Life in the Magic City

Mayor Larry Langford, VisionLand's visionary, at his sackcloth & ashes extravanganza in April.

Langford said that Birmingham’s crime problem “pails” (sic) in comparison to the biblical City of Nineveh. In his proclamation of the day, he tells the Bible story of Jonah and the city of Nineveh: “Whereas Chapter 3, verse 5 & 6, of the Book of Jonah, Old Testament states, that the people of Nineveh believe God and proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them even to the least of them." He bought 2,000 sackcloth robes for the event.

For those of you out-of-towners or those some still unaware of how terrifically awful (and tragically funny) our mayor is... this one's for you. The Birmingham Weekly recently released "Leapin' Larry's Year in Review." Some of it is almost too ludicrous to be true...

A handful of highlights:

*Oct 2007- Mayor-elect Langford announces his choice for Public Works director, Rickey Kennedy, a city landscape supervisor. Langford met Kennedy when Kennedy was cutting the grass in Linn Park. The new job came with a $100,000 pay increase and put Kennedy in charge of the $54.7 million Public Works budget. The Public Works department is the second largest department in the city. Later the Jefferson County Personnel Board declared Kennedy unqualified for the job and ordered the mayor to make a new appointment. To date Langford has defied that order.

*Nov 2007- Langford is sworn in as Birmingham mayor. In his inauguration speech, he promises to build a domed stadium, lambasts parents for buying children designer clothes and once again declares that what children need most is corporal punishment.

• Langford says he is in talks with Mall of America to build a new shopping center in Birmingham. The mall would be adjacent to a new aquarium. “If Atlanta can have Beluga whales, we can too,” Langford says.

*Dec 2007- Langford also claims that Legion Field, which he also wants to demolish, was named after a demon in the Bible. In fact, it was named in honor of the American Legion.

• With its attention span exhausted by the Boutwell debate, the council approves nearly $30,000 for renovations to City Hall. Councilor Roderick Royal questions the expenditure, but his colleagues gripe about his curiosity. Later it turns out that at least $12,000 of that money paid for a new deck outside the mayor’s office where Langford could smoke without having to walk a short distance to the existing deck down the hall.

- In his second interview with Securities and Exchange Commission lawyers in Miami, Langford refuses to answer most questions on the basis of unspecified constitutional rights. In a back-and-forth with investigators, Langford refuses to actually plead the Fifth Amendment. Later, Montgomery investment banker Bill Blount invokes the same unspecified constitutional rights (Matt's side note: He's being nailed by the SEC for accepting $156,000 in illegal cash & benefits. The same day he was indicted, our beloved Jefferson Co. Senators approved a $40,000 raise for him. Huzzah).

• In one of his few major staffing changes, Langford replaces finance director Michael Johnson with former Jefferson County finance director Steve Sayler. At the county, Sayler helped direct billions in disastrous interest rate swaps and left the county’s financial records in such shambles that to date the county has not been able to produce an audited financial statement.

All this before 2008 even hit... I didn't have time to dig into the $70,000 he spent (of loaned money) on clothes, the "top secret" plans he brought in with two officers armed with semi-automatics, his plan to bring the Olympics to the Magic City, the Kids Getting Laptops disaster (his partnership with a man who just received a 98-count indictment) the disappearance of legally-required monthly financial updates... Long-lost friends, if you make any plans to visit us in Birmingham, I suggest you do it soon... before our beloved city is a crater.