Johnson: Here’s Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin’s checklist for success for his 3rd term

This is an opinion column.

That grandmother on the porch. If you live in or around Birmingham, you probably know her. She’s Mayor Randall Woodfin’s go-to metaphor, has been since he took office eight years ago with a bold promise of a “new beginning” for Birmingham.

It was a “new beginning” for that grandmother, he said. That grandmother who saw an abandoned, deteriorating property to her left and an overgrown lot to her right. Who lamented the aged and empty playground across the street, feared traversing the cracked sidewalk in front of her home, and prayed that her grandchild would come home from school each day.

That grandmother who didn’t feel safe sitting on her porch after dark. Or too often at all.

“We all know that crime is a problem in our city,” Woodfin said in 2017, durin