SUMMERDALE, Ala. — The mayor of Summerdale met reporters in the lobby of Town Hall, declined to answer a single question, and said eight words before walking away.
“Everything is well in Summerdale. Have a nice day.”
Behind that sentence sits a police chief on administrative leave, a Town Council that says it learned about the decision after the fact, a rumored successor who is a sitting county commissioner, and a councilwoman who believes the whole episode is aimed at her family.
What Happened
Summerdale Police Chief Michael Gaull was placed on administrative leave on Wednesday, Sept. 16, by Mayor Randy Farris.
Gaull, a veteran law enforcement officer, has led the Summerdale Police Department since 2023.
Place 2 Councilwoman Norma Wilson Giles, the senior member of the Town Council, said the move caught the council entirely by surprise.
“It’s terrible. We knew nothing about it,” she said in a Friday interview. “We didn’t receive any communication from the mayor whatsoever. Not a phone call, not an email, nothing.”
“Absolutely, the council has been blindsided,” she said. “The mayor told me in a text message that he has asked the chief to resign because he wants to go in a different direction.”
Giles said that when she texted Farris asking him to explain the decision, he responded that he wants Gaull to resign so the town can hire a new chief. As of Friday, Gaull had not tendered a resignation, and Giles said she does not believe he will.
“As far as knowing of any allegations or knowing if any even exist, council has not been informed,” Giles said.
Why Resignation Versus Termination Matters
The distinction Giles drew is the procedural heart of the situation.
“If the police chief were to resign, there is no recourse for the council,” she said. “But if he does not choose to resign, he is entitled to a hearing and the council would have to vote to fire him.”
That is the structural check in most Alabama municipal governments. A mayor may have day-to-day administrative authority over department heads, but removing one typically requires council action — and, where a hearing right attaches, a process in which the grounds for removal must be stated and answered.
A resignation bypasses all of it. There is no hearing, no vote, no public record of why. Which is why a request for a resignation, rather than a move to terminate, is a meaningful choice.
Giles has made her position on that explicit.
“I hope that our chief does not resign,” she said. “I would appeal to him not to and let this play out.”
The Rumored Successor
Multiple sources say Farris wants outgoing Baldwin County Commissioner Matt McKenzie to be the new police chief.
McKenzie leaves office in November following an unsuccessful bid to become Baldwin County’s next sheriff.
Giles said she could not confirm whether Farris has McKenzie in mind, but said she has heard the same account from multiple directions.
“I have been told by several, several people that are involved with the county commission and the county, and he is saying that when he leaves office in November, he is going to work as a police chief for a local municipality, but that someone has to leave first,” Giles said. “I believe that to be the game plan.”
Giles said Farris has had his sights set on a new police chief since taking office.
McKenzie did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Gaull.
The Family Ledger
Giles, who has served on the Summerdale Town Council since 2000, believes personal animosity toward her and her family is driving events. She said so directly.
The relationships she describes are worth laying out, because they explain why she reads a personnel decision as a family matter:
- Giles is the sister of former mayor David Wilson, whose 33-year tenure Farris ended in the 2025 municipal election.
- Wilson and Giles are also siblings of Baldwin County Commissioner Billie Jo Underwood, whose official vehicle expenditures McKenzie questioned this summer.
- Giles is the mother of Jeremiah Giles, who was defeated in the May Republican primary for a Baldwin County Circuit Court seat by prosecutor Kristi Hagood.
“As far as Mr. Farris is concerned, there is definitely animosity towards me,” Giles said. “Over and over again he is very ugly to me.”
She said Farris has made “all kinds of ugly, snide remarks” to her during Town Council meetings.
“I do not respect this mayor,” she said. “He doesn’t like me because my brother was the mayor is all I can come up with.”
Giles said the motivation behind what she describes as McKenzie’s animosity is less clear to her. She noted that McKenzie attended nearly all of her son’s campaign events and that her family has “always been as nice to him as possible.”
“I don’t know why he has taken this position he and Billie Jo have,” she said. “I don’t know.”
These are Giles’s characterizations. Neither Farris nor McKenzie has responded to them.
‘Shaking in Their Boots’
Giles said Farris seems determined to undo what her brother accomplished for Summerdale, and that the effect on town staff has been immediate.
