The Baldwin County nonprofit serving adults and children with developmental disabilities has withdrawn its court fight over its sudden state-ordered closure — not because it is backing down, its attorney says, but because it is finally getting the hearing it asked for.
On Friday, Aug. 1, ARC Baldwin County asked Circuit Judge Byron Brackin to dismiss its petition seeking judicial review of the Alabama Department of Mental Health’s decision to decertify and shut down the nonprofit as of July 15.
Why the case was filed — and why it’s ending
The petition, filed in early July, argued ARC Baldwin received no notice of the state’s intent to decertify, no opportunity to delay the decision and no public evidentiary hearing — protections attorney Deven Moore said state law normally requires. At the time, it appeared the nonprofit’s only path to challenge the closure was a circuit court appeal.
That changed, Moore said, once the state agreed to an administrative hearing. “Our circuit court Notice of Appeal was filed because it appeared, at the time, ADMH was unwilling to offer us any due process, most notably the opportunity for an administrative appeal,” Moore said. “Since then, the state has moved forward in granting us a hearing.”
Charles Malone, a former Mobile legislator and circuit judge now practicing law in Tuscaloosa, has been appointed administrative law judge for the case, with a pre-hearing conference set for Wednesday, Aug. 5. Moore said he may use that conference to ask that the hearing itself be opened to the public; as of early August the hearing was being reported as closed, and Malone had not committed either way.
The closure that started it all
The legal fight traces to July 1, when ADMH Commissioner Kimberly Boswell wrote to ARC Baldwin Executive Director Kathy Fleet informing her the nonprofit had been decertified and that every resident served through a Medicaid waiver would be moved immediately. The organization’s other services were shut down as well. The order capped an ADMH investigation conducted between January and March that, according to the decertification letter, found resident deaths attributed to failures in medical care compliance, record integrity issues and staffing problems.
The closure displaced roughly 90 people served by ARC Baldwin and eliminated about 200 jobs — a sudden rupture for families who say they learned their loved ones were being moved only shortly before it happened, or after the fact.
What happens next
ARC Baldwin has roughly three months from its early-July appeal to get its administrative hearing scheduled. The stakes are its recertification: if ARC Baldwin can convince the administrative law judge that it should be restored, services could resume; if the hearing goes against it, ADMH’s final decision can be appealed once more to Baldwin County Circuit Court.
The state maintains it followed the law. Attorneys representing ADMH said in a court response that ARC Baldwin was given all proper notices, and the agency has denied that its closure standard — a serious threat to the safety and welfare of consumers, as determined by the commissioner — was misapplied. ADMH spokesperson Malissa Valdes said the agency was pleased with the dismissal motion and declined to answer further questions, including whether Malone might open the hearing to the public.
Judge Brackin had not ruled on the dismissal motion as of Monday morning, Aug. 3. For the families watching, the shift from a courtroom fight to an administrative one changes the venue, but not the question: whether ARC Baldwin’s shutdown was justified, and who gets to decide.
The complaint ARC Baldwin later withdrew was filed July 6 in Baldwin County Circuit Court, and it was pointed in its language. The nonprofit said that before the decertification letter arrived, neither ARC nor its more than 200 employees, nor the families of the more than 90 intellectually disabled clients it served, had any idea the Department of Mental Health was considering decertifying the organization. If the commissioner’s decision rested on a finding that ARC’s continued operation posed a safety threat, the complaint argued, that determination “was arbitrary, illegal, capricious and based upon an inaccurate or incomplete understanding of the relevant facts.”
The scrutiny had deep roots. ARC Baldwin had operated under a provisional certification from ADMH since 2025 because of past incidents, and the state’s January-through-March review that preceded the closure was conducted against that backdrop.
Transparency was a recurring concern for families through the summer. On July 15, an attorney representing ADMH told family members during a town hall that the administrative hearing would be open to the public, though certain details, such as identifying information about victims, could be kept confidential. State officials later took a narrower position: Valdes said agency leadership had deemed the hearing closed because of sensitive information regarding victims, a shift that left families uncertain about how much of the state’s findings they would ever see.