Alabama League of Municipalities

The Alabama League of Municipalities is a membership organization established to promote the interests of municipal governments in the Alabama Legislature and elsewhere, and, later, to share information on good governance and compliance with legal and ethical responsibilities of local government officials.

The first attempt to organize representation for towns and cities was the Alabama Association of Mayors and City Commissioners, formed in 1926 at a meeting in Fairfield. With no revenues or permanent staff, the association was largely ineffective. The group adopted its present name in 1928. In 1935 the League won grant funding from the American Municipal Association to hire an executive director. At the recommendation of Governor Bibb Graves they offered the position to his former legislative liaison, Ed Reid.

Though only 25 at the time, Reid was an experienced legislative staffer and a former newspaper editor. He secured additional grant funding from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. Among the priorities for the League were lobbying for ways to secure stable public funding, a difficult challenge in context of the limits on home rule in the Alabama Constitution of 1901. Among the small victories for the League were a state law that made the Alabama Highway Department responsible for maintaining state and federal roads inside municipal boundaries.

In 1937 the Alabama League of Municipalities issued its first edition of the Alabama Municipal News, later renamed the Alabama Municipal Journal