The city of Orange Beach is declining to release portions of internal police department surveys that could show when city officials first learned of a 2024 incident in which officers found Mayor Tony Kennon inside the city’s Coastal Resources Building following a 911 call reporting a possible domestic violence incident.
The surveys were cited in an ethics complaint filed against Kennon, which argues the timing of when a key city official became aware of the Labor Day 2024 call has significance. The 911 caller had reported seeing a man beating a woman on the balcony of the public building. Orange Beach Police Department officers found Kennon inside a closed office in the building during a brief investigation at the time, and body camera footage that later became public showed officers interacting with him behind the closed door. In the footage, Kennon told officers the office was “our [he and his wife’s] getaway on the weekends” and said his wife, Paula, was with him, though she was never officially interviewed by police. Kennon has denied any wrongdoing but has acknowledged he was in the building at the time.
The ethics complaint was filed May 1 by City Council members Jeff Silvers, Ginger Harrelson and Robert Stuart. It alleges that Kennon threatened them with lawsuits and political retaliation on April 21 if they moved to release the body camera footage, amid efforts to settle an ongoing federal lawsuit involving local attorney C.C. Dixon Moreno. The complaint also states that City Attorney Jamie Parris Logan has said she did not learn of the 2024 incident until roughly April or May of 2025, while reviewing employee surveys about the performance of the city’s then-police chief. It further alleges that City Administrator Ford Handley and City Clerk Renee Eberly learned of the incident within a day or so of it occurring.
Logan later completed an internal investigation into the police department’s response to the 2024 incident, which found “deficiencies in the [police] response were attributable to broader issues related to training within the Police Department,” according to the complaint.
In response to a public records request, Logan cited two Alabama Supreme Court decisions in declining to release narrative portions of the surveys, saying they contain “sensitive and private personnel information” submitted by employees “pursuant to an expectation of privacy.” Open records law expert and attorney Evans Bailey said one of the cited decisions is typically used to protect confidential sources, while the other leaves the release decision to a judge’s discretion. “It may also depend on if they were expressly given a guarantee that these things will be kept anonymous, and there may be. It will depend on what the narrative says. You really have to take this stuff on a case-by-case basis,” Bailey said. The records denial also initially cited two Alabama Attorney General opinions that did not appear directly relevant to open records requests; Logan later clarified the response with different, more applicable opinions from 1996 and 2017.
The city did release “AI response summaries and charts” of the surveys, though Logan said the city does not have the original individual survey responses as submitted by police employees, since the survey was conducted as an online, unattributed submission. The summaries, covering surveys from 2024 and 2025, show that under former Orange Beach Police Chief Steve Brown, employees who responded were most concerned with compensation, communication, accountability and advancement within the department, with roughly 19 percent citing accountability and 20 percent citing morale as top-three issues. One summary described a “recurring theme” of perceived inconsistent leadership and accountability, citing reports of favoritism, biased promotion processes and a lack of transparency from command staff. Brown did not respond to a request for comment.
Some of the released charts lack clear labeling or context, including graphs that appear to omit portions of questions or answers, leaving some sections difficult to interpret.