Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon stood before the City Council on a Tuesday morning and did something he had not done publicly in weeks: he apologized.
At the onset of the council’s work session at Orange Beach City Hall, Kennon apologized to council members for the outbursts and animosity he displayed during the two previous council meetings. He also apologized for instances where council members said they had not been receiving information related to agenda items.
“Let me begin with I want to apologize to everyone, anyone I’ve offended, especially (Councilman Robert Stuart) and (Councilwoman) Ginger (Harrelson). We’ve been friends for 30 years, and it breaks my heart that we are where we are,” Kennon said at the beginning of the work session. “Y’all, my wife doesn’t even like me, but you don’t have to like me to love the city. Hopefully, we can get to the point where we like each other, and I’m going to try really hard to do a better job.”
Later that Tuesday, the council worked through a full meeting agenda without any perceivable infighting for the first time since June 16. The meeting was over in roughly one hour — a notable feat for a body that had spent recent sessions clashing openly over procedure, lawsuits and a police body camera video that has shadowed the mayor for more than a year.
Where the rift began
The political rift inside Orange Beach’s city government has been building since spring. Council members have said it began in April, when Kennon allegedly threatened councilors with legal action and political persecution if they attempted to release body camera footage from a September 2024 police encounter — threats, the council members say, intended in part to help settle a federal lawsuit filed by Orange Beach attorney C.C. Dixon-Moreno.
Dixon-Moreno filed a public records request for the footage in 2025, but the city denied it. Attorneys for the city have argued in court that the body-worn footage is protected under the state’s Public Records Act, and several counts of her lawsuit have been dismissed as the case has wound forward.
The footage at the center of the fight captures an early-morning encounter on Sept. 2, 2024, when Orange Beach police officers responded to a 911 call about a “butt naked” man beating a woman on the balcony of an office inside the Coastal Resources Building, a city-owned facility Kennon has described as a weekend getaway. Body camera video reviewed by a reporter in 2025 shows Kennon identifying himself as mayor and telling officers that his wife, Paula, was with him. Officers left the building without verifying the identity or condition of the woman in the room with him. An OBPD officer checked on Mrs. Kennon by phone a few days later, but she was never officially interviewed by police.
Kennon has repeatedly denied ever hitting his wife that night, and she has also denied that any assault occurred. He has admitted he was in the building and spoke with officers. His wife later declined to speak with investigators, and no recordings from the building’s security camera system have been produced; the city clerk has said no recordings of the September 2024 incident exist.
The ethics complaint
The public fight escalated when Councilwomen Ginger Harrelson and Councilmen Robert Stuart and Jeff Silvers filed a complaint with the Alabama Ethics Commission, asking investigators to determine whether Kennon has used his public office to protect himself — including by interjecting in legal strategy in the Dixon-Moreno lawsuit and by trying to block the council’s efforts to release the body camera footage.
The complaint also alleges that senior city officials knew about the police encounter within days of it happening, while the full council was left in the dark until the story became public during the 2025 election cycle. Kennon has declined to discuss the complaint, noting that Ethics Commission matters remain confidential until an investigation produces enough evidence for a hearing.
Council members have also been working on a draft resolution that would release the Labor Day weekend 2024 body camera footage outright. Following the work session, Harrelson said the council is still ironing out the possibility of introducing that resolution but is waiting to see whether the move would negatively affect the city’s insurance rates through the Alabama Municipal Insurance Corporation.
A poll of the council found that Harrelson and Stuart would both vote to release the footage as long as doing so would not harm the city. Councilman Pat Simpson said he was not sure how he would vote. Councilman Jack Robertson and Kennon declined to say how they would vote.
An attempt at a reset
At the work session, City Administrator Ford Handley told council members that city staff would work to provide more information on any topic they needed — a direct response to complaints that details of the Dixon-Moreno settlement talks and other litigation had not been shared with the council in a timely manner.
Kennon said the information problem would end and that future work sessions would be “revamped.”
“For 12 years, we did things a certain way, and it was acceptable,” Kennon said. “With this new council, we did not see it coming that maybe that was not acceptable, and we needed to deviate from that. Sometimes if you spent the day with us around here and saw just how fast things move, I get the cart before the horse all the time, and that’s just my personality, and it messes things up a lot of times. It makes people think that they’re not included, and I don’t really mean it that way.”
Silvers said during the meeting that he was glad city staff, the mayor and the council are working hard to keep the city on track. Stuart struck a similar note.
“I think that we need to be here to do what’s in front of us and what we were elected to do,” Stuart said.
Kennon later said he apologized to get himself and his colleagues back on city business, and he hopes future council meetings do not feature any more infighting.
“I feel good that tonight is an example of hopefully what people will see from us going forward,” he said.
What comes next
The tensions have also spilled into routine governance. During a live-streamed council meeting earlier in the dispute, Kennon moved to appoint former school board member Nelson Bauer to a vacant council seat after Jerry Johnson’s retirement, only to see the council vote the appointment down 3-2; Councilman Pat Simpson was appointed instead. The meeting turned testy again when Kennon gaveled Stuart out of order as he tried to address a resident, and later threatened to remove Stuart from the meeting when he continued speaking about the city school board’s leadership.
The Ethics Commission complaint, filed May 1, alleges that City Administrator Ford Handley and City Clerk Renee Eberly both knew Kennon had been the subject of a brief police investigation within a day of the September 2024 incident — but that no attempt was made to preserve the building’s security camera footage. Eberly later told a reporter that no recordings of the Sept. 2, 2024 incident existed. Handley has said he takes his role seriously and will cooperate fully with the review.
The truce, for now, covers the council’s day-to-day work — but not the underlying disputes. The Ethics Commission investigation remains open, the Dixon-Moreno federal lawsuit continues to move through the courts, and the question of whether the body camera footage will ever be publicly released remains undecided as the council weighs insurance implications and waits on legal advice.
Whether the civility holds through the next contested agenda item — or the next executive session about the footage — will say a great deal about whether the apology marked a turning point or merely a pause in one of Baldwin County’s messiest municipal feuds.