By Brandon Moseley
Two weeks ago, the Mountain Brook City Council voted to extend their terms and the term of Mayor Stewart H. Welch III by a full year. Municipal elections, that were scheduled for 2022, would be moved to 2023 and since Mountain Brook has a staggered council election system, the 2024 council election would be moved to 2025.
Hundreds of Alabama municipalities have done the same thing without any problem thanks to legislation passed at the urging of the Alabama League of Municipalities. The reason the cities are moving their elections, and consequently giving themselves one more year in office, is so municipal elections will not be in the same year as Presidential or state elections. Nonpartisan city council races often get lost in the maelstrom that surrounds gubernatorial, legislative, congressional, and presidential elections.
One legislator told 1819 News that it also makes it hard for municipal candidates to fundraise competing against Donald Trump. An estimated 450 cities have already successfully made this transition. Mountain Brook, because its city council elections are staggered, did not legally qualify to move their elections under that legislation, so it needed its own special legislation.
State Rep. David Faulkner (R-Mountain Brook) told the City Council “We did not know. We had no idea.”
The council passed a resolution urging the legislative delegation to pass a special local bill to allow them to move the 2022 election.
Faulkner said since the resolution was passed so close to the special session, legislators were focused on redistricting and so were unable to pass a special local bill in that short time frame.
Faulkner said, “That resolution set off a firestorm.”
That political “firestorm” came from Mountain Brook parents, who have formed a 501c4 non-profit group: Mountain Brook Families.
Over the summer, the City School System had attempted to implement a controversial anti-bullying regimen in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Many of the materials in the ADL plan upset conservative Mountain Brook parents, who demanded forcefully that City Schools Superintendent Dicky Barlow and the city school board retract the controversial partnership with the ADL. Eventually the school board bowed to the immense public pressure; but not before requiring employees of Mountain Brook schools to attend the special training.
One Mountain Brook school employee, who is an evangelical Christian, forced to undergo the sensitivity training, told 1819 News that, “The things in there were Sodom and Gomorrah” referring to the training on transgender children and the radical LGBTQ materials.
The determination and the sheer political will of the Mountain Brook parents earned them the Alabama Policy Institute’s 2021 Policy Warrior Award at API’s recent gala event on Nov. 4.
Mountain Brook Families are still concerned that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is creeping into some lesson plans. They are also concerned with the promotion of anti-Christian philosophies, leftist indoctrination, inappropriate sex-ed instruction, controversial purchased reading materials, and Marxism in the Mountain Brook School System – which was once thought to be the best school system in the state. Now parents are talking about moving out of the school system.
Not all of the group’s concerns have been addressed. The City Council appoints the city school board and the board hires the superintendent. The idea that the City Council elections were being postponed angered and alarmed many of those parents.
One of the members of the group, who asked not to be identified in this article, said that the group is not committed to replacing the council, Mayor, and school board.
“We would like to work with the current school board,” the activist told 1819 News. “We are willing to work with anyone to address our concerns.”
The hopes of Mountain Brook City Council members to not face voters in 2022 appear to be dashed.
“We cannot move the election in 2022,” Faulkner told the Council rejecting the suggestion that the legislature could pass a special local bill for Mountain Brook during the 2022 regular session just months before the 2022 elections.
After those elections occur, Faulkner suggested that the legislature either pass a special three or five year term to get the City finally holding odd year elections like they want.
“We will work out an acceptable way (to) align the city of Mountain Brook with all other cities, but we won’t be able to do it by moving the election next year,” Faulkner said.
“I knew our City Council had no nefarious reasons for doing this,” Faulkner said. “There was no selfish motive to give themselves an extra year.”
The 2022 Alabama regular legislative session will begin on Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2022 – just 60 days away.
