Members of the Bayou La Batre Housing Authority Board violated Alabama’s Open Meetings Act when they privately negotiated employment contracts that ultimately produced a multimillion-dollar retirement payout for the agency’s former director, a Mobile Circuit judge has ruled.
In an order published Tuesday, Judge Wesley Pipes found that board members discussed and agreed to new employment contracts for former director Virginia Huddleston and Darryl Wilson during an executive session on Oct. 15, 2019. Alabama law expressly bars public bodies from discussing the “salary, compensation, and job benefits” of specific employees behind closed doors.
“Although they were later approved in normal session, there was no discussion, just a formal vote to ratify what had already occurred without any hint of what it was,” Pipes wrote.
How Alabama’s Open Meetings Act Works
The Open Meetings Act is the statute that guarantees Alabamians the right to watch their government operate. Public bodies may retreat into executive session, but only for a narrow list of enumerated reasons, such as discussing pending litigation or the good name and character of an individual.
Compensation is explicitly not on that list. The reasoning is straightforward. Deciding how much public money to pay a public employee is precisely the kind of decision citizens are entitled to observe. A vote taken in the open that merely ratifies a deal struck in private defeats the purpose of the law, and Pipes’ order makes that point directly.
Crucially, the statute provides a remedy with teeth. As Pipes noted, citing Alabama case law: “Agreements and actions taken in violation of the Open Meetings Act are void.” Not voidable, not subject to correction. Void.
The Contracts at Issue
The employment agreements sit at the center of a five-year legal battle between current and former Housing Authority officials over payments made to Huddleston and efforts to claw them back.
The dispute surfaced publicly in 2020, following a complete turnover of the Housing Authority board and the resignations of Huddleston and Wilson. Newly appointed board members released documents showing the couple’s employment agreements had been repeatedly amended over time to increase their salaries and expand their benefits.
Similar transparency concerns arose at a July 21, 2020, meeting, where the board approved another contract addendum without public discussion. Requests for copies of the contract made at that meeting were denied or ignored.
That addendum converted the retirement terms into lump-sum payments:
- $2.52 million for Virginia Huddleston
- $1.66 million for Darryl Wilson
- $4.2 million combined
Pipes’ ruling found the entire July 9, 2020, amendment void and unenforceable, along with the retirement provisions contained in the 2018 and 2019 contracts.
The Bylaws Failure
The judge did not rest solely on state law. He also pointed to the Housing Authority’s own bylaws, which permit executive sessions only for purposes allowed by law and require the authority’s attorney to certify that a given session meets those legal requirements.
Pipes found that certification never happened.
The Attorney’s Affidavit
Huddleston, Wilson and several board members argued in their defense that the contracts had been created in cooperation with the board’s attorney at the time, Brent Day. Day’s own sworn statement contradicted them.
The defendants contended that “the Board approved all of these contracts and amendments, and that they were either drafted, reviewed, or approved by the Authority’s attorney,” Pipes’ order recounts. “Mr. Day provided an affidavit denying he did any of these things and points to a letter he wrote to the Board advising that the sale of Safe Harbor may violate any number of laws and threatening to resign.”
Huddleston and Wilson tried unsuccessfully to have that letter struck from the record, arguing that email records showed Day was copied on correspondence between Huddleston and board members discussing the contract terms.
Pipes was unpersuaded, and his reasoning is notable for how little it depended on the lawyer’s role at all.
“Day’s potential involvement does not affect the enforceability of the contracts. They are unconscionable and illegal regardless of his knowledge, approval, or ignorance of them,” Pipes wrote. He added that while Day’s involvement “might be relevant to Defendants’ claim they did nothing wrong and relied on the Authority’s lawyer to tell them if there was a problem,” none of the defendants raised advice of counsel as an affirmative defense, and it is “probably waived at this point in this five-year litigation.”
Why It Matters in Bayou La Batre
Bayou La Batre is a working seafood community of roughly 2,000 residents on the western shore of Mobile County. A housing authority in a city that size administers public housing for some of the most economically vulnerable families in the region, operating on federal subsidies and tight budgets.
Against that backdrop, a $4.2 million retirement package approved without public discussion represents a sum that dwarfs what many residents could imagine, drawn from an agency whose entire purpose is to serve people of limited means. The ruling voiding those provisions means the litigation over recovering the money can proceed on firmer legal ground.
Local Context: Bayou La Batre and the Open Meetings Act
Bayou La Batre, on the western shore of Mobile County, is a seafood-processing community whose identity is tied to the Gulf. Public bodies there, as elsewhere in Alabama, operate under the Open Meetings Act, the law at the heart of this dispute.
Housing authorities in Alabama are governed by boards that manage federally subsidized housing for low-income residents. Because they spend public money and serve vulnerable populations, their decisions are subject to both state open-government law and federal oversight.
The ruling that agreements struck in violation of the act are void carries weight beyond this case. It reinforces that a public vote taken in open session cannot simply ratify a deal negotiated in secret; the public must have the opportunity to observe the deliberation itself.
For residents of Bayou La Batre, where public resources are scarce, the decision affirms that the use of those resources is subject to scrutiny, and that the absence of public discussion is not cured by a later formal vote.