ride through there by Springhill, you see where we’ve got those cones and everything in the median. It’s because the drainage system has almost completely failed, and what we’ve got to do is actually take that entire system up from I-65 to McGregor and replace the entire drainage system. It takes about $2 million to replace it. So it really was one that spread out some, but it basically was based on a system that really failed on us that we had to replace.

It was a top priority because it had been put off for so long. If you look at capital projects for the city of Mobile, it’s been many, many years before we have had a $26 million capital project to do drainage. I think it started off one time when a storm water managements program that the city started for some reason got away from them and what wound up happening was we had a southern drain down here in the south part of town that the city did I guess about 30 percent of about eight years ago and never did any more to it. So people saw no relief from it even though one end of it was fixed. The end where the houses were still wasn’t fixed so we just left that here recently to fix that side of it. So a lot of them were projects that were started and were never completed.

L: How long do you think the capital improvement projects are going to be your top priority? Is there going to reach a point where we just say we’ve accomplished a tremendous amount of this, or is this just an ongoing thing?

SJ: They are just so expensive today that we’ve only done about 40 percent of what we need to do that we had on the list. The rest of them, the next project on the list is $13 million, and so we’re getting into really the projects that are very, very expensive. I would say we can do, if we had the resources to do it, we can do $26 millions a year and we’d still be doing them for about four or five years. So we’ve got a lot more needs than we have resources. We’ve got to do that though because if the infrastructure in the community does not keep up with the growth, then it causes a lot of major, major problems.

L: Speaking of growth, and one of the infrastructure things that’s been a hot topic lately is the bridge, the concept of the bridge. You are on record as saying you’re going to take the DOT’s recommendation on one of these things. Have you made any progress in where you think we ought to be on the bridge?

SJ: I think that the community has to come together and build some consensus. If not, someone at the Federal Highway Administration is going to make a decision about the bridge and I don’t want to see that. I want us to get to the point of saying if it’s going to be one of these three alternates, lets pick the one that’s least disruptive to the city of Mobile, to the maritime industry to the historic district, and say if you must take one, it’s got to be this one, can’t be one of the other two.

The community has got to get to that level, and there are some meetings that have been taking place. I participated in one last Friday with the Department of Transportation and the maritime industry, who were really trying to put their position on the table. They’ve (DOT) been real good about meeting with the various groups. We have issues with certain alignments of the bridge, we have issues with it as it relates to the cruise terminal and issues as it relates to the maritime museum and we’ve voiced that to them.

They’ve got a list of objections, but the bottom line is that the decision, as I understand it, is going to be made by the Federal Highway Administration based on three alternates. Now they can tweak them different ways, but the three alternates is where the decision is going to be made. And I just think it’s wise for this community to build consensus on the one that’s least disruptive to the port.

L: We hear a lot about that it will damage the shipping industry, and from what we understand the shipping industry is about to launch into a campaign to said they want it to go over the Cochrane-Africatown Bridge.

SJ: They voiced that when I met with them. The thing about that is, we have brought the Department of Transportation in and said, “OK, tell us why it can’t go over the Africatown Bridge.” What they’ve done is shown us their modeling for the bridge in which they actually routed traffic around 65 to 165 over the Cochrane Bridge. The first thing is, I’m told, it had over a $600 million price tag, and when they did the modeling, it said only 30 percent of the traffic would take it.

The whole reason for the bridge is to eliminate the amount of traffic that goes through the tunnel. If it doesn’t do that, they are simply not interested in building an alternate that does not accomplish that. Six hundred million for 30 percent, that’s not enough. They’re saying, “We’re willing to meet with anyone and show them our numbers and if they’ve got some, we’d like to look at theirs.”

Now they’re doing an environmental impact study. They had that study done, they’re still meeting with community groups. They’ve spent a lot of time and money on studies for this bridge. What I think the situation is now, is as far as they are concerned, they are down to three alternates and they are dealing with those three alternates. The thing that should be understood, though, the city of Mobile, the county of Mobile or no one that I know, had plans for a bridge. That really came from the State of Alabama and the Federal Highway Administration, and it’s all because Interstate 10 is a federal highway that’s bottlenecking in the city of Mobile, and that’s what they’ll tell you.

