Night Life in Montgomery

From time to time, I wonder why I don’t go out more in Montgomery. I have lived in a fair number of large cities and have visited countless others. I like going out to bars and clubs. Sometimes I like to go hear live hip-hop. Sometimes I like to go hear electronic music and go dancing. I like good beers, whether in upscale joints or places with sawdust on the floor. Other times, I prefer a more lounge sort of environment, with couches and tasty mixed drinks, maybe a pool table or some darts. Why don’t I go out more?

Then I read articles like this one in the Montgomery Advertiser, and I remember that I’m not in New York or Austin. I’m not even in Tuscaloosa, which has some problems with the police and some anti-drinking forces within the university but by-and-large tries to accommodate the young people and nightlife crowd with a variety of bars and live music venues.

No, Montgomery is no Tuscaloosa. Here, bars and clubs are the enemy (unless, of course, you are talking about The Alley and the Entire Future of Downtown Redevelopment). To most who live in this area, Montgomery must be fled by sundown. For those who stay behind, you’ve got what is discussed in The Advertiser’s article: a police-state crackdown with SWAT raids on local businesses. As if I needed another reason to be glad I’m not a student at Alabama State.

Let’s take a look at the article, from Feb. 10 by Scott Johnson. Headline: “City Uses Raid-Style Inspections on Nightclubs.” Well, that’s fantastic PR right there. Really just what you want to see when you are thinking about holding a convention in Montgomery or going out for a night of dancing. The thing is, the Chamber of Commerce types who that ought to bother are probably more mad at the newspaper for reporting the truth than they are at the police for turning local clubs into Gestapo Night.

So what’s behind the use of armed SWAT raids at local clubs (some of which have no history of violence)? According to the article, “through the years,” there have been shootings at some nightclubs. How many shootings? How many years? It takes some hashing through the article to discover.

From a careful read of the piece, we learn that one club was shut down by the city: Top Flight Disco … in 1997!

And another club, Celebrations, closed on its own in 2007 after some controversy.

Oh no! Two clubs closed in the past 13 years! Horror! Call in the SWAT team!

I’m frankly surprised they were able to get the owner of Rock Bottom American Pub to go on the record as complaining about the raids. Even money says that club gets the door kicked in just to make sure the liquor licenses are up to date. Oh wait, Rock Bottom already was raided, along with six other nightclubs on Jan. 16 and nine more the night before that. Fifteen clubs in two nights!

Maj. Huey Thornton, a police spokesman, said the SWAT team was necessary for the safety of the inspectors.

“These officers have specialized training in dealing with situations where there may be large crowds,” Thornton said. “We don’t want to send our officers — or any city or state em ployees — into any situation without providing them the safety and security to accomplish their mission.”

Damn, maybe that’s the kind of important crime fighting lesson we missed at the Crime Expo.

Three places were shut down for over-crowding — Frontstreet Entertainment, Magic Nights Club, and Club Rewind. For how long were they shuttered? Oh, for a whopping 16 hours, although the court has the option of suspending their business license for 10 days.

Frontstreet Entertainment was certainly a likely target of the raids. Montgomery residents will remember that there was a shooting there on Christmas night, injuring two teenagers. Horror. Freakout. Teens not old enough to drink were at a nightclub. Shooting. Christmas.

And yet while the article says the Frontstreet shooting “prompted” the city to take action, the quote from Mayor Todd Strange calls the raids “a proactive approach.” Either the article is wrong and the Frontstreet incident had nothing to do with MPD’s raids, or the mayor doesn’t know the difference between “proactive” and “reactive.”

But sure, we get the point. He’s explaining why the cops are raiding the clubs where there is no history of violence. They’re showing up with guns to prevent violence from happening. That makes tons of sense. Send ‘em a message!

Oh, but also, buried in the story was the fact that there was also a fatal shooting at something called Club O’s back in January. Club O’s then shut its own doors. So let’s recap the rationale for the raids:

1. Top Flight Disco was shut down 13 years ago.

2. Celebrations closed itself amid controversy three years ago.

3. Two teens were shot (but not killed) at Frontstreet Entertainment in December.

4. Two people were killed at Club O’s in January (and then Club O’s closed down).

Holy crap! Let’s nuke the Alley Bar! I might have seen a Huntington student use a fake ID to get into Bud’s and order a margarita at El Rey’s! Let’s burn something down!

