December 02, 2004“Half a loaf is better than none,” was Mayor Bernard Kincaid’s assessment upon receiving less than a third of the $31 million in reserve funds sought for year-end budget requests. Funding requests range from $500,000 for repairs at East Lake dam to $1,500,000 to remove the condemned upper deck at Legion Field. Kincaid has been jousting with councilors for the past two months, deflecting complaints that he failed to consult with them on how he chose to spend the money. Complaints focus on an October Finance and Budget Committee meeting at which the mayor said that his thought process “was not to be put on paper.”

To garner support for the spending proposals, Kincaid eventually huddled individually with each councilor except Joel Montgomery, who noted at the November 22 vote on the $31 million that he did not confer with the Mayor. After the council meeting, Kincaid insisted that he had reached out to everyone. “I invited all of the council members for one-on-one [meetings]. One council member canceled and never made arrangements for a subsequent meeting. Need I say more?” Kincaid said.

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At the behest of Councilor Valerie Abbott, the $22 million that the council did not approve was delayed until the December 7 council meeting. “Every time I look further at this stuff, I come up with more questions,” said Abbott, who expressed concern about spending the city’s reserves. The councilor is not convinced that Legion Field’s upper deck constitutes an emergency. “I know that it doesn’t meet code, and we can’t put any people in it. But we’ve been told that it isn’t falling down. It’s not in danger of structural collapse. So to me it doesn’t qualify as an emergency,” she elaborated.

Among the approved projects are $25,000 for Birmingham Foot Soldiers [behind-the-scenes participants during the Civil Rights struggle], $623,182 for demolition of dilapidated buildings, $103,000 for maintenance of the scoreboard at Legion Field, $500,0000 for weed control, $40,000 for City Stages, $25,000 for Rickwood Field, $200,000 for the Entrepreneurial Center, $417,775 for 20 employees at the new Roosevelt City fire station, and $1,500,000 to remove the upper deck from Legion Field.

The East Lake Park dam remained a source of some contention with rainstorms forecast the day after the November 22 meeting. “[East Lake dam] is the only thing that is hanging out there that is unfunded at this point that has some urgency in my mind,” Kincaid said after the council meeting. “It’s amazing that the person whose district that is in [Councilor Gwen Sykes] voted to wait two weeks. That’s incomprehensible to me . . . If it were to become an instance where I thought that there was imminent danger, then I would go ahead and have that processed as an emergency.”

The day after the council meeting, Councilor Joel Montgomery insisted, just as he did during the meeting, that the council should not have had to vote for the entire budget. “You didn’t have to vote for the whole enchilada. You could have pulled out what items you wanted,” Montgomery said, insisting that Kincaid never wanted the council’s input. “He wants to be the commander-in-chief. He wants to be the administrative branch and the legislative branch. He wants to hand us these things and say, ‘Here it is, vote for it, take it all, or nothing at all,’” said the councilor. Montgomery added that he never scheduled a meeting with Kincaid. “He called over there [council office], and I had meetings or some event or something to go to, and we just told him what my schedule was, and that’s the way it is . . . He didn’t pursue it and neither did I. What difference does it make? He’s gonna put what he wants to in the budget. He doesn’t want anything from us up front where he conceives these brilliant ideas of his, and he doesn’t want it from us after he hands it to us. It’s his way or the highway.” &