re: Birmingham Mayor Threatens to Steer Athletes from UA and Auburn if Bill Passes

quote:

---

What Bham needs is a Tommy Battle. That man has turned Huntsville into a boom town. Fiscal responsibility, great education, free enterprise, created good jobs in his tenure as mayor. I voted for him when he ran for governor and would do so again. Man has a great business mind and knows how to bring growth to a city and maintain it.

---

The deep federal (mostly DoD) investment into Huntsville makes it hard for me to suspect Battle is the significant factor in that boom. Tech industry has been looking for ways to get out of California and into states with less labor/business encumberments for decades. Huntsville already having a STEM background made this eventually sort of overdetermined.

That said, he didn't do anything to discourage the non-DoD growth in the area which in itself deserves credit. The town has a more diverse economic base, so political games being played with the Space Force Command aren't exactly the gut punch it would have been 30 years ago.

quote:

---

What Bham needs is a Tommy Battle. That man has turned Huntsville into a boom town.

---

That would never work in Birmingham. The city of Huntsville has a much more broad, diverse population than the city of Birmingham, which allows the mayor more flexibility since they necessarily have widespread support from the surrounding population. The city of Birmingham is made up of a small, monolithic voting bloc which comprises a relatively small portion of the metro area. The mayor of Birmingham's only job is to take the tax money generated by suburban workers and distribute it via nepotism while trying to do just enough to not drive existing businesses away.