Since Gaull was placed on leave, she said, other city officials are “just shaking in their boots” wondering whether they will be removed next.
Whatever the merits of the underlying dispute, that is a real organizational consequence. A department head removed without stated cause sets an example that every other employee in a small municipal government reads.
The Mayor’s Responses
Farris has said almost nothing publicly.
After multiple unsuccessful attempts to reach him by phone, reporters went to Summerdale Town Hall to request comment. He met them in the lobby and refused to answer questions, saying only: “Everything is well in Summerdale. Have a nice day.”
Responding to further requests for comment Friday afternoon, Farris declined to explain why he placed Gaull on leave, except to say, “this is an ongoing situation.” He also declined to respond to Giles’s claims.
Personnel matters are an area where public officials routinely decline comment, and there are legitimate reasons for that — employee privacy, potential litigation, the risk of prejudicing a process that has not concluded. That said, a mayor’s decision to place a department head on leave is a public act with public consequences, and the absence of any stated rationale is itself part of the story.
A Saturday Meeting
The council asked the mayor for a special-called Town Council meeting Saturday to discuss Gaull and the police department. That meeting was set to begin at 1 p.m. in the Summerdale Municipal Complex.
A special-called meeting is the council’s available lever. It puts the matter on a public agenda, in a room where members can ask questions on the record and where residents can attend.
Summerdale
Summerdale is a small town in south Baldwin County, along the corridor between Foley and the county’s interior. Its police department is correspondingly small.
In municipalities of that scale, a police chief is not an administrator at a remove. The chief is a person residents know by name, who works shifts, answers calls and is visible in daily life. A change in that position registers locally in a way a comparable change in a large city does not.
It also means that municipal politics and personal relationships are not separable categories. The people making these decisions have known each other, and each other’s families, for decades.
Where It Stands
Gaull remains on administrative leave and has not resigned. No allegations against him have been stated publicly, and the council says it has not been told whether any exist. The mayor has declined to explain the decision. The rumored successor has not commented.
What happens next depends substantially on a decision that belongs to one person: whether Michael Gaull resigns, or requires the process the council would have to follow to remove him.
Update: Council Votes 4-2 to Reinstate the Chief
Updated Sept. 20, 2026.
Summerdale’s police chief is going back to work.
Meeting chambers at the Summerdale Municipal Complex were packed Saturday afternoon as the Town Council met to vote on Police Chief Mike Gaull’s future at the police department. After a 45-minute executive session, officials returned and voted 4-2 in favor of reinstating him.
Town officials said Gaull will return to work soon, but did not give an exact date.
Residents Still Do Not Know Why
The vote resolved Gaull’s employment status without resolving the question that filled the room.
“I’m still confused. I don’t know what the heck happened,” Summerdale resident Ken Dombrowski said. “Anybody can make an allegation. You know, it doesn’t mean anything.”
Gaull was placed on administrative leave after Mayor Randy Farris asked him to resign over allegations that have not been specified publicly. Efforts to ask the mayor about those allegations after the vote were unsuccessful. He declined to comment.
Town of Summerdale attorney Reynolds Sorell indicated the information exists and that releasing it is not the town’s call to make.
“The mayor said that Chief Gaull wants to request what those allegations were,” Sorell said. “Then he would give that to them, but I will leave that to Chief Gaull to disclose to the public, if he so chooses.”
That places the disclosure decision with the chief rather than the administration — an arrangement that is common in personnel matters, where a public employer’s ability to discuss allegations against an employee is constrained, but the employee is generally free to release the information themselves.
What the Vote Does and Does Not Settle
A 4-2 council vote to reinstate is a direct reversal of the mayor’s action, and it is the clearest public signal yet of where the governing body stands. In Alabama’s mayor-council form of municipal government, the balance of authority over department heads between the mayor’s office and the council is a recurring source of friction, and a split vote on a police chief’s status is the kind of question that tends to resurface rather than close.
What the vote settles is that Gaull remains chief. What it leaves open is everything the council debated behind a closed door for 45 minutes, the nature of the allegations, and whether the working relationship between the mayor’s office and the police department can be reconstructed from here.