Now the thing we have to be mindful of though, in some cities out west, in California, when they’re not able to build the proper structures, like the bridge, to keep traffic moving, they limit the access of the local community to the highway. I know you’ve seen these little arms on some entrances to highways that come down and block the entrances at certain times. Well, that’s an option. In the Virginia area and Washington, they just limit your access to it at certain times. So, there are a lot of things that could be done, but they feel like they’ve studied them to the point where they have the three options.

L: We keep hearing it will kill the cruise industry if they build this bridge. Has your administration been able to research that and find out if it’s true or not?

SJ: The cruise ship cannot be under the bridge, can not be docked under the bridge. The bridge can’t go over where the ship is docked. That’s just a no-no in the cruise industry. Any alignment they had that went over the cruise terminal, we would be adamantly opposed to.

L: What about larger ships? Would they be able to make it under the bridge?

SJ: The cruise ships we are able to handle in Mobile can get under the bridge. They haven’t set an exact height for the bridge. They’re probably up close to 200 feet now. That would accommodate the ships that could come into Mobile. Now the super cruise ships are not going to come in here because they can’t turn around here in the turn basin.

If it’s over 1,000 feet, they can’t turn around in the turn basin here. So we’re not looking for the super cruise ships. The ones we’re looking for, the largest one is about 900 feet, and that’s 2,400 passengers. The one we have now is like 1,400 passengers. I think if the bridge was at 200, it will accommodate our needs for the cruise industry.

L: So what I hear you saying is if we’re going over the river down here, it’s going to go south of the cruise ship terminal or north of the cruise ship terminal.

SJ: The one they’re proposing north of the cruise ship terminal is the one that goes right next to the maritime museum. The other two are south of the cruise ship terminal. Just south. The farthest route south goes right through both shipyards (Bender Shipbuilding and Atlantic Marine), and I guess for people who want to preserve any part of the bridge being downtown, they like that because it’s way down near the metro jail.

But I don’t think that’s feasible because of the impact it will have on the shipyards. I think it’s three routes to consider, one of them appears to be very detrimental to the maritime industry, the other two are routes that I think if either one are chosen, they would have to be tweaked.

L: At some point, are you going to say, “This is what our administration thinks is best?”

SJ: We’d like to be part of that consensus-building team. We’d like to be in that. We’d like to sit down and say, “We want you to consider the impact this will have on downtown development and esthetics. We want all that taken into consideration and we can live with this particular bridge if you do all these things.” I think it can be done. It’s going to be a process, but I think it can be done. And really it’s going to be done to the fact that there’s not a perfect plan for the bridge. We wish you wouldn’t build one at all downtown, but if it’s going to be done, this is the only one that’s acceptable.

L: You think we’re definitely getting one?

SJ: Oh, I think the Federal Highway Administration will eventually make a decision, just like they did on I-165. The reason for that is they have the responsibility for making sure interstate’s flow. They’ve already said they can’t realign the tunnel and they’re not going to build a new tunnel, so I think the only option as far as they see—there are two options. The option of picking one of the three options ore no build. And no build, over the years, would become extremely detrimental to Mobile.

L: Would it choke of growth?

SJ: Absolutely. In fact, we are having Dr. Semoon Chang do a study on the economic impact of not improving infrastructure, including a bridge and the outer loop. We get International Shipholding in, and if we are fortunate enough to get Airbus and Northrop Grumman, they all have some requirements to move cargo, to move materials, and if you’ve got the interstates tied up in front of Brookley and the interstates are tied up in some of these other areas, we’re just not going to be competitive anymore when it comes to economic development. That’s one of the reasons here in the South that we get a lot of interest from other areas, because of the lack of congestion.

L: Switching gears. During the election, you said annexation would be a priority. Where are we on that? Is it a front-burner issue?

SJ: This coming up fiscal year you’ll see that. You’ll see our plan for that. What we are doing now is doing all out research on annexation. We are in the process of now developing a map and our approach to do that. It is a very high priority of ours and something I think is essential to the overall growth and development of the city of Mobile.

We’ve got some meetings in-house right now. I’d say by the first of the year, you’ll start seeing material.

L: How likely are we to get the EADS project in your mind?

