2021 Birmingham City Election

Bell Wants to Get the City Back on Track After His Four Years Out of Office

William Bell

William Bell wants to reclaim his legacy.

That’s been the thrust of the former mayor’s campaign to take back the office he lost in 2017 — that his successor, Randall Woodfin, has “squandered and wasted” the progress made during Bell’s nearly eight-year administration.

“Four years of ineptitude and mismanagement has our city hurting and adrift,” Bell said in a video announcing his candidacy. “The stakes are just too high for our current mayor to learn on the job. He’s in over his head and it shows.”

Birmingham, he’s argued, “needs an experienced hand to get us back on track” — and the 72-year-old Bell, who has been entrenched in Jefferson County politics since the late 1970s, believes he is just the stabilizing force to “build Birmingham back better.”

“Show People Your Heart”

Bell often highlights his relationship with former President Barack Obama, which yielded, among other things, a 2017 designation of the city’s civil rights district as a national monument and a 2014 trip to France as part of Obama’s D-Day anniversary delegation.

Bell’s approach to Birmingham’s steadily growing homicide rate features shades of Obama’s unofficial “consoler-in-chief” moniker, with an emphasis on showing concern for victims of gun violence and their families.

“You set the example for everyone else,” said Bell during a July 26 livestream, one of several he’s hosted in the lead-up to the election. “That’s what a mayor’s supposed to do. When I was the mayor the last term, anytime there was a homicide, I showed up, and I wasn’t afraid to speak out about the violence in our community. And when you show people your heart, when you show people that you care, it changes the hearts and minds of other people, and that’s what we’ve got to do.”

Bell has argued that, while policing is important, officials should place more focus on upstream solutions to crime such as community policing, “when you have police officers in the community, understanding the needs of the community and working with the needs of citizens in those areas.”

Woodfin’s budgetary policy, Bell says, has instead been an upstream cause of violence in the city — particularly, he says, post-COVID budget cuts to the city’s libraries and recreation centers, which left many youths without constructive after-school outlets.

“When they laid all those people off, that shut down our parks … . It hurt us out in the streets,” he said. “That’s why we’ve got all this crime out here.”

He’s expressed similar concerns over Woodfin’s cuts to Birmingham City Schools’ budget, which he says “didn’t make sense.” Since 2019, Woodfin has redirected $2 million previously earmarked for city schools to his Birmingham Promise initiative, a public-private partnership providing BCS juniors and seniors with apprenticeships, dual enrollment opportunities and scholarships to public colleges and universities in the state.

Bell has been openly critical of the Birmingham Promise, arguing that the scholarship program’s “last-dollar” approach — which means that students must first exhaust all other public aid options — “puts the burden on the student.” Bell has promised to “restore funding” to the school system, allocating those resources to after-school programs and early education.

Neighborhood Revitalization

Bell also has targeted Woodfin’s neighborhood revitalization efforts, arguing that the current mayor is not removing blight or addressing other neighborhood issues quickly enough.

In one livestream, Bell criticized a perceived lack of response from Woodfin’s office regarding flooding in a District 7 neighborhood; he’s also argued that Woodfin’s approach to neighborhood revitalization has focused too much on the built environment and not enough on the “social structure” of the city.

There’s also the matter of the Birmingham Land Bank Authority, an organization launched in 2014 to claim and clear title of abandoned properties as part of Bell’s “Rise Birmingham” initiative. Bell has argued that Woodfin’s “profit-motivated” approach has “defeated the purpose by which the Land Bank was originally brought about,” which was to deed abandoned lots over to neighboring homeowners.

Bell also has called for a return to the Birmingham Community Framework Plans, a survey-based initiative he started that gathered and shaped community needs into long-term strategies. While Woodfin has publicly lamented his inability to convince national grocery chains to establish new stores in some of Birmingham’s impoverished food deserts, Bell has argued that the framework plan, if implemented, would solve this problem.

“You look for ways to entice companies like Publix or some of the other major food chains to come into an area, and you put your best foot forward, and you can get them there,” he said. “Working together through a comprehensive plan, we can show them the direction that a particular community is going in, and then they become willing to invest in the community themselves.”

The Outlook

Bell faces an uphill battle in this month’s election. As an incumbent in 2017, he lost to Woodfin in a runoff election by nearly 20 points — 41.05% to Woodfin’s 58.95%. Some polls this year have shown him trailing even more significantly behind Woodfin and Jefferson County Commissioner Lashunda Scales, who is also seeking the mayoral seat. As a long-established politician, one pollster told the Alabama Political Reporter, Bell is unlikely to find new support in the city.

“Simply put, there is nowhere for him to go in terms of increasing his numbers,” the pollster said.

in fact, he’s lost some significant support, too, even from his old administration. Bell’s former chief of operations, Jarvis Patton, donated $250 to Woodfin’s campaign in February.

Still, Bell believes that enough Birmingham residents are dissatisfied with the direction of the city to want a return to the pre-2017 era.

“I’ve heard from every corner of this city, from Huffman to Ensley, from North Birmingham to Highland Avenue, that we need change,” he said in the video announcing his campaign. “I refuse to sit by while our city’s resources and potential are squandered by mismanagement, ineptitude and inexperience. … I believe in hope. I believe in striving for a better city, and I’m saying right here and right now that we can do better. We can make our city safer. We can get our budget under control and make investments in our neighborhoods. I know, because I’ve been part of those achievements … . I’ve seen what we’re able to do in Birmingham if we’re willing to do the work.”