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Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato, left, and Hoover police Chief Nick Derzis speak at a mayoral election forum at Shades Crest Baptist Church on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025.
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People listen during a Hoover mayoral election forum at Shades Crest Baptist Church on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025.
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Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato participates in a mayoral election forum at Shades Crest Baptist Church in Hoover, Alabama, on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025.
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People assemble for a Hoover mayoral election forum at Shades Crest Baptist Church on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025.
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Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato, left, gives opening remarks at a mayoral election forum at Shades Crest Baptist Church on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025, as his challenger, Hoover police Chief Nick Derzis listens.
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Hoover police Chief Nick Derzis speaks at a mayoral election forum at Shades Crest Baptist Church on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
People assemble for a Hoover mayoral election forum at Shades Crest Baptist Church on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025.
Two men vying to be Hoover’s next mayor sat before a group of about 220 people in Bluff Park Thursday night and painted two different pictures of the sixth largest city in the state.
Hoover police Chief Nick Derzis told the crowd assembled at an election forum at Shades Crest Baptist Church that Hoover is a city with a strong history of being a leader, a standard bearer of excellence in city government and services and a place where people wanted to come shop.
But these days, it feels and looks tired, Derzis said. The Riverchase Galleria and Patton Creek shopping centers have many empty storefronts, and the Galleria no longer has the quality of stores most Hoover residents want, he said.
The mayor has a fractured relationship with the City Council, city financial practices were in a state that created an opportunity for fraud, and the mayor has been engaging in backroom deals and not delivering on promises for an arts center, Derzis said.
“If you put your trust in me, I promise you’ll get a mayor who works hard, and I’m not full of empty promises,” Derzis said.
Sitting a few feet away, current Mayor Frank Brocato described a Hoover that’s better off than it was nine years ago when he was first elected mayor.
The picture in his frame shows a city with crime rates that are their lowest in 16 years, a better relationship between city and school system officials, new tools to strengthen older neighborhoods and keep them from decaying, and shopping centers and business parks in the process of being revitalized with new stores and companies in the technology and health care industries.
Hoover more than 25 times in eight years has been named a top city in the nation in a number of categories by national publications and lists, including the No. 1 place to live in Alabama and 17th best place to live in America among small cities by U.S. News and World Report.
“Applause after applause — accolade after accolade,” Brocato said. “The facts don’t lie. You can believe this doom and gloom, but it’s not the truth.”
Brocato told the forum crowd that there has been a lot of negative talk in this year’s election season. “But I believe that the people of Hoover know the difference between noise and results,” the mayor said. “While others have been throwing stones, we’ve built a stronger, safer, more vibrant city, and we’ve done that together.”
In particular, the mayor and City Council have strengthened the Police Department by adding 33 police officers, building a $4 million training center, investing in state-of-the-art equipment and becoming among the small percentage of police departments in the nation that are accredited, Brocato said.
He and other city leaders have successfully revitalized empty office buildings in the U.S. 280 corridor, helped bring about the expansion of health and technology companies through financial incentives, negotiated deals to keep the SEC Baseball Tournament in Hoover, built a $90 million a year tourism industry, added property maintenance regulations to protect older neighborhoods, added miles of sidewalks and hundreds of acres or parkland, opened up recreational access to the Cahaba River and boosted the amount of revenue going to the Hoover school system, he said.
Through “Future Hoover” town hall meetings early in his administration, the city developed and adopted a comprehensive plan that provides guidance for the city’s growth in the years to come, he said.
RIVERCHASE GALLERIA
Derzis said the picture is not as rosy as the mayor likes to paint it. In particular, “the Galleria obviously to me is an eyesore,” he said. “No stores that most Hoover residents want to shop in,” except maybe Von Maur and Costco.
When asked what he would do to fill the vacant spots, Derzis said he’d get on a plane and head to Chicago to talk with the owners and try to give them incentives to turn the mall around.
Brocato said filling empty storefronts is not as simple as Derzis likes to make it. “With empty buildings, if we don’t own it, we don’t’ control it,” the mayor said. “There has to be a desire for the owners to actually do something.”
There are nine property owners on the Galleria campus, Brocato said. “It’s not just a one-stop shop solution,” he said.
The Galleria is not alone in its struggles with retail space as customers have shifted to more online shopping, Brocato said. “Online sales go up 16% every year,” he said. “We see it all across the state with other mayors telling us exactly what’s going on. We’re all telling pretty much the same story.”