SJ: If the competition is judge on merit, I think we are positioned very, very well to win. If the competition gets to be something else, it is difficult to say where our position is because it becomes a strictly political deal. I think if it’s judged on merit, we have by far the best site, we have two quality companies, Northrop Grumman and Airbus, and I think we have the base here.

We have water, air, rail and interstates and the infrastructure’s already on the ground. It’s not something that’s got to be built. All they have to build is the assembly plant. I think that puts us in a very, very good position, and that’s why I say that on the merits, we will win the competition, if the competition is decided on merits.

L: The incentive package being offered is pretty hefty.

SJ: I think when you look at economic development, incentive packages are necessary, but you have to tie them to something. Our incentive packages are always tied to the level of employment. The have crawl-back clauses. If they don’t meet the employment, then the incentives come back by the same percentage. I think it’s a pretty competitive proposal those companies have put forward. I’m hoping it’s on merit, because I feel real comfortable. But the thing we have to understand is the minute we stop dealing with that project, we start dealing with three others. It’s the kind of thing where you’ve always got to be out there because you never know how things will turn out.

So what you do is deal with other prospects in other industries and we’re doing that and feel pretty good about that. We have some prospects we will be meeting with in the future. Some are industrial. We have a number of people who want to build condominiums in Mobile. We’re dealing with three prospects now that have visited the city several times.

Starting in January, we’ll see construction begin on a new Hampton Inn on the corner of Royal Street. I think it’s a good time for us, a real window of opportunity and I think a log of what we expected is actually taking place.

L: What other new developments might we hear about soon?

SJ: There are some prospects looking west. Some north. Of course, the partnership that’s been put together to get the racetrack is still very much alive. We think we will see demolition of the old CSX building by January. And we’re dealing with a group that has a real interest in Mobile that builds condominiums all over the Southeast that wants to build condos right here in downtown.

We get people who come about once or twice a month and ask if we can drive them around downtown. They’re pretty impressed in terms of the development.

L: Why do you think it’s so hot right now?

SJ: It there’s a lot of focus on Mobile. I’ll tell you one thing, the way I believe we got involved with Airbus is because of Boeing. If you remember, Boeing came here. Boeing judged us their number one site in the country, and then made the decision they weren’t going to build a new plant and would stay in Seattle. Well, when they did that, about a month later, Airbus showed up and said, “If it’s such a good site, let us look at it.” And they thought it was a good site.

A lot of the interest we get comes from other people who’ve seen other folks come here. We had one group that came in last week because they said they came to Mobile because anywhere David Bronner is involved, they want to be involved. You get a lot of referenced from people like that. The hotel and RSA Tower and cruise terminal brought a lot of people into Mobile. Then we’re seeing a lot of former Mobilians who had retired in northern cities and western cities and are coming back home.

L: In talking to some people, if there’s any negative thing we may have heard about your administration, some people in the city or even some members of the city council say it’s tougher to come in and see the mayor and talk to the mayor than say it was your predecessor. Do you think that’s a fair comment?

SJ: I don’t think it is at all. We up here are really open to the city council and managers. In fact, every Monday morning, we have every department head in the city right in that room out there, every department head. As far as the city council is concerned, we set up Tuesday afternoons after the city council meeting, we’ll meet with any of them. But it’s up to them to set the meeting up.

We talk to them all the time, but what we don’t do though—I will work with anyone as long as I think it’s beneficial for the city. But if it’s someone who’s looking for us to go favor-for-favor, we don’t operate like that. I’m strictly interested in what’s good for the city of Mobile and the citizens of Mobile. I don’t have any personal agenda and I really don’t care to help anyone with their personal agenda. So, if they make that statement, they’re probably right about that.

As far as if they want to come in here and talk to me, I’ve never known any council member denied the opportunity to come in here. Most of the time they just call up here and say I want to talk to you about this, I want to talk to you about that.

L: What has been expressed to me is that they say, “I’ve always got to talk to (chief of staff) Al (Stokes).

SJ: They choose to talk to Al because they might get the reception they might be looking for from Al. But you know, if they dial on this phone, I’ll talk to them. But if they call Al and say “Al, I want you to make a decision for the mayor,” he’s probably going to say “I’m not going to be able to do that.” But now, I don’t mind talking to any of them and will talk to them. The fact is, though, I’m here every day. Most of the time before 7:30 and most of the time after 5. Council people’s hours don’t extend that way.

