Spanish Fort’s newest City Council member officially took office this week, capping a decade of community volunteer work with his first step into elected public service. William Anthony “Bill” Menas Sr. was sworn in as the council’s District 2 representative during a Monday meeting, with Baldwin County Probate Judge Tim Russell administering the oath. Menas’ wife, Crystal, held the Bible during the ceremony while the couple’s two sons, Will and Christopher, looked on from the audience.
Menas, 52, was selected by the council earlier in December to fill the seat vacated by former Councilman Dennis Dismuke, who resigned after accepting a job outside the state. Under Alabama’s council-manager form of municipal government, vacancies on the Spanish Fort City Council are filled by appointment of the remaining council members rather than by a special election, which placed the decision in the hands of the city’s five sitting council members. District 2 takes in a portion of the fast-growing city that has seen some of the heaviest residential and commercial development along the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay in recent years.
A City at a Turning Point
A Realtor with Bellator Real Estate & Development, Menas said the timing of his appointment lines up with a pivotal moment for the city. “With everything coming to Spanish Fort right now this is a key time to get involved, try to get our arms around this growth, and just have some smart growth going forward,” Menas said following the ceremony.
Spanish Fort has transformed over the past two decades from a small bedroom community on the bluff above Mobile Bay into one of Baldwin County’s major retail and residential centers. The city, incorporated in 1990, sits astride the Interstate 10 corridor that links Mobile to the beaches of the Gulf Coast, and its commercial anchors include the Eastern Shore Centre and the sprawling Spanish Fort Town Center developments along U.S. Highway 98. That growth has brought sales tax revenue and new neighborhoods, but it has also brought traffic, infrastructure demands and the kind of planning questions that increasingly dominate council agendas on the Eastern Shore, alongside neighboring Daphne and Fairhope.
Menas said his years spent watching that transformation from the sidelines — and from inside the real estate industry — shaped his decision to seek the appointment. His professional life gives him a front-row view of the housing market that is driving Baldwin County’s population boom, and he said he hopes to bring that perspective to deliberations on zoning, development requests and the city’s long-range plans.
Roots in the School System
Menas said his ties to the community first deepened when his older son, Will, was in eighth grade and the city’s new high school had just opened. Spanish Fort High School, which opened its doors in 2005, quickly became the centerpiece of the city’s identity, from its athletic programs to its band. Menas began volunteering to help the school’s fledgling band program, using his own enclosed trailer to haul equipment to competitions and events across the region.
From there, he said, his involvement expanded into whatever the school needed. Band programs at a new school require an enormous lift from parents — uniforms, instruments, trailers, chaperones and fundraising — and Menas became a familiar presence at the school as the Toro band program grew. His volunteer work over the following decade stretched across booster activities and school support efforts as both of his sons came up through Spanish Fort’s public schools.
His family’s connection to the school system runs deep in another way as well. Crystal Menas has taught chemistry and marine biology at Spanish Fort High School for about five years, after spending twelve years teaching at Daphne High School. Marine science classes along the Eastern Shore draw on an unusual natural classroom — the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and Mobile Bay sit just down the hill from the campus, giving students hands-on exposure to one of the most biologically rich estuarine systems in the country.
She came to the city’s schools after a teaching career that began across the bay in Daphne, and her science classrooms put students to work in laboratories and in the field, taking advantage of the coastal setting Baldwin County offers. Teaching runs on a different clock than real estate or industry, but it is a household where both careers share the same foundation of preparation and follow-through.
The couple’s younger son, Christopher, was preparing to follow his older brother to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to study chemical engineering, a path that keeps the family’s roots spread between Spanish Fort and Tuscaloosa. With Will already established on campus and Christopher preparing for the move, the Menases join thousands of Baldwin County families who make the drive up Highway 98 and Interstate 65 for football Saturdays and campus weekends, even as their daily lives remain anchored to the Eastern Shore.
Friends of the family describe the Menas household during those school years as the kind where projects were always underway and an extra pair of hands was always welcome — a reputation Menas will carry with him from the booster club to the council chamber.
A Work Ethic Built Over Decades
Menas, who was born in Pensacola and moved to Robertsdale as a child before eventually settling in Spanish Fort, described his path to the council seat as rooted in a strong work ethic built over decades. “I come from a very humble beginning,” he said. “I’ve been working my entire life since I was 15 — out in the fields, working on trucks, pumping gas, running forklifts. … I’ve never been afraid of work.”
His early years in Robertsdale placed him in the heart of south Baldwin County’s agricultural country, where farming, trucking and manual labor were the economic bedrock of communities like Summerdale, Silverhill and Foley long before the county’s coastal boom reshaped its economy. Menas said those years — hauling, lifting, fixing and getting up early — taught him lessons that still guide how he approaches business and public service.
After 21 years with Selig Chemical Industries, Menas retired from the company in 2000 and went into business for himself. Building a company from scratch in middle age, he said, required the same discipline he learned as a teenager, and the venture eventually grew into the company he leads today. Along the way he also took on a leadership role within Bellator’s commercial real estate division, working on the commercial side of a market that has become one of the busiest in coastal Alabama.
That blend of experience — chemicals and industry on one hand, real estate and development on the other — is an unusual resume for a council member, and Menas said it gives him a practical understanding of both the businesses the city wants to attract and the residents who worry about how growth changes their neighborhoods.
What the Appointment Means for District 2
Council seats in Spanish Fort are at-large positions on the ballot but districted for representation, meaning District 2 residents look to Menas as their direct voice on the five-member council. The issues most likely to fill his first months in office mirror the ones facing the entire Eastern Shore: managing traffic along the Highway 98 and Interstate 10 corridors, keeping pace with road and drainage needs as subdivisions multiply, and deciding how to balance the commercial growth that funds city services with the quality-of-life concerns of established neighborhoods.
Baldwin County as a whole has ranked among the fastest-growing counties in Alabama for years, drawing new residents from Mobile, from out of state and from across the country, and Spanish Fort has captured a large share of that inflow. Each new roof brings demand for schools, public safety, parks and utility capacity, and city leaders have repeatedly emphasized that the coming decade will determine whether the city grows on its own terms or is shaped by forces outside its control.
Menas said he intends to approach the job the same way he approached the band program — by showing up, doing the unglamorous work and staying until the job is finished. He thanked the council for its confidence and the residents of District 2 for the opportunity, and he encouraged residents to reach out to him directly with their concerns.
Monday’s ceremony itself was brief but personal. Probate Judge Tim Russell, whose office handles everything from probate matters to marriage licenses and elections across Baldwin County, administered the oath of office as he has for generations of Eastern Shore officials. Menas placed his hand on the family Bible held by his wife, an educator who has spent her career in the same school system her husband has spent years volunteering for, and took the oath with his sons standing close by. For a man who built his career in warehouses, fields and eventually boardrooms, the moment marked a distinctly new chapter — one conducted not with a handshake over a sales contract but with a pledge to the residents of a city he helped build in his own way, one trailer load of band equipment at a time.
For a city that has grown as quickly as Spanish Fort, the councilman said, the goal is simple: make sure the progress that has defined the last twenty years leaves the city a better place to live for the next twenty. “This is home,” he said. “We raised our family here, and I want to be part of getting this right.”