But the Galleria actually is making a comeback, Brocato said. “We’re seeing it much more vibrant than it has been in the last nine years,” he said. “Malls all over the country are in nowhere near as good a shape as ours. Look at Brookwood mall. It’s in a pretty good place, too. There’s weeds growing. Ours is not that way. We have about 7 million people come to that campus a year. It is providing a lot of sales taxes”
Brocato, when asked what he would do to stimulate more activity there, said “No. 1, you’re going to hear the mayor talk positively about it, not negatively about it.” But, at his recommendation, the City Council also in March agreed to partner with some of the Galleria property owners to fund a $200,000 redevelopment study for the campus. That study should be completed and ready to present to the council next month, he said.
Derzis said a big study was done on the Galleria property in 2018 as part of the development of the city’s comprehensive plan, but nothing ever came of it.
“We need to be doing something about it,” Derzis said.
The mayor likes to point to online sales as the reason for the Galleria’s woes, but just up Interstate 459, The Summit seems to be thriving and full of stores that Hoover residents like, the chief said. It’s hard to find a parking spot on the weekends, he said.
“Why can’t we entice those major retailers to come to our city? I think that we absolutely can. We’ve got 100,000 cars that cross 459 and Interstate 65 on a daily basis. We need to make a concerted effort to get retailers to come to Hoover,” Derzis said. “We can do a lot better of folks getting out and driving the bus and not waiting for people to come to us.”
ARTS CENTER
Similarly, the mayor has been talking about building an arts center in Hoover for nine years but hasn’t been able to get it done, Derzis said. The City Council did allocate $17 million toward an arts center when it voted to borrow $85 million in March 2023, but a site has yet to be identified.
Derzis said he favors the idea of an arts center for both performing and visual arts if it includes a sustainable business plan. He thinks it will take a partnership with private entities, he said. Hoover is the only city among the top 10 cities in the state that doesn’t have one, he said.
Brocato said city officials through focus groups and consultants already have determined what size facility they want, the type of events they want to see there and even have a design in mind. What they lack is a location for it, and they still have to figure out how to pay for the rest of the construction costs and operational costs, he said.
It’s probably going to take $50 million to build what they really want to build, he said.
POPULATION GROWTH
Both candidates also were asked Thursday night what they believed was the mayor’s responsibility in regulating population growth so that schools aren’t overcrowded.
Derzis said Hoover’s education system is great, but the mayor has to facilitate smart growth in the city by making sure that proper infrastructure is there to support new homes and residents. The Riverchase Career Connection Center, which draws students from both high schools for parts of their school day, is a good way to alleviate crowding at the high school level some, but other schools like Bluff Park Elementary are overcrowded, too, Derzis said.
Derzis noted that he has formed an educational advisory committee that includes two former school board members, former Hoover High Principal Jennifer Hogan, a parent and a construction company executive who is a Hoover High graduate. They will help guide him on city issues and decisions that impact the school system, he said.
But he also respects that the school system is a separate entity from the city that is governed by the school board, and he would not try to interfere in their decisions, he said.
Brocato said he already does regularly communicate with the school superintendent and his administrative team and consult them in regard to development issues. When a request recently came for the city to annex land to accommodate a new 331-home development, school leaders indicated it would not be detrimental to the school system, Brocato said.
He also noted that 900 new homes that have been approved in recent years were designated for people age 55 and older, so those homes should not have much of an impact on the school system either, he said.
Other questions directed at Derzis and Brocato Thursday night centered on stormwater flooding, transparency in city government, the city’s purchase of an office building on Lorna Road three years ago that remains vacant, concerns about the city’s financial practices and the roles of the mayor, City Council and city administrator. Thursday night’s forum lasted about 1½ hours. A video of the forum can be seen here.
The forum was organized by a group of residents from several Hoover neighborhoods, including Bluff Park, Monte D’Oro, Riverchase and Ross Bridge. The same group held a forum with 14 Hoover City Council candidates on Tuesday, Aug. 5. Read about that council election forum here.
The Hoover Sun, Hoover Area Chamber of Commerce and League of Women Voters of Greater Birmingham are organizing a forum with both the council candidates and mayoral candidates at the Hoover City Schools Performing Arts Center at Hoover High School at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 14.
The municipal election is on Tuesday, Aug. 26. Monday, Aug. 11, is the last day to register to vote in that election. To register or update your registration information, go to alabamavotes.gov.