The other thing is this. Being mayor of the city, today, I had eight appointments out of the office, then I’m back out again. If they come looking for me when I’m gone, that might be what they’re talking about. But nobody has denied them access. No council member has ever been denied access to this office. If they call and say they want to see me, if I’m not in a meeting or something, I’m always glad to talk to them. I don’t grant all their requests (laughs), but I’m always glad to talk to them.

L: If you look down the road 10 or 20 years from now, what are some major differences we’ll see for the city of Mobile?

SJ: I think first of all, you will see our boundaries expand. Mobile’s population will increase by that period by 20,000 to 30,000, maybe more. You know we’re only 45,000 people away from overtaking Birmingham as the largest city in the state. I don’t think that’s something that’s out of our reach.

I also think you will also see Mobile become the most progressive city in the state. We are now developing at a rate that most people will tell you that number one city in the state for economic development is the city of Mobile. Most people will tell you the development in this state is taking place in Mobile. And I think as we move forward, we’ll see a continuation of that.

Keep in mind that we are developing, even though we are not the state capital and don’t have all the state buildings, we are not the financial hub like Birmingham and don’t have all the headquarters, banks and everything as they do. We don’t have Mercedes. We don’t have Hyundai. But, Mobile is holding it’s own and growing without a major shot like that. When our major shot comes, I think the development here is unlimited. I don’t think there’s any limit to what you’ll see in this city.

You’ll see the city expand. You’ll see a different approach to Mobile than you see in other cities. The thing is, we’re the only city in Alabama that has casinos as close as we have on one side and the lottery as close on the other side. Very few cities in Alabama have to compete with that.

Entertainment for us is difficult because of all the competition. But I think you’ll see us advance in the arts. I think Mobile will become very well known for its arts. I think you’ll see a major, major retail and entertainment development down on the waterfront. We’ve already got a lot of interest in that, a lot of people trying to get us to help them acquire access to property along the waterfront. But it has to be a large piece of property because they want it to be a large development.

I think one of the development streets of Mobile is St. Louis Street. That’s why I’m anxious to make it a two-way street. A lot of people don’t pay attention to St. Louis Street, but it’s one of the widest streets in the city. I tried to send our real estate department to look at the old Mobile Fixture building because I wanted to buy that building for the city. I was thinking of putting our new police headquarters there. Every piece of property on St. Louis Street is optioned, from Springhill Avenue to the waterfront. We did some research on it, you can’t buy anything on St. Louis Street.

And it’s getting that way on some other streets. Just because you see some vacant buildings in Mobile, certainly doesn’t mean it’s accessible.

L: Are we past the point in this city where we have to have a “String of Pearls” initiative as we did 20 years ago, and now the private sector is taking those things on?

SJ: When this building was built, and the convention center was built and a lot of other things were built, they were built with public money. Our hope was to stimulate private investment, and now I think private investment is catching on. So I don’t think we have to have a “String of Pearls,” but I do think we have to have a plan.

We have this year in our budget, we are going to develop a plan, not just for downtown Mobile, but for the entire city of Mobile period. And we’re also going to develop a plan that encompasses our efforts to reach out into the other communities. We have to develop plans for fire coverage and police precincts. Our plans actually include police precincts and fire stations outside the city. We would like to do a master plan to update everything that’s taking place downtown. We’d also like to go out to that Springhill area around McGregor. I think we’ve got some excellent retail opportunities out there. We’ve got some in Midtown. We’ve got to nurture all of those and develop them. Just like when you go to some larger cities like Birmingham, there’s a very nice area over here you can go to, or you can go across town and there’s another very nice area. We have to nurture some of that in our planning process and I’d like to see us do that.

L: So we’ll see a plan for the city soon?

SJ: Oh, we’re actually starting to interview vendors for that process.

L: Has the last year been what you expected?

SJ: It has. We’ve been quite fortunate in everything we’ve attempted. As I look back, it could have gone a very different way. It could have been a whole lot of turmoil, nobody cooperating, couldn’t get the budget passed. All of that could have happened, and it didn’t happen. My expectations have been fulfilled this year.

Rob Holbert is Lagniappe managing editor. Contact him at rholbert@lagniappemobile.com.

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