FOLEY, Ala. — The Foley City Council will hold its regular work session and meeting Monday, Sept. 21, beginning at 4 p.m. in the council chambers at Foley City Hall.
The published agenda runs the usual range of a fast-growing city’s monthly business — proclamations, department reports, bid approvals, weed abatement hearings — but buried in the middle of it are three first readings that would change how development, solicitation and nonprofit permitting work inside the city limits.
The Three Ordinances Getting a First Reading
A Technical Design Manual
The most consequential item on the agenda may also be the least dramatic-sounding. The council will take up the first reading of an ordinance adopting a Technical Design Manual — a TDM — governing design, development, permitting and construction standards within the City of Foley.
A technical design manual is the document engineers and developers actually work from. It is where a city specifies the concrete details of how things get built: street cross-sections, drainage and stormwater standards, utility placement, sidewalk widths, materials, testing requirements and submittal procedures. Zoning determines what can be built where. A design manual determines how it gets built and to what specification.
For a city adding subdivisions, commercial corridors and infrastructure at Foley’s pace, consolidating those standards into a single adopted document has practical consequences on both sides of the counter. Developers get one reference instead of a patchwork of policies, resolutions and departmental practice. The city gets an enforceable standard it can point to when a submittal falls short.
Because it is a first reading, the ordinance is not up for final adoption at Monday’s meeting.
Door-to-Door Commercial Solicitation
The council will also take up the first reading of an ordinance relating to door-to-door commercial solicitation. The measure would establish permit registration, enforcement and business accountability requirements, protect residential privacy and provide for related matters.
Solicitation ordinances are a recurring item in growing Gulf Coast cities, and they tend to follow a familiar pattern: a registration or permitting requirement for commercial solicitors, identification requirements while working, restrictions on hours, a mechanism for residents to opt out, and penalties for violations. The stated purposes usually pair consumer protection with residential privacy — giving the city a record of who is knocking on doors and giving residents a way to decline.
The agenda language specifically names business accountability alongside residential privacy, suggesting the ordinance is aimed at the registration-and-enforcement side rather than a simple no-soliciting framework.
A Nonprofit Permit Fee Reduction Program
The third first reading would establish a nonprofit permit fee reduction program for eligible entities that provide sufficient public benefits and public purposes.
Permit fees are a routine cost of doing anything physical in a city — building, renovating, holding events, altering a structure. For a nonprofit operating on donated funds, those fees come directly out of program money. A formal reduction program replaces case-by-case waivers with a defined eligibility standard, which is generally cleaner for both the applicant and the city, since it puts the criteria in writing rather than leaving each request to be argued individually.
Proclamations and Presentations
The meeting opens with items that set a different tone than the ordinance readings.
The council will consider a proclamation declaring Nov. 2 as “Color the World Orange Day.” The council will also hear a presentation by the Safe Harbor Animal Coalition.
The Routine Business That Shows How the City Runs
Much of the agenda is the recurring monthly work that rarely makes news but reflects the operating condition of a municipal government.
The council will receive a report on bills approved and paid in August, along with monthly reports on taxes and permit plans and from the Planning and Zoning, Police, Building, Fire and Human Resources departments. Monthly bids for August will be presented for approval.
That combination — a tax report, a permit-plans report and a planning and zoning report in the same packet each month — is essentially a running dashboard of a growth city. Tax collections show the consumer economy. Permit plans show what is about to be built. Planning and zoning shows what is being proposed further out.
Budget, Grants and Money Items
The council will consider amending the City Fiscal Year 2026 budget. Mid-year and late-year budget amendments are standard practice in municipal finance, reconciling the adopted spending plan against actual revenues and expenses as the fiscal year closes out.
Two grant-related approvals are also on the agenda. The council will consider approving two applications for the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs Volkswagen Settlement eligible mitigation action items projects.
That program traces back to the Volkswagen diesel emissions settlement, which established a national environmental mitigation trust distributed to states. Alabama’s share is administered through ADECA and is generally directed toward projects that reduce nitrogen oxide emissions — typically the replacement or repowering of older diesel vehicles and equipment with cleaner alternatives. Municipalities have used the funds for items such as fleet replacement and heavy equipment upgrades.
