The Marion City Council split three to three Monday night on two measures tied to the city’s troubled water system, then saw Mayor Dexter Hinton abruptly declare the meeting over without a motion or vote to adjourn and without taking public comment that was listed as an item on the agenda.
The deadlock came less than two weeks after a multi day water outage and a boil water notice that stretched through Thanksgiving. Residents filled the council chamber expecting to hear how the city planned to prevent another crisis and keep state water and sewer money flowing. They left with more questions than answers.
Emergency Resolution
The first tie vote came on an emergency resolution that Hinton said would help the city “move at a faster pace” on water projects funded by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management. A previously-scheduled emergency meeting set for last week regarding the same proposal did not take place due to lack of a quorum being present to vote.
The resolution would have declared that the condition of the water system constituted an emergency, said standard bid timelines were “inadequate,” and would have allowed the city to accelerate bidding. It also would have authorized the mayor to sign contracts and other documents related to the project without prior council approval, with those actions to be reported back to the council later.
City Clerk Laura Hinton read the resolution aloud. She told the council the resolution would let the city move faster “with the bid process to make the needed repairs to our water system.”
Mayor Hinton framed the measure as a way to speed up work that has been “months in the works” and “been discussed for years.”
Councilmembers Leon Kennie and Jeremy Arrington moved and seconded to adopt the resolution. Mayor Hinton joined them in voting yes. Councilmembers Ann Lecroy, Willie Jackson and Stanley Kennie voted no.
After the roll call, Hinton told the room that “we are at a stalemate” and said the no votes meant “you are now saying that this is not an emergency for the city.”
The packet that Clerk Hinton handed out Monday included a letter from ADEM dated Nov. 19. According to the discussion in open session, ADEM has asked Marion to submit its 2022 and 2023 audits by Dec. 22 and warned that failure to do so could lead to revocation of water and sewer funding. In other words, the city’s ability to keep and draw down state money depends on audits that have not yet been completed.
Lecroy pressed for details. She asked whether the $170,000 in ADEM reimbursable funds mentioned in the packet would “take care of all the audits.” Hinton replied that the money would be reimbursed to the city as audits were completed and submitted, and that the last audit had not been submitted and so had not yet been reimbursed.
Hinton and the clerk told the council that Marion has received $523,088.30 in nine payments so far and has about $700,000 remaining for drinking water projects and about $3 million for sewer projects in the first phase of planned repairs and improvements. They said all current projects were bid out in August 2024, that contractors have already done certain work, and that checks are held until both the city’s engineering firm and ADEM sign off.
Mayor Hinton and the clerk told the council that the 2022 audit has now been submitted and that the 2023 audit is still “being finalized.” They said ADEM has already reimbursed the city $170,000 for past audit costs and that those reimbursements were meant to cover “the last four years.”
Those figures match Hinton’s long standing claim that his administration has secured millions of dollars for water and sewer work. They also highlight how much remains unfinished. According to comments from the clerk, there were no completed audits “from ’99 forward” until recent years. She and the mayor said audits have now been done from 2013 through 2022, but conceded that the city is still playing catch up.
To complete the 2023 audit, the clerk said she and outside accountants must “pull all the records all the bills all the invoices” and upload “every bank record, transaction book, minutes,” in addition to day to day work.
The question is what role Monday’s emergency resolution plays in all of that. Hinton’s own explanation at the meeting described it as a way to “let [ADEM] know that it’s a priority” and to speed up procurement. He acknowledged that adoption of the resolution would not flip a switch, saying that even with an emergency declaration “ADEM has to approve bids” and that it could be “at least 90 days” before new work begins.
He also pointed out that an emergency resolution on sewer work adopted eleven months ago had still not produced material on the ground.
Neither he nor the clerk told the council, prior to the vote, that failure to adopt the resolution would automatically cause the city to lose existing funding. That claim surfaced after the tie, when Hinton accused councilmembers of saying the water crisis was “not an emergency” and Turner wrote on Facebook that “three members of the Marion City Council have effectively halted the overhaul of Marion’s water system.”
Line of Credit
The second tie came on a resolution to authorize a line of credit of up to $100,000. Hinton described the loan as a way to help cover operating costs at the end of the year, which he called “our toughest financial months.” He said the money would help pay fuel, power and other basic bills and could be repaid from normal revenue and grant reimbursements.
Lecroy said it was the first she had heard of a bank willing to lend to a city without an existing account and asked for more detail.
Clerk Hinton told the council that the line of credit had been arranged with help from the Black Belt Community Foundation and a financial institution, Hope Credit Union, that does not currently hold city deposits. She said the bank was willing to lend if the foundation guaranteed repayment and told members, “Call it God or whatever you want to.”
She did not address how much of the proposed line of credit would go to water system repairs, how much would go to ordinary operating expenses, or how much might be used to front costs for the 2023 audit in hopes of later reimbursement by ADEM.
Arrington moved and Leon Kennie seconded to approve the line of credit. Hinton again voted yes, and Lecroy, Jackson and Stanley Kennie again voted no, producing another three to three tie.
The Water Bypass Issue
After that vote, the meeting turned to the November outage and a heated argument over whether Hinton blocked efforts to use a bypass connection so Perry County Water Authority Director Earl Ford could feed water into the city system.
Councilman Stanley Kennie said nursing homes, the dialysis clinic and other facilities were calling him “all day” during the outage. He said he and the rest of the council had agreed to work directly with the county to get water turned back on.
“Everybody on this council called me,” Kennie told the mayor. “All of us agreed to go over your head to get this water done.” He said Ford came on site to use the bypass connection and that Hinton stopped him “three times.”
