By: Donald V. Watkins
Copyrighted and Published on November 24, 2024
An Editorial Opinion
In March 2018, the city of Birmingham, Alabama committed $90 million from its neighborhood improvement funds (over a 30-year period) to build a new downtown football stadium for The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s football program. The stadium opened in 2021 for Blazers football.
The stadium’s seating capacity was designed to discourage its use as a venue for the Magic City Classic between Alabama State and Alabama A&M Universities, which draws 60,000 patrons each year.
Starting in May 2018, the city of Birmingham, Alabama began to defund its police department. Over the next six years, the city’s 912 sworn officer force was cut in half.
Fast-Forward to 2024
Today, the UAB football team plays its home games in the new Protective Stadium. The games draw relatively small crowds to the 47,000-seat, $175 million stadium. Yesterday’s attendance for the UAB-Rice game was only 16,181.
Of course, the mayor and council members sit in a luxury skybox that was given to the city as a “thank you” gesture for its $90 million handout to stadium developers.
City officials sat in their skybox yesterday and watched UAB defeat Rice 40-14.
Meanwhile, most of the city’s 99 designated neighborhoods and communities are falling apart from urban rot and violent crime.
In May, Birmingham-Southern College could no longer cope with the deteriorating urban decay and skyrocketing homicides in the community surrounding its 192-acre campus and closed its doors permanently.
The Magic City Classic continues to be played in Legion Field, a 97-year-old football stadium that is so structurally flawed and unsafe from an engineering standpoint that only ASU and AAMU will play a football game in this deathtrap.
The defunding of the police department that started in 2018 guaranteed that Birmingham’s murder rate would skyrocket. Today, Birmingham is the “Murder Capital of the U.S.”
Who are the Winners and Losers?
By any objective measurement, the winners in this scenario are UAB, its football program, boosters and fans, and the city officials who watch UAB football games from the city’s luxury skybox.
The losers are Birmingham’s impoverished neighborhoods, city taxpayers, ASU and AAMU, Magic City Classic patrons, BSC, and the escalating number of homicide victims in Birmingham each year.
This is a tragic situation for city taxpayers who do not receive the seven basic city services they pay for each year with their tax dollars. Instead of getting a return on their investment of tax dollars, Birmingham taxpayers get royally screwed by their elected officials on a non-stop basis.