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Stop Treating City Hall Like an ATM
By Teasha Cable
Your city doesn't hand out money. Here's what it owes you instead.
Stop Treating City Hall Like an ATM
Most conversations about economic development start with the big win: the corporate headquarters relocation, the factory groundbreaking, the ribbon cutting with the governor in attendance.
Dorothy George spends her days somewhere else entirely.
She's in the neighborhoods, coffee shops, and storefronts where the other 99% of American business e.g. small business, activity actually happens.
Dot is the Small Business Relationship Coordinator for the [City of Birmingham's Department of Innovation and Economic Opportunity](https://www.birminghamal.gov/government/city-departments/department-innovation-economic-opportunity), working specifically through the City of Birmingham: Office of Business Diversity & Opportunity.
After four years on the job, Dot meets between 800 and 1,000 small businesses a year. She starts her day by driving into the neighborhood...not at a desk. Her knowledge challenges some basic assumptions about what cities owe the entrepreneurs who depend on them, and what they should expect in return.
A City is Not a Bank
If Dot has a rally cry, it's this:
Your city is not a bank.
Business owners often expect the city to provide capital, write their business plans, or otherwise function as a one-stop shop for everything a growing business needs. It doesn't work that way, and pretending otherwise sets small businesses up for disappointment.
What a city can do is focus almost exclusively on policy.
That means making it easier to get a business license, making sure ordinances reflect how businesses actually operate day to day, and getting land use decisions right so that space exists for businesses to grow into.
Given that small businesses, defined by the SBA as those with 500 employees or fewer, generate the bulk of Birmingham's tax base, getting this right isn't optional. It's the foundation the city's own budget depends on.
Borrowing a Tech Mindset for a Community Program In a previous life, Dot managed a $1.2 million software initiative for Alabama DOT, coordinating engineers, designers, and transit directors through a shift from rigid, phase-by-phase waterfall planning to agile, iterative development.
Agile" being the key word here.
Dot brought that same mindset back to city government, and it shows most clearly in their Coffee & Convo events, the office's recurring outreach series that takes government conversations out of City Hall and into the community.
The first year, attendance was sparse. Some sessions had just Dot, a colleague, and the host business. She considered scrapping it. But instead, she decided to treat each session like a sprint: adjust, try again, adjust again.
By the third year, the series drew as many as 126 attendees in a single month, and a themed session pairing Innovation Depot's tech community with Main Street business owners pulled an even 50/50 split of 44 attendees, deliberately designed to reflect Birmingham's full business community rather than one slice of it.
Why Regionalism Beats Going it Alone
The biggest obstacle to getting any of this to work at scale: ego.
Nonprofits and economic development organizations compete for the same grants and the same recognition, which makes it genuinely hard to get everyone rowing in the same direction.
Everybody in this ecosystem is fighting for the same thing, whether they admit it or not. Our small businesses live or die together. That logic extends past city limits.
Birmingham sits inside a metro area that includes Bessemer, Hoover, Vestavia, Mountain Brook, and more, all connected by the same highways and, increasingly, the same economic fate. Bessemer has site-ready industrial land Birmingham doesn't. Birmingham has density and infrastructure Bessemer doesn't.
Competing with peer regions like Nashville, Atlanta, or Charlotte means the Jefferson County metro has to function more like a single ecosystem than a set of rival municipalities. Balancing Data with the Person Behind It
Data is important, but the person being served by that data is more important, and you still need the data to make the right decision for that person. Neither side of that equation works alone.
She points to Birmingham's own economic history as proof of why that balance matters over the long run. The city wasn't prepared when the iron industry left, and it took years for the medical sector to grow into the gap that left behind.
A long-range plan built purely on the data available today, without checking back in every few years, can miss exactly the kind of shift that reshapes a region's entire economy.
The reverse is also true: caring about people without tracking outcomes makes it impossible to know whether programs like Coffee and Convo are actually reaching the businesses that need them most.
My Learnings
None of this works without naming what's actually available.
Dot rattled off a long list of resources during the conversation, from the Birmingham Business Alliance and Innovation Depot, to REV Birmingham and the Entrepreneurial Center for Excellence, as well as a directory built specifically so business owners can find the right organization without going on the veritable wild goose chase. Time is money.
Dot's instinct, to keep pointing people toward the next resource rather than trying to be the only resource, runs through everything Dot focuses on. For any city or economic development organization trying to define its own role, that's a useful place to start:
Define the policy lane clearly Borrow discipline from wherever it works best Keep the data honest
And remember—a region only grows if everyone in it actually grows together.
Want to see the data behind Birmingham's small business ecosystem for yourself?
Download the 2026 State of Small Business report at magiccityinsights.com.