And if you like to shoot pool at Deja Vu, just keep in mind that your money is going into the pockets of an owner who makes apologies for the cops.

“I appreciate it as a business owner that they are coming out and making sure things are run right, but just make sure it’s fair across the board,” said Lithia Barber, owner of Déjà vu Billiards.

Barber, who said the raid was “kind of scary,” wondered why inspectors targeted her Burbank Drive business and overlooked other nearby nightclubs.

The SWAT team members came into the club wearing masks and carrying rifles, locking the door behind them, Barber said.

Oh, just masks and rifles? Well, I guess they have to “make sure everything is run right.” Hard to imagine they can do that with just masks and rifles and not actively kicking every patron of your establishment in the face, followed by cavity searches.

While Barber questioned the use of the SWAT team, she did say she supports the inspections and would welcome more of them.

The inspection only took 20 to 30 minutes and was not that much of a disruption, she said.

“We ended up having a really good night that night,” she said.

Presumably, by “we,” she means her cash registers still turned a profit, and doesn’t mean that her customers “had a really good night” as armed cops with masks locked the door behind them and searched through everything. Hey, what’s 20 or 30 minutes when you’re a paying customer looking to shoot some pool with friends?

The article goes on to say that our Mayor has promised to “keep conducting the surprise inspections for as long as they are necessary.” Oh. OK. Since they were so necessary before.

“We will continue doing them and probably be pretty aggressive until the message gets out there,” he said.

And what is that message? For me, it’s a good reminder of why I don’t go out and spend money in my hometown.

Montgomery: Recycling disaster

It’s been about six weeks since Mayor Todd Strange, ever mindful of ecomomics, stopped the city’s curbside recycling program. We (and our large group of friends) were quite saddened by this news. Even though we had our share of issues getting our hands on the official municipal orange recycling bags, we do recycle a lot, even collecting glass (which Montgomery never recycled … at least as long as we’ve lived here) and sending it to another nearby (more progressive) city for reprocessing.

So, we were prepared to be vehemently opposed to the end of curbside recycling, but instead were surprised to find ourselves somewhat lukewarm on the issue. Only a third of Montgomery households participated in the program. And we can vouch for the flexible definition of “participate” – while we regularly put out at least one full orange bag every week, other houses appeared to put out a bag with a few items in it every two weeks. Even if you are a strong believer in recycling, it’s hard to justify the fossil fuel use for trucks cruising up and down streets for the weekly recycling pickup when results are so meager.

It gets worse – turned out that city was using the McInnis Recycling Center (a business effort of the Montgomery Association for Retarded Citizens) to process the materials. That facility could only handle about a quarter of what it got through curbside pickup. The remainder was either sent to the Elmore County recycling program or to the landfill. Only 1% of the city’s waste was getting recycled.

Eliminating this massively ineffective recycling program saved the city $400,000 per year (so we were told by the local newspaper). The City was bleeding money, facing an $8 million budget shortfall and burning through the entirety of municipal reserves. In this fiscal crisis, with the city taking a bath on any number of budget items including the terrible Bobby Bright legacy lunch trolley (which was losing $75,000 per year), we found ourselves agreeing with reduced pickup. Or even eliminated pickup. The Mayor said that the city was moving toward drop-off sites that would be open twice a month on Saturday. Probably this reduced recycling input (conceding that ending curbside pickup would lead to decreased participation) would mean that all the recycling at least, you know, got recycled. Maybe the city should have thought about the capacity limitations of Montgomery’s retarded people before they set up the recycling program. We’re not saying those people shouldn’t have jobs (obviously), but if the McInnis facility can’t handle being the sole site of Montgomery’s recycling program, they shouldn’t be handed a job bigger than they can do.

In any case, we were less motivated to show up and complain about the end of curbside recycling once we found out how wretched the existing program was. That’s when Mayor Strange hit us with the one-two punch of his proposed alternatives.

