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Kent Davis isn’t going out without a fight. Gov. Kay Ivey seems ready to give him one.
Davis, the commissioner of Alabama’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs, formally declined Gov. Kay Ivey’s request that he resign, stating in a video message posted to the ADVA website on Friday that he had done nothing wrong and denying allegations that his department had mismanaged funds. He also said he had informed Ivey’s office of his decision in a formal letter.
In response, Ivey has called a special meeting of the Veterans Affairