A Birmingham Olympics?

NY Times:

In his first year as Birmingham’s mayor, Larry P. Langford has proposed a $500 million domed stadium, a $125 million law enforcement complex and a $33 million trolley car network.

But those ideas were dwarfed by Mr. Langford’s proclamation this month: He wants the Olympics.

“Why shouldn’t Birmingham host the Olympics in 2020?” Mr. Langford, 60, asked in an interview at City Hall, smiling coyly and puffing a menthol cigarette.

With 230,000 people, Birmingham is far smaller than most of the cities that have played host to the Summer Olympics. It lacks sufficient hotel space, transportation options and athletic facilities, as the mayor concedes. And Atlanta, the last American city to host the Summer Games, in 1996, is only 145 miles away.

No matter, Mr. Langford said. “Our city has allowed the world to tell us for too long that we’re ‘less than’ and ‘too small,’ and we’ve bought into it,” he said. “We need to start thinking big.”

The mayor proposed constructing roadways, hotels and athletic facilities and spreading Olympic events throughout Alabama and into neighboring states.

The response has alternated between laughter and frustration. Roads are deteriorating in the city. The murder rate is rising. And the county that Birmingham is part of, Jefferson, where Mr. Langford was the president of the County Commission until 2007, is on the brink of what could be the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.

...


Langford may think big but he is not very smart. Jefferson County is on the brink of bankruptcy because it decided to turn the county finances into a hedge fund that bet on the wrong side of the market and sent its debt obligations into a death spiral.

He appears ready to do for the city what he did for the country. Admitedly, he had a lot of help screwing up the county finances, but his track record suggest he is still in over his head at best.

The Olympics are a challenge for cities 20 times the size of Brimingham. The city needs to find a way to pull itself out of the hole, not dig it deeper.

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