• Option One: Sort All The Trash. The Mayor was talking for a while about a program like the one being set up in Baldwin County by Team Green Recycling. TGR is a private company building a plant to take in all of Baldwin County’s trash, unsorted, and sort it before it goes to the landfill. They make money by selling the recyclables, and the city makes money by reducing landfill costs. Turns out it’s not cheap for cities to handle solid waste, and it makes financial sense for cities to reduce their trash output (though landfill fees are still inordinately cheap, especially in communities without an interest in forcing “true pricing,” taking pay-later externalities into account). In any case, this approach seemed credible and reasonable, having been tried before in other similar communities. But we haven’t heard much about it since October, and maybe that’s because TGR’s money is all tied up getting the Baldwin County project off the ground, so they’re not ready to invest up here.
• Option Two: The Plasma Plant. A “plasma plant?” Sounds like some of that geoengineering crap that people float to avoid having to deal with the pressing need to actually reduce consumption and carbon emissions. Without knowing anything at all about how this works, we can only say for sure that the city’s has recently agreed to do a one-year “feasibility study,” after which we may build a plant which may be ready in three years.The idea of these things is that they use very high temperatures on the solid waste, recyclables and all. No special curbside pickup. No sorting. No consumer effort at all. Organic stuff vaporizes and makes steam to run a turbine, so gasification plants are supposed to generate power to sell back to the grid. Other stuff that doesn’t “gasify” ends up being reduced into “slag,” which industry sites assure us can be used for many purposes, including building blocks and roads. The plants don’t produce ash. One of the major problems is that no municipality in the US has a running plasma plant now. The first one, in Florida, is expected to be running by 2011. There is a plant in Huntsville that uses plasma technology, but it’s basically just an incinerator and produces ash. And we have no information on what this means as far as air emissions when you go around and burn up an entire city’s worth of milk jugs and disposable diapers and glass jars and old cell phones and batteries and all the other shit that people put into their trash cans.

The Mayor said he’d get back to us on these options. The City Council said fine. Then we received this flyer in the mail informing us of the recycling drop-off locations, and including the fine print that plastic would no longer be recycled by the city. Only paper and cardboard and aluminum. This seemed like some kind of sick joke. Recycle two days a month, paper and cardboard and aluminum only. Plus, it turned out that at least one of the schools had Saturday school, causing some unpleasantness (or at least jockeying for parking) between the school attendees’ parents and local recycling aficionados.

All of which has left us with a number of questions. Such as:

1. If the city is so super broke, how are we going to afford cutting-edge plasma technology that NO OTHER CITY IN THE UNITED STATES HAS?

2. What are we going to do if the feasibility study comes back in one year and indicates that a plasma plant isn’t an ideal solution? What if they cost more than we expect, or don’t work? Or they leave poison in the ground where they are built? Or emit lots of air pollution? Or blow up regularly, killing all the workers who work there?

3. What are we going to do in the meantime? Fill our landfills with glass and plastic simply because the City of Montgomery can’t seem to set up a recycling system like the one in Troy, Alabama, population 12,000 or so? A tiny town 45 minutes to the south of us has figured out how to do curbside recycling of glass, metal, paper, cardboard, and plastic, and not bleed money and go bankrupt? What’s our problem up here?

4. Can’t we just stop our absurd twice-a-week trash pickup and do a single day of the week to pick up trash and a single day of the week to pick up recycling? And start doing glass? And plastic? And somehow not exclusively rely on McInnis to sort it all? And maybe even find a way to sell the recycled goods on the private market and make it into a revenue stream for the city? Or if not, just declare that this is a service (like free parks, for example) that makes our city worth living in and it’s worth it to lose money on since it makes our city a more attractive place to live?

The Edge of Our Seats: Montgomery Mayoral Race 2009

We consider ourselves fairly plugged in folks, politically. We have a strong sense of what’s happening at the legislature here in Alabama. We follow national politics a lot more closely than your average citizen. But we really have virtually no idea what is going on in the Montgomery mayoral race.

As we have noted, Bobby Bright (our former mayor) went to Congress to become the most right-wing Democrat in the country. He voted against health care for children and an equal pay act for women named after a woman from his home state. He voted against the stimulus. Hey Bobby, real nice job up there in D.C.

