Kincaid didn't mean to be a killjoy. He just wanted to take control of several city contracts that stood to be paid in the interim period before he officially assumed office.
The authority over city contracts, it seems, is at the heart of a fractious and noisy spectacle that has paralyzed government in Alabama's largest city in recent months. In laying out the welcome mat, his former colleagues on the city council limited the scope of mayoral powers by approving two new ordinances requiring council approval for contracts that exceed $10,000 and before hiring outside lawyers and consultants.
Kincaid vetoed the measures, claiming that the council had overstepped its role. When it voted unanimously to override him, Kincaid took his grievance to court, where a local judge ordered the two adversaries into mediation.
Anyone who expected the court-mandated negotiations to heal the rift underestimated the level of acrimony. Council members failed to appear at the meeting. Instead, they sent their lawyers. Kincaid, for his part, refused to negotiate with the emissaries.
The irony of the current stalemate is hard to miss. The idea of greater oversight of mayoral contracts is a close approximation of the themes that carried Kincaid to his upset victory last year. In his two years on the city council, Kincaid was a frequent critic of former Mayor Richard Arrington's freewheeling administration and a forceful advocate for increased accountability.
The city council majority, on the other hand, has until recently shown little interest in reining in the executive branch. In Birmingham, where Arrington has ranked as City Hall's undisputed and unfettered master since 1979, the notion of controlling the mayor's ability to distribute contracts is one that appears only in the pages of political science textbooks.
To conclude that the nine-member council is suddenly gripped by the reform impulse is to miss the new calculus of Birmingham politics. Arrington's departure has left a power vacuum and both the new mayor and the city council--led by veteran Council President William Bell, who unsuccessfully challenged Kincaid for the city's highest office-- are vying to fill it. "They are not going to have a very good relationship. Kincaid may be faced with a 9-0 majority against him," says Steven Daniels, a professor of government at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "He has no obvious allies on the city council right now, so that will make his term very difficult."
At the moment, Kincaid faces hostility on two fronts. A majority on the council is at odds with him largely because his long-shot victory over Bell came at the expense of Arrington's once-dominant political machine, known as the Jefferson County Citizens Coalition. Arrington even retired from office three months early to allow Bell, the coalition's endorsed candidate, to serve as interim mayor and to confer on him the advantages of incumbency. After the election, Bell returned to his post as council president.
The coalition's allies aren't the only ones tying Kincaid's hands. Council members who advocated restrictions on Arrington want to make sure no future mayor enjoys the same latitude that he did. They argue that Kincaid's change of office is leading him to change his tune.
Kincaid won a small victory in January when the council affirmed the mayor's spending power in the event of an emergency. But with both sides insisting that the other is resistant to compromise, no matter how the court decides the contracts question it seems certain that this unseemly municipal saga will last at least until the next round of council elections in 2001.
"This really is a recipe for gridlock for the rest of Kincaid's term," says Daniels. "The city council may be cutting off the nose to spite the face."