“You knew up front that you could bypass,” Kennie said. “I did not want to bring this up, that the city could have had water within five minutes.”
Mayor Pro Tem Willie Jackson backed him up. Referring to Ford, Jackson said, “Earl was standing there and you stopped him.”
Hinton denied that and said the bypass was not a realistic option. Looking at Kennie, he told him, “You do not know because you are new, but we have tried that before.” He said council members and the county water authority “worked on it six hours and it did not even work,” and added, “I told you that the pump was going to work.”
Hinton insisted that the bypass had never functioned in his time in office. “I have been here nine years and that system has never worked,” he said. A few moments later he said, “We will turn our whole system off and we will let the county work,” and told the room he has been in “two lawsuits, matter of fact three lawsuits with the county and the county water trying to take our water.”
A search of Alabama’s online court records by the Times-Standard-Herald did not locate any lawsuits in which the City of Marion and Perry County or the Perry County Water Authority appeared regarding the county attempting to assert control over the city’s water resources or system.
Kennie replied that, during the outage, councilmembers were ready to go around city hall and work through the county. He repeated that “the city could have had water within five minutes” and said again that he had not wanted to bring the incident up in public but felt he had to.
As the argument widened, Hinton accused the three no votes of not wanting to conduct city business. “I see that y’all do not really want to run the rest of the business,” he said at one point. Later he added, “I am through with that. I see y’all do not want to do business.”
November Bills
The council discussed, but never took a vote to approve, the city’s November bills.
Earlier in the meeting, Clerk Hinton reminded members that “you guys have the bills from the previous meeting” and said she had gone through “every line item.” When Lecroy asked if the checks had been mailed, the clerk answered, “You did not vote to approve them. If this is approved tonight we will send them out.”
LeCroy asked Clerk Hinton what her office hours were. Hinton said she sometimes works from home and sometimes at City Hall: “My hours are my hours.”
LeCroy pressed further, asking, “Are you 8:00 to 5:00?”
“We’re not nitpicking,” said Mayor Hinton, interrupting the exchange. “Moving forward we will not have a melee in the council meeting,” accusing council members of bringing “personal stuff” into the discussion. “Our minutes are supposed to reflect approval of city business,” he said.
Strictly speaking, the minutes of a meeting are supposed to reflect the agenda items, discussion, votes and other actions taken by the mayor and council at a given meeting, whether or not certain items receive positive votes.
Hinton then moved on to the meeting’s next agenda item without formally asking the council for a motion or vote on the bills.
Adjournment and Aftermath
In their final action, the council did unanimously agree to hold a work session on Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 5 p.m. to go over the ADEM packet and water projects in more detail. Immediately after that vote, Hinton said, “That is it on the agenda,” and declared the meeting adjourned. Hinton did not ask the council for a motion or vote on the adjournment.
A resident attempted to point out that “public comments” appeared on the printed agenda. “What about public comments?” he asked. Hinton replied, “Meeting is already adjourned.” The resident, who identified himself as Laird Willis and said he had a background in engineering, spoke briefly anyway. He said the Nov. 19 letter from ADEM was a “final notice from [the] director of ADEM” that the city had to take seriously, criticized the city for not keeping “critical spares” such as pumps in inventory, and said the prolonged recent outage “put people’s lives in jeopardy.”
The morning after the meeting, the mayor posted a statement on his Facebook page. “At the city council meeting yesterday,” he wrote, “Councilwoman Ann LeCroy, Councilman Willie Jackson, and Councilman Stanley Kennie voted against the Emergency Resolution and the Line of Credit Resolution.” He said that by not adopting the emergency resolution “we are NOT acceptable for emergency funds to cover the repair costs” and that the line of credit “would allow the city to financially operate until first of the year’s funding comes in.” He wrote in capital letters that “THEY LEFT THE MEETING WITH NO ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS” and said he would “go LIVE later to discuss what this means for Marion.”
Clerk Hinton recorded and posted an Instagram video later Tuesday night criticizing the three councilmembers. In it, she told residents that tie votes, including the failure to approve the monthly expenditures, were “hampering the city from conducting business.” She warned that vendors would cut off fuel and other services and said the city might have to send employees home. She said “right now we have fuel bills at different vendors” and that if those are not paid “people are not going to render us the services.” She described recent council meetings as “a pissing contest as to who could piss the farthest” and said, “It is time out for this crap, this BS.”
Turner’s Facebook post went further, asserting that the tie votes had left Marion “set to lose millions in grant funding” and that failure to approve the resolutions meant that “phase one cannot be reimbursed and phase two of the City of Marion’s plan cannot be funded by ADEM.” He wrote that the “incomplete application package” for additional water money is “in jeopardy” because the city has not provided “necessary documentation regarding the financial strength of the water system.” He also suggested three options for the mayor, including asking the circuit court to step in, seeking an advance from the county, or creating a separate water authority.
Neither ADEM nor the Department of Examiners of Public Accounts had responded by press time to public records requests from the Times-Standard-Herald seeking clarification on whether the agencies were in receipt of the city’s 2022 or 2023 audits, and on whether adoption of Monday’s emergency resolution is required to keep existing water and sewer funding or to secure additional money.
The Times-Standard-Herald has also requested contracts, invoices and correspondence from Banks, Finley, White and Company and Mason and Gardner, the outside accounting firms that have worked on Marion’s books, in an effort to verify when city audits were completed.
What is clear is that Marion is facing a hard deadline on its 2022 and 2023 audits and that its access to current and future water funding depends on producing them. It is also clear that the city has not yet approved its November bills, that residents just experienced a prolonged outage and boil order through one of the biggest holidays of the year, and that there is deep mistrust between the administration and half the council over how money and information are being handled.