So to fill Bright’s shoes as the Mayor of Montgomery, we have a free for all. Six candidates. The election is in a few days. The campaigning has been going on for quite some time now, but we still know virtually nothing about many of the candidates. Here’s our take so far:

Todd Strange — Far and away the front runner. He immediately saturated the airwaves with super-expensive commercials and his signs are the biggest and are all over town. He’s a former car dealer who has spent most of his political time on the county commission. He’s a Republican (although the Mayoral race is technically non-partisan). He comes off the most like a professional politician. He seems certain to at least force a runoff, if not win outright. We got a letter from super rich and sorta liberal superstar plaintiff’s trial lawyer Jere Beasley telling us to vote for Strange. Strange says his number one priority will be economic development, which, for all we know, means sprawl, continued neglect of poor areas of town, and tax breaks for corporations. Or maybe not. Who knows? The paucity of details on his website allows you to fill in your own hopes for Strange’s policies.

Michael Briddell — He was Bobby Bright’s right hand man. (Couldn’t he have come up with a better job title on his website than “executive assistant”?) Word is that Bright has officially endorsed Briddell and wants him to win, but we certainly haven’t seen any evidence of that (co-campaigning, mailings, etc.). Word also says that all of Bright’s campaign people (the ones who helped Bright defeat state rep and former Subway sandwich store owner Jay Love for the Congressional seat) actually went to work for Strange, leaving Briddell with a depleted campaign team. That would make sense because we haven’t seen much out of Briddell at all. He’s a former TV “journalist,” so why haven’t we seen him on TV more? What stories did he break as a journalist? What are his plans for encouraging re-investment in abandoned areas of town? Who knows?

Willie Cook — Mr. Cook has some name recognition because he’s on the City Council. Also because he had a bunch of people waving his signs at a few intersections around town yesterday when we went to the grocery store. He’s also somewhat known because the Montgomery Advertiser has reported that Cook was fired from his position as an Alabama State Trooper in 1986 because he solicited sex from women in exchange for not giving them a speeding ticket. Evidently, there was also some kind of incident back in 1997 when he was suspended from his job as a capitol police officer for something involving damage to private property.

Cook also made headlines when he declared this his economic plan for saving the City of Montgomery was to have the city get into the business of predatory lending: offering high-interest refund anticipation loans (RAL) to taxpayers. This at the same time that there’s a bill in the statehouse to increase regulations on the notorious RAL products. Finally, Cook is notable due to his lawn signs being a shamelessly transparent attempt to piggyback on support for Obama: “Yes We Can 2!!”He also has a picture of himself standing in front of a disembodied Obama on his awful website.

Jay King — This police officer has been pretty much invisible as far as we can tell. Sure, Kate did talk to him on the TV show, but we have seen a grand total of one yard sign for this guy and we haven’t seen anything about him that makes us want to learn more.

Scott Simmons — Some people think Simmons may have a shot. He does have some signs around town. That’s about all we know about him. It certainly can’t be a good omen when the front page headline about you in the newspaper a few days before the race is to herald the fact that you are, in fact, not dropping out of the race. Still, if you want to feel extremely uncomfortable, click here and watch his wife sit there and talk about their relationship while wearing a not-even-pretending-to-be-populist fur coat and pearl necklace over a hilarious and sappy soundtrack. Yeah, good luck appealing to Montgomery voters with that one. On the plus side, she does explain to voters about how her damaged ovaries produced babies even after the doctors said that they couldn’t.

Jon Dow — He has slightly more signs than King, but is the least-known candidate for us. We know absolutely nothing about him (although we know someone who’s going to vote for him). Even reading his biography on his website really tells us nothing. Sure, we’ve heard of the Central Alabama Community Foundation, and we’re fans of BONDS, but it’s hard to tell how that stuff would qualify him to be mayor. He does say that he wants to eliminate Montgomery’s grocery tax and work with state advocates to eliminate the state grocery tax. That may be good enough to win Kate’s vote! At six letters, he has the shortest name of all of the candidates.

The Montgomery Advertiser has a pretty weak page devoted to the mayoral race here. As we said, we think of ourselves as reasonably well informed when it comes to politics, and yet before we started looking at websites for this post, we couldn’t articulate a single policy difference between any of the candidates (other than the laughable RAL thing from Cook). And that’s a shame. How many Montgomery residents are even going to bother to look up differences between candidates in the most superficial way?