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Speaking of the Birmingham mayor’s race…
Richard Arrington apparently will not find out if the once-formidable Citizens’ Coalition could propel him into the mayor’s office again, telling the Birmingham News that he will not run. Many public figures are not self-aware enough to know when their time has come and gone. Is he an exception?
There has been talk here and there of the the Citizens’ Coalition reclaiming its glory days, but it hasn’t really had a meaningful presence since before William Bell, Arrington’s handpicked successor, lost the Birmingham mayor’s race to Bernard Kincaid in 1999.
In light of Arrington’s successors (Bell as an interim, micro-manager Bernard Kincaid, convicted felon Larry Langford), does Arrington look better now to Birmingham residents than he did when he left office?
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No time does not make this low life crook look any better. He left the city in terrible shape dominated by corruption with an economy in sharp decline.
The city has slowly continued to decline. He has everything to do with the fact that corruption continues to dominate the city.
The current crowd may not be his personal friends, but he was the guy who drove honesty out of city politics.
I could not disagree more. Hostile federal prosecutors scrutinized everything that Arrington did as mayor. He was under the microscope throughout, but the fly-speck crowd never found any evidence of wrondoing. He ran a clean administration and did a great job keeping Birmingham afloat despite the structural problems of industrial decline and multiple suburban cities swallowing up jobs and tax base. Arrington was dealt essentially the same hand as Detroit, but managed to keep the city going and even growing. It has been downhill since he left. Arrington did an outstanding job, and it’s a shame he won’t run again
You slam Bernard Kincaid as a micro manager, but his “micro” management brought NO scandals in his eight years of office. His “micro” management brought no new taxes, yet relieved the city of debt, all while relieving the school system of state control and repairing city infrastructure.
Birmingham should be so fortunate as to have another “micro” manager of the calibre of Bernard Kincaid.
I’m a bit surprised you consider it a slam to call Kincaid a micro manager. The biggest supporters of his that I know would agree that he is, and I can’t tell that you disagree.
Even his biggest supporters were frustrated by the bottleneck in his office. But we agree that Birmingham has done much worse.