Separately, the council will consider requesting permission to memorialize the application submitted for the Fiscal Year 2027 Library Services and Technology Act Strengthening Youth and Family Grant. LSTA is the primary federal funding program for libraries, administered to states and passed through to local libraries for specific programming and services.
The Fire Department Items
Two agenda items concern the Foley Fire Department, and read together they describe a fleet transition.
The council will consider purchasing loose equipment for the department’s new ladder truck. “Loose equipment” is the industry term for everything a truck carries that is not bolted to the chassis — ground ladders, hose, nozzles, hand tools, extrication equipment, self-contained breathing apparatus, rescue gear. On a new aerial apparatus, that package is a substantial purchase in its own right, and it is typically handled separately from the chassis order because lead times and vendors differ.
The council will also consider approving the surplusing and sale of a 2014 custom fire pumper. Declaring apparatus surplus is the formal step that allows a municipality to dispose of equipment it no longer needs, generally through public sale.
Parks, Events and a Letter of Intent
The council will consider amending a resolution authorizing the mayor to sign a letter of intent for the Street Department.
It will also consider waiving the fees for the use of Heritage Park by Stephanie Jenkins-Vordermark and Abiding Love Church to host a Family Faith and Family Festival on Jan. 30, 2027. Heritage Park is one of Foley’s principal public event venues, and fee waivers for community events are a routine council function — though the pending nonprofit fee reduction ordinance on the same agenda would, if eventually adopted, provide a standing framework for exactly this kind of request.
Weed Abatement Hearings
Council members will also set public hearings on declaring weeds to be a public nuisance and ordering their abatement on East Myrtle Avenue and on two properties on Clarke Ridge Road.
The weed abatement process is one of the more prosaic powers a municipality holds, but it follows a formal sequence: the council sets a hearing date, notice goes to the property owner, the hearing is held, and if the nuisance is declared the city can order abatement and, when the owner does not act, perform the work and assess the cost against the property. Setting the hearing is the first procedural step, not a finding.
Attending the Meeting
The regular work session and meeting begin at 4 p.m. Monday, Sept. 21, in the council chambers at Foley City Hall.
Because the three ordinances are receiving first readings, Monday’s meeting is the point at which their text becomes public and open to comment rather than the point at which they take effect. Residents and business owners with an interest in the design manual, the solicitation rules or the nonprofit fee program have time to weigh in before any final vote.
Why First Readings Matter
All three ordinances on Monday’s agenda are receiving first readings, and the distinction is worth understanding for residents who want a say.
Alabama municipalities generally introduce an ordinance at one meeting and adopt it at a later one, unless the council suspends the rules to act immediately. The gap exists to give the public and affected parties time to read the actual text rather than react to a summary. A first reading is the point at which an ordinance stops being an internal draft and becomes a public document.
For the Technical Design Manual in particular, that window matters to a specific audience. Engineers, surveyors, developers, builders and utility contractors all work to the standards a design manual sets, and the practical burden of a new specification falls on them. Municipalities that adopt design manuals typically hear from that community between first reading and adoption, and the document that eventually passes often differs from the one introduced.
The solicitation ordinance affects a different set of people — residents who want fewer knocks, and the businesses whose sales model depends on them. Home services, pest control, lawn care, security systems, roofing and energy retrofits are all industries with door-to-door sales channels, and a registration-and-permit framework changes the cost of operating one inside city limits.
Foley’s Growth Is the Common Thread
Read the agenda as a whole and a pattern emerges: nearly every substantive item is a response to scale.
A city codifies construction standards when the volume of construction makes case-by-case review unworkable. A city regulates solicitation when the number of households makes door-knocking a viable business. A city formalizes nonprofit fee reductions when the number of requests makes ad hoc waivers inconsistent. A city buys a ladder truck and surpluses a 2014 pumper when its building stock has grown taller and its call volume has grown heavier.
Foley has spent the past several years adding residential subdivisions, commercial development and public infrastructure, and the city has been working through the governance questions that follow. It recently adopted a fiscal 2027 budget with substantial capital spending and reserves, launched a master campus plan to coordinate city facilities, and taken up questions ranging from data center moratoriums to apartment development near the Beach Express.
Monday’s agenda is the same story told through ordinance drafts and equipment purchases.