A technology company with ties to a Mobile County man awaiting trial on charges of impersonating a law enforcement officer has filed a notice of claim against the city of Creola, a legal step that typically precedes a lawsuit against a public entity. The dispute centers on a canceled contract to overhaul the city’s phone and internet service, and it has left both sides trading accusations over who is responsible for a costly, unfinished project.
The claim was filed with the Creola city clerk’s office in May by Accelerated Technology Services Group LLC, a company that does business as Cytranet and lists the same post office box once used by Doug Roberts, 24, who founded the business. Roberts is scheduled to stand trial next month on dozens of charges, including impersonating a peace officer, possession of a forged instrument and violating Alabama’s so-called blue light law.
Investigators say Roberts, who ran unopposed for a Precinct 66 constable seat in Mobile County, was not a sworn peace officer when he pulled over motorists and issued homemade citations. He was found with a constable’s uniform and was driving a Chevrolet Tahoe outfitted with police-style radios, weapons, sirens and lights at the time of his arrest last July. He was released on a $600,000 bond and ordered to wear an ankle monitor pending trial.
Court records show Roberts made several changes to his company’s corporate filings while the criminal case was pending. In January, he registered Chase Nelson as the business’s registered agent with the Alabama Secretary of State’s office, and in February he filed a trademark application for the name Cytranet, described as a telephone and wireless broadband communication service. Nelson is listed as Cytranet’s director and pitched the company’s services to the Creola City Council in March, as officials were weighing an upgrade to the city’s aging phone and internet systems.
According to Ginger Poynter, an attorney who is representing Roberts in his upcoming criminal trial and who spoke on Nelson’s behalf regarding the contract dispute, the council unanimously approved Cytranet’s proposal to install a new phone system and transfer the city’s existing telephone numbers to new carriers at a cost of $29,336 over 36 months. Poynter also managed Nelson’s work on her 2014 campaign for district judge in Baldwin County, though she said she does not represent Cytranet as a company.
Poynter said Mayor Bill Criswell signed the contract and the city clerk supplied a list of phone numbers to be transferred, prompting Cytranet to begin the port process. She said the trouble began after the numbers had already been assigned firm transfer dates by both carriers involved, at which point the city told the company it had failed to solicit the number of competitive bids required under state law and needed to place the project on hold. Alabama law generally requires municipal contracts for labor, services or materials exceeding $15,000 to be awarded through a sealed, competitive bidding process to the lowest responsible bidder.
Criswell and Councilwoman Lee Anne Greene both referred questions about the Cytranet contract to the city’s attorney, who declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement. City officials have not disputed that the notice of claim was filed, and a copy was produced by the city clerk’s office.
Although Cytranet has not filed a lawsuit against Creola, both sides largely agree that the halted transfer contributed to an outage that knocked out phone lines at Creola City Hall and the Creola Police Department for roughly a week and a half in May. Poynter said Cytranet sent the city a certified letter warning that halting the process midstream could cause a serious disruption in service, and that an engineer believed to be Roberts delivered a similar warning in person after being turned away from city hall on May 1.
By May 10, the city of Creola’s Facebook page told residents the phone outage had been caused by a lightning strike during a storm and that crews were working to restore service. The post included alternate contact numbers for the police department and city hall but made no reference to Cytranet, the contract or the decision to place the project on hold.
Poynter said Roberts is no longer an agent of the company and now works for it as an engineer, but she said city officials pointed to his arrest as a reason for ending the business relationship. She characterized the cancellation as leaving Cytranet responsible for lost contract revenue, the cost of a new phone system and an interconnect agreement with another carrier that the company had already entered into to complete the transfer.
A person with knowledge of the agreement and of telecommunications networks generally, who asked not to be identified, said the service interruption could have been avoided and suggested the city’s phone numbers could have effectively been held up during the transition. Cytranet denied that characterization. Poynter acknowledged that Creola made unsuccessful attempts to halt the number transfer through its existing carrier, but said the company did not interfere with those efforts and ultimately allowed the city to port its numbers back to another provider despite what she described as the company’s own financial losses.
The contract dispute is playing out separately from the criminal case against Roberts, which remains on track for trial next month. Roberts has argued in pretrial motions that he believed he was authorized to act as a deputy constable because he had previously been deputized by Constable Dale Dorsey, a claim Dorsey has corroborated in testimony. Poynter said Roberts ran unopposed for the constable post and was on track to take office. Circuit Judge Michael Youngpeter rejected Roberts’ motions to dismiss the charges in March, ruling that a jury should decide what Roberts knew about the law regarding deputization and when he knew it.