Chris and Helen Furger found their paradise seven years ago. They bought a cottage at the end of Plantation Road, an unpaved, leafy lane in the unincorporated Theodore community of southern Mobile County. Beyond their one-acre lot stretched a large tract of woods crowned with massive oaks. Raccoons, birds and other wildlife thrived in that sanctuary.

   Chris worked nights as a machinist and shop foreman at Teledyne Continental, the aircraft engine plant. In his spare time, he remodeled their home, adding a sun porch as a Christmas surprise for Helen, who suffers from a disabling back injury.

   "It used to be so pretty down here," Chris says.

   That is, before workers showed up one morning around 9 o'clock looking for boundary markers. Chris showed them where his property line was.

   About two weeks later, he says, bulldozers arrived without warning and began pushing over trees behind his house. Big trucks rumbled back and forth to haul away the debris. The Furgers grabbed their video camera, and images of devastation filled the viewfinder.

   Next came dump trucks, scattering dust as they hauled dirt for construction. Helen remembers watching them from her sun porch and crying softly. Chris says he fumed. Paradise was gone.

   The developer laid out an industrial park on the 93-acre tract behind the Furgers' house. He used the once-quiet lane for access, along with another unpaved road that served an adjacent neighborhood.

   As the work that began in spring 1999 continues, the developer will connect the two access roads with an extension so traffic can reach the industrial lots by going through either neighborhood. Altogether, the developer envisions 24 businesses in the park.

   The land falls under Mobile County's jurisdiction, but county officials can do little to help the Furgers. In fact, the county has so few legal ways to prevent such encroachment that it doesn't even employ a planner.

   "It just seems never-ending to us now," says Chris, gazing across his yard to his new neighbor, a company that markets newspaper racks. He had hoped for at least a buffer of planted trees. Instead, he got a stark, 6-foot-tall privacy fence.

   Local officials confide that they expect to see the people living around the development squeezed out, as noise and commotion intensify. Many of the older residents may have difficulty replacing their modest homes. For them, unplanned growth is a devouring beast from which there is no protection.

   Planners for the city of Mobile insist that a similar incident would never have happened within their boundaries. That's because cities have zoning and other planning tools. But step across the line into unincorporated Mobile County, and it might as well be the Wild West for property owners.

   Near a busy intersection at Tillman's Corner immediately south of Mobile, for example, you'll see a strip joint, a fireworks stand and some cheaply built apartments. Runoff from a commercial parking lot has tormented an adjoining subdivision. But county officials can't straighten out this hodgepodge. They can't even require minimum building distances from the road.

   Indeed, Alabama is the only Southeastern state that denies its counties the authority to plan for wise land use. Why? The antiquated 1901 Alabama constitution has no provisions for sensible local government.

   An industry can move in next door to a home, bringing noise and foul odors. An auto junkyard can set up shop in the neighborhood, hauling in rusting hulks. Or a pasture or pine tree farm across the highway suddenly can sprout a rural slum, if newcomers string old trailers along a dirt rut more suitable for goats.

   Naturally, victims of such calamities usually run to their county commissioners, demanding relief, only to learn the hard truth: In Alabama, county government is little more than an afterthought. Only the Legislature in Montgomery can write local laws for unincorporated areas; even then, action may require two or three years.

   In practical terms, this county law-making is done by each county's legislative delegation. It doesn't matter that some of the delegation members may live in an adjacent county, far from the immediate problems. Nor does it matter that a single senator in the delegation can veto any proposal under "local courtesy," a rule that might better be described as despotism.

   An example of what's wrong with this indirect way of writing local laws is Mobile County's long struggle to ban dirt roads in private subdivisions. Such roads are often built to shoddy standards, and the county fears that taxpayers will be stuck eventually with fixing them. Still, legislators have insisted on loopholes that allow more dirt-road construction - in fact, the lawmakers have forbidden the county from outlawing such projects.

   In a recent 12-month period, developers have built 68 substandard or dirt roads for 41 private subdivisions scattered around the county. They take their profits and move on, leaving the residents, often living in mobile homes, to cope with grading, drainage and other future repairs. A single mile of road can cost $500,000 to fix.

   The county can't require developers even to help pay for sewer service as it becomes available. Cities long ago acquired this assessment power as a way to ensure orderly, efficient growth. But the county often has to skip large areas as it tries to extend lines. The result is chaotic and costly sprawl.

   Back in 1901, a small group of progressives at the convention that wrote the state's present constitution tried to give counties "home rule" - the right of their officials to pass local laws. But the industrialists and planters who ran the convention left counties under the Legislature's heel. The practical effect is that special interests have a much easier time manipulating power that is centered in Montgomery rather than dispersed in 67 counties.

   Citizens across Alabama are paying heavily as a consequence. Consider, for example:

• The stench from corporate hog farms has spoiled country living for many residents in St. Clair and Pickens counties, spawned lawsuits and sparked fears statewide about contaminated groundwater.

• In Calhoun County - which lies between communications-industry giants Birmingham and Atlanta - cell towers have ignited controversy after invading even the residential areas of Anniston.

• In Tuscaloosa County, home of Mercedes and the University of Alabama, pollution threatens a future source of drinking water - massive Lake Tuscaloosa - because the county commissioners can't zone to protect it.

   These and dozens of other cases have a common thread: The 1901 constitution leaves county governments powerless to cope with runaway growth and speculation. Legally, they are stuck in the mule-and-wagon era, while development roars ahead of the services and protections that citizens need.

   A poll last year by the Mobile Register found that local respondents, by 52 percent to 34 percent, wanted county officials to be good stewards and to plan for growth. Most didn't want legislators dictating to their local leaders.

   Alas, reform cannot come quickly enough for the victims of the constitution's antiquated rules. People such as Chris and Helen Furger already have been hurt, and they have nowhere to go for help.

   Unless, that is, Alabamians finally demand what people in other states take for granted: effective local government. A new constitution can bring good planning home where it belongs.

Return to: Century of Shame, Introduction

Part 3: Blessed are the Privileged

Reprinted with Permission from the Mobile Register.