State Rep. Spencer Collier is the front-runner for a contract position coordinating economic development for the city of Bayou La Batre, according to informed sources — an arrangement that would place a sitting member of the Alabama House on the payroll of a city government run by his cousin.
The Bayou La Batre City Council voted roughly two weeks ago to authorize Mayor Stan Wright to make the hire. Under the terms contemplated, the contractor would be paid $52,000 a year.
Wright and Collier are cousins.
Collier declines to discuss it
Collier said he preferred not to comment on the report for the time being.
A former state trooper, Collier was at the time employed as a legal investigator for the Mobile law firm of Cunningham Bounds. He had remarked in recent months on the competing demands of public office and his work with the firm — a familiar complaint in a state whose Legislature is nominally part-time and, in practice, is not.
Who Collier is
Collier, 36, was nearing the end of his second term as the Republican representing House District 105, which takes in south Mobile County, including the Bayou. He and his wife, Melissa, live in Bayou La Batre and have three boys and a girl. He is a graduate of Troy University, where he studied criminal justice and political science.
Within two years he would be one of the more consequential figures in Alabama state government: Gov. Robert Bentley appointed him director of the Alabama Department of Homeland Security in 2011, and he later became secretary of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, a post from which his 2016 firing would help trigger the political crisis that ended Bentley’s governorship. In December 2009, he was a legislator looking for a steadier living.
Why the Bayou needed a development coordinator
Bayou La Batre in 2009 was a city under sustained economic strain. The seafood industry that gave the town its identity — shrimping, oystering, the processing houses and the boatyards along the bayou — had been battered from several directions at once: cheap imported shrimp, rising fuel costs, and the destruction left by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, from which the city was still visibly recovering. Federal recovery money had built houses; it had not rebuilt an economy.
A development coordinator’s job, in that context, was to find something else for the town to do. Collier said he was already working on several projects, including a natural gas storage hub that he estimated could generate as many as 400 construction jobs beginning in the spring.
The obvious question
The arrangement raised the question that arrangements like it always raise. A sitting legislator, whose votes in Montgomery affect the flow of state money to municipalities, would be paid by a municipality — one led by a relative — to attract investment to it. Nothing in Alabama law as it then stood clearly prohibited such a contract. The state’s ethics statutes were notably permissive about legislators holding outside employment, including with public bodies, and the practice was common enough that it had a name in Montgomery: double-dipping.
That would change. Within a year of this report, a newly Republican Legislature meeting in special session would pass a package of ethics laws that tightened the rules on legislators’ outside income and on the relationship between public officials and the entities they influence — a package Collier himself would support.
For Bayou La Batre, the calculation was narrower and more practical: a city of a few thousand people, with a shrinking tax base and an urgent need for jobs, was hiring the person best positioned in Montgomery to help it find them.