By David Sher
I got up this morning, grabbed my gym bag, and headed to my workout.
I ran into a friend in the gym I hadn’t seen in a while and asked him about his two adult daughters.
He said one daughter was living in Atlanta and the other in New York.
I replied that’s what’s wrong with Birmingham. “We can’t hold onto our children.”
Parents often complain to me about losing their children and grandchildren to other cities and emphasize that they’re never coming back.
He sighed, ‘I guess Birmingham just isn’t exciting enough.
I told him I don’t really buy ‘the Birmingham is not exciting’ argument.
The reason we’re losing our children is we don’t have the jobs for them.
He agreed and then blamed our conservative legislature.
I said if that were true, how do you explain that Alabama is the home to two of the fastest growing metro areas in America?
The Daphne-Fairhope-Foley Metropolitan Area is the sixth fastest growing and the Huntsville Metro Area is the 20th fastest growing in the U.S. Huntsville now has 50,000 more people than Birmingham.
In fact, Huntsville, now Alabama’s biggest city, keeps winning and winning–both with the government and private sector.
The Space Command is coming to Huntsville and IKEA, one of most globally successful retailers in the world, selected Huntsville for its first Alabama store.
According to Consumer Affairs, Alabama is ranked as the 7th most popular state for seeking a new home.
Yet our Birmingham region remains stagnant while Daphne and Huntsville have the same state government,
Then I asked him to explain Florida and Texas, the two fastest growing states in the U.S., who may be more conservative than Alabama.
According to a recent report from the National Association of Realtors, just 3% of movers cited political reasons as their primary motivation.
I’m not trying to promote conservative governance. I’m just trying to make the case that there has to be a bigger obstacle to Birmingham’s growth than our legislature.
It’s fragmented local governance.
Let’s Follow the Lead of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh in Allegheny County Pennsylvania until recently faced the same structural problem as Jefferson County.
Jefferson County has 35 cities–Allegheny County has 130—four times as many.
Allegheny County, just like Jefferson County, had only two branches of government, legislative and judicial, with no executive branch.
No Jefferson County commissioner, including its president, is elected county-wide.
But unlike Jefferson County, Allegheny County recognized the problem and fixed it.
Allegheny Count didn’t combine cities.
Allegheny County didn’t merge schools.
Allegheny County opted for one strong county.
On January 1, 2000, the Home-Rule Charter went into effect in Allegheny County. It replaced the three elected commissioners with an elected chief officer (the County Executive), a county council with 15 members, and an appointed county manager.
The transformation was dramatic and immediate. By creating a true executive branch with a county-wide elected chief executive, Allegheny County suddenly had unified regional leadership that could speak for the entire metro area.
The county executive became accountable to all 1.2 million residents, not just individual districts, and could coordinate economic development across all 130 municipalities.
The results speak for themselves. Today, the three most important politicians in Pennsylvania are widely recognized as the Governor of Pennsylvania, the Mayor of Philadelphia, and the Mayor of Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh now has a seat at the table in statewide and national conversations precisely because the region created the unified leadership structure that gives them political clout and economic coordination.
This is the kind of unified regional voice that Jefferson County desperately needs but currently lacks.
The Path Forward: Bringing Our Children Home
The solution is right in front of us: follow Pittsburgh’s lead and complete Jefferson County’s governmental structure by creating a truly independent executive branch. A county-wide elected executive accountable to all 660,000 Jefferson County residents could finally give Birmingham the regional political voice and economic coordination that would make us competitive.
Until we fix this fundamental flaw, we’ll keep losing our most precious export—our young talent—to cities that figured out long ago that fragmented governance kills economic prosperity.
The choice is simple: continue operating with broken government structure, or build the unified leadership that brings our children home and puts Birmingham back on the map.
Our competitors aren’t waiting. Neither should we.
David Sher is the founder and publisher of ComebackTown. He’s past Chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce (BBA), Operation New Birmingham (REV Birmingham), and the City Action Partnership (CAP).
Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Invite David to speak for free to your group about how we can have a more prosperous metro Birmingham. [email protected]
(Visited 1,682 times, 1 visits today)
