FAIRHOPE, Alabama—City Council President Lonnie Mixon’s participation in a personnel board hearing last week may have run afoul of city rules.

Those rules prohibit elected officials from serving on the personnel board.

“The Personnel Board is an independent review board comprised of five City residents,” the personnel rules state. “A person may not be a member of the Board while residing outside the City limits, while employed by the City, while holding an appointed or elected office with the City, or while running for an elected municipal office.”

Mixon said today that he did not serve on the board as a member but as the council’s liaison to the board, and that he does not have the right to vote.

But during the hearing last Thursday, he sat at the dais with the other board members and participated in questioning of witnesses.

He also sat with the board during its private deliberations of the evidence and testimony at the closed-door part of the meeting, he said today.

Although the state’s Open Meetings Law requires that members of a public body like the board must vote in public following a closed-door executive session, the Fairhope Personnel Board announced in public the decision it had already made in private.

Mixon said he attended the closed-door meeting when the board reached that decision in private.

“It wasn’t really voted on,” he said today. “I guess everybody informally agreed during the discussions. So as the discussion went, there wasn’t a need for a vote because everybody felt the same way in the discussions.”

Mayor Tim Kant said personnel rules were written to prohibit participation by political officials like Mixon.

“He doesn’t have a right to participate,” Kant said Monday. “It’s supposed to be an independent body. That’s the whole reason for having a grievance board so it’s a complete separation.”

The board overturned the three-day suspension without pay of Shawn Black, a service technician in the water and sewer department, which had been recommended by department head Dan McCrory.

Both Black and McCrory testified at the public meeting part of the hearing, as did two other employees.

The personnel board hears appeals of city employees from disciplinary actions such as terminations and suspensions without pay. With six termination recommendations in the Fairhope Police Department working their way through the pre-disciplinary process, it is possible the personnel board will hear some of those cases.

It’s unclear at this time whether Mixon will participate in future hearings of the personnel board.

Editor’s note: This is the second article in a series on personnel issues affecting Fairhope city employees. For related story on personnel board’s reversal of Black’s suspension, see Nov. 22 edition of The Fairhope Courier.