Chaos At The Council?

Things heated up on Tuesday at the Mobile City Council meeting. They argued about a more than one-thousand percent increase in taxpayer funding for this year's Gulf Coast Classic football game.

As the smoke was clearing from Tuesday's talk, council members talked to News 5's Tiffany Craig.

News 5's Tiffany Craig asked William Carroll, "Is our council racially divided? No, I mean you can see yesterday that before the council meeting was even over we called for a recess that this could be worked out. A lot of us have our own ideas on where money should fall into the budget. What's the most critical issues of the budget that need the most or better of the funding. So, its always an intense conversation."

Connie Hudson says this type of debate comes with the job. "You can't afford to carry forward grudges and hold grudges against people. That's not a productive way to function in office. If that was the case, I would probably have had to pack up and come home a long time ago. I think that sometimes the racism is brought into the debate because of trying to leverage influence an opinion on certain issues."

Clinton Johnson doesn't think there is any chaos on the council "I don't know if we said anything that hurt anybody, we simply spoke to the issues like everybody else did. So, I don't think anybody had a fight. Nobody called anybody a name. We stated a position and we stated it with passion."

Tiffany also talked to John Williams. "Do you consider what happened at council yesterday healthy debate? I consider that the result one that we all can go on from... peacefully work together. I think the depth that we went was unfortunate."

Click here to listen to bonus sound from Tuesday's city council meeting.