FAIRHOPE, Alabama—After at least six years of noncompliance with the Alabama Open Meetings Act, the Fairhope Personnel Board has begun to observe the law’s requirements for employee grievance hearings.

On Wednesday morning, the city’s human resources administrator issued a public notice for a “Personnel Board Disciplinary Hearing” to occur at 8 a.m., Monday, Jan. 9, in the Delchamps Room at the Fairhope Municipal Complex.

That public notice came one day after a Dec. 27 story by The Courier that described the history of the board’s noncompliance with the OMA and of the difficulty the newspaper had earlier this month in obtaining the time and place of a board hearing.

The Dec. 28 public notice did not specify the employee or employees whose case or cases will be heard, but earlier reporting by The Courier has indicated that the hearing will probably involve Ronald Avera, a corrections officer with the police department, who is contesting his proposed termination.

In interviews with Mayor Tim Kant, City Administrator Gregg Mims, City Council President Lonnie Mixon, attorney Paul Myrick and others, the reasons given for why the city has failed to ensure that its personnel board complied with the OMA after the statute underwent significant revision in 2005 were not clear.

But Kant offered one possibility.

“I guess we were advised when dealing with employees that they didn’t necessarily have to be open,” Kant said. “I think that’s the reason. I don’t think they’ve met maybe a handful of times.”

Myrick, a private attorney in Mobile who has provided employment law advice to the city for some 30 years, said that even though advance public notice of the place and time of personnel board hearings may not have been given in the past, that the meetings were still, in fact, “open” and had followed city personnel rules, which required them to be open to the public in certain circumstances.

That is, Myrick contended that the public could have attended the board hearings had they known where they were being held.

“That would be a technical violation,” Myrick said, referring to the failure of the city to provide advance public notice of personnel board hearings, as required by the OMA.

Dennis Bailey, a Montgomery attorney and counsel for the Alabama Press Association, took a different view of the importance of the notice provisions of the OMA, also known as the state’s “sunshine law.”

“Notice of meetings is a key element of the Open Meetings Act,” Bailey said. “Failure to give proper notice is only arguably a ‘technical violation’ when large numbers of the public learn of the meeting despite improper notice. However, failure to give notice can result in the action taken being declared void.”

Five other police employee disciplinary cases have been pending since at least November, and it is possible that some of those cases might also be heard by the personnel board on Jan. 9, according to staff.

Editor’s note: This is the last article of the year in a six-month-long series on Fairhope personnel policies, procedures and practices. The series will continue in 2012.