A woman stepped outside to thank and hug Bessemer Mayor Louise Alexander as a crew filled a refuse truck with heavy tree limbs that sat on the side of her home on Hall Avenue early Thursday.
This week was the first of the city’s 90-day cleaning blitz which the new mayor declared shortly after taking office.
“We’re going to do one district at a time,” Alexander said. “In the next 90 days, all the debris should be up here in the city of Bessemer. Then we’ll start the next phase with the litter crew going around making sure the street is clean with the sweepers.”
Alexander, who took office Oct. 7, campaigned largely on a platform of addressing neighborhood needs, including tackling longstanding blight.
After leaving Hall Avenue, Alexander and a crew from the city’s Department of Public Improvement headed to an illegal dumping ground where sofas, chairs and a dresser covered the area just across the street from homes.
A homeowner there invited the city to use his driveway to park their vehicles.
“This city will look very, very good in 90 days or less,” said William Lewis, assistant director of public improvement.
“We got our aces in their places. The mayor and staff are giving us the green light to do what we need to do. We’re putting extra trucks out and we’re just getting it done.”
Alexander’s clean-up initiative is reminiscent of one nearly 20 years ago in Birmingham when then-newly elected Mayor Larry Langford launched his “23-in-23” initiative to attack litter and blight in the city’s 23 communities in 23 days in 2008.
Birmingham’s former cleanup program concentrated an army of city workers into one neighborhood each day.
Like Alexander, Langford defeated an incumbent mayor by successfully campaigning on a platform largely focused on neighborhood issues.
Alexender said residents during her campaign expressed a common theme and request.
“They were speaking on behalf of themselves and their community that, ‘We understand things coming downtown Bessemer, we understand things coming on outskirts of Bessemer, but what about our communities?”’ she recalled. “’We can’t sit on our front porch and look out without looking at debris. We can’t sit on our front porch and drink our coffee without smelling debris.’”
Alexander said the 90-day blitz is the administration’s first response.
“I told them that’s going to be my first priority, cleaning up the communities,” she said. “And that’s what I plan on doing. And we have started that.”
