A man facing dozens of charges for allegedly impersonating a peace officer has put the city of Creola on notice that he may sue over a telecommunications contract officials say was never properly bid out.
Doug Roberts, 24, was arrested in July 2016 and charged with impersonating an officer. Authorities said he entered the race for the Precinct 66 constable post in Mobile County even though he was not a licensed peace officer, and that he issued homemade traffic citations while equipped with a constable’s uniform, a Chevrolet Tahoe outfitted with radios, weapons, sirens and lights.
With a criminal trial set for August, Roberts faces numerous counts of impersonating a peace officer, possession of a forged instrument and violating Alabama’s blue light law. He was released on a $600,000 bond and ordered to wear an ankle monitor.
During the interim, Roberts made changes to Accelerated Technology Services Group LLC, a company he founded using the same post office box that appeared on the citations that led to his arrest. In January, he registered Chase Nelson as an agent of the business with the Alabama Secretary of State. In February, he filed a trademark application for the name Cytranet — described as a telephone and wireless broadband service — on behalf of the company.
Nelson is listed as a director of Cytranet. In March, he appeared before the Creola City Council to pitch the company’s services as the city weighed upgrading its phone and internet systems.
According to attorney Ginger Poynter, who represents Roberts in his upcoming criminal trial, Creola officials unanimously supported Nelson’s proposal to install a new phone system and port the city’s existing numbers to new carriers at a cost of $29,336 over 36 months. Poynter said Mayor Bill Criswell signed the contract and the city clerk provided numbers to port, and Cytranet began the transfer — until, after carriers had set firm port dates, the city said it had failed to obtain the required number of bids and placed the project on hold.
Alabama law requires that contracts for labor, services, work or the purchase or lease of materials exceeding $15,000 be awarded through sealed, competitive bidding to the lowest responsible bidder. The city produced a copy of the notice of claim Accelerated Technology Services Group filed with the city clerk in May, a standard step before suing a public entity.
While Cytranet has not filed suit, both sides agree the work it began and could not finish likely knocked Creola City Hall and the Creola Police Department’s phone lines offline for roughly a week and a half in May. Poynter said Cytranet sent a certified letter warning the city the process could not be changed or stopped without serious service disruption. An engineer — whom Poynter identified as Roberts — allegedly told officials something similar after being turned away from city hall.
On May 1, a post on the city of Creola’s Facebook page told residents the phone lines ‘were hit by lightning during [a] storm and [were] being worked on,’ and listed alternate numbers for the police department and city hall. It made no mention of Cytranet or the suspended upgrade.
Poynter maintains Roberts is ‘no longer an agent of the company’ and works as an engineer, but said Creola cited his prior arrest as a reason for ending the business relationship. ‘The city left Cytranet holding the bag for the lost contract revenue, a new phone system and stuck in an interconnect agreement with another carrier,’ she wrote.
A source familiar with the agreement and telecommunications networks said the service interruption could have been avoided and suggested the city’s numbers could have been ‘held hostage’ until they could be ported back. That source asked to remain anonymous, and Cytranet denied the allegation.
Poynter acknowledged Creola’s unsuccessful attempts to stop the transfer through its current carrier, but said Cytranet did nothing to impede those efforts and allowed the city to port its numbers back to another company despite its losses.
Regardless of the dispute, Roberts’ criminal trial is proceeding. Poynter has said Roberts’ primary defense is that he believed he was serving as a deputy constable when he issued the citations because he had been deputized by Constable Dale Dorsey, who has corroborated that account in testimony. In March, Circuit Judge Michael Youngpeter denied motions to dismiss, ruling a jury should decide what Roberts knew about the law and when.