FAIRHOPE, Ala. - Mayor Tim Kant’s hiring of a private attorney to advise him about the implications of a recent state Supreme Court case about mayoral powers may have run afoul of a more recent high court case about a city council’s authority.

“A mayor has no independent authority to enter into a contract for a city,” said Lori Lein, deputy general counsel for the Alabama League of Municipalities, in describing a June opinion of the state Supreme Court. “The only way a city can be bound by a contract is for the governing body to approve it. So the council’s got to approve a contract before it’s entered into by a mayor, or it’s invalid.”

Lein said that June decision supported earlier legal conclusions by the ALM on the issue, which stated that municipal contracting is a two-step procedure.

“Ordinarily, the council must decide whether the municipality should enter into the contract,” says an ALM 2008 publication for municipal officials. “After the council votes to accept a contract, the mayor must then execute the contract for the municipality.”

But Kant said this week he believes he did have the authority to hire Gulf Shores attorney David Whetstone, without prior council approval, for advice about the highly publicized May opinion of the Alabama high court, which held that mayors alone have the power to hire and fire municipal employees.

“I take the position that in the mayor-council form of government the mayor is entitled to (legal) counsel as is the council,” Kant said. “All I can do is what I believe is right, and I believe I am entitled to counsel. I didn’t sign a contract (with Whetstone). I just had an understanding. If people want to call that a contract, they can.”

Whetstone represented Kant before the council at Monday’s public participation meeting prior to its regular meeting that night. The former district attorney said some city rules and ordinances, which divested or limited the mayor’s ultimate authority over municipal employment decisions, would have to be reviewed and possibly revised.

“Fairhope is not alone,” Whetstone told the council. “Every city in the state with the mayor-council form of government has been turned upside-down.”

Whetstone said the Supreme Court’s ruling differred from widely held interpretations in past years by the Attorney General’s office as well as the ALM. Such interpretations said councils could pass ordinances giving them authority over municipal employment decisions.

The issue of Kant’s hiring of attorneys without written contracts, or prior approval by the council, was detailed in an award-winning series of articles last year by The Fairhope Courier. Kant said in one of those articles that he had inherited the procedure of hiring attorneys on a handshake from former Mayor Jim Nix.

Also in that series of articles, Kant said the failure to notify Councilman Rick Kingrea, the council’s legal liaison, of his hiring of the Hand Arendall firm to represent the city in a lawsuit filed against the city by its insurance company, was not intentional, and that steps would be taken to make sure it did not happen again.

“The council has never seen this contract,” Kingrea said this week about the Whetstone contract. “I would think it would require our approval.”

Kant said the city was paying Whetstone $140 an hour, and that the attorny’s fee was being kept under the mayor’s monthly expense fund of $1,000 to be used at his discretion.

He said using those discretionary funds also authorized his hiring of Whetstone.

“That’s his interpretation, and I don’t agree with it,” Council President Lonnie Mixon said this week. “We’ll be looking into this and getting to the bottom of it.”

Whetstone did not return a phone call seeking comment.