Alabama Supreme Court Backs Prichard Mayor in Fire Chief Firing Dispute

PRICHARD, Ala. — The Alabama Supreme Court has settled a years-long legal dispute over the firing of Prichard’s former fire chief, ruling that Mayor Troy Ephriam acted within his authority when he dismissed Mark Trenier in 2013 without first bringing the decision before the City Council.

In an opinion released Friday, justices pointed to the terms of Trenier’s original employment contract, unanimously approved by the Prichard City Council in 2007, which guaranteed him the fire chief position for five years. That agreement expired on April 19, 2012, and once it did, justices wrote, Trenier became an at-will employee under Alabama law — meaning the city could terminate him for essentially any reason.

Ephriam testified that he had discussed Trenier’s job performance with him on multiple occasions while evaluating the fire department’s effectiveness, ultimately concluding that Trenier had failed to provide the leadership the department needed. Trenier countered that his firing was unlawful, arguing that Alabama law required at least four City Council members to approve his dismissal — a vote that never took place.

The Supreme Court disagreed, reasoning that the council’s original 2007 vote approving Trenier’s hiring effectively satisfied that requirement when his contract expired and the city chose not to renew it. The council had, in fact, voted twice on whether to extend Trenier’s contract — once in March 2012 and again that October — and both attempts failed to gain enough support to pass.

The ruling upholds an earlier decision by Mobile County Circuit Court Judge Robert Smith, who found that Trenier’s tenure effectively ended when former Mayor Ron Davis, who had originally appointed him, lost his 2012 reelection bid to Ephriam. In his ruling, Smith wrote that an incoming mayor shouldn’t be forced to keep a fire chief appointed under a previous administration whose policies and priorities might clash with the new mayor’s own agenda for the department.

Trenier, who left the Mobile Fire-Rescue Department in 2007 to take the Prichard job, filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Ephriam and the city in Mobile County Circuit Court in the summer of 2013. With the Supreme Court’s ruling now final, that legal challenge appears to have reached its conclusion, closing out a dispute that had lingered over Prichard’s city government for roughly two years.

The case adds to a string of high-profile personnel disputes in Prichard tied to the change in administration, following a similar legal fight over the city’s former police chief that was resolved in Ephriam’s favor in an earlier ruling.

At-will employment in Alabama

Alabama follows the employment-at-will doctrine: unless a contract or statute provides otherwise, an employer may end someone’s employment for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all, as long as the reason is not itself illegal. That is why the April 2012 expiration of Trenier’s five-year contract was central to the court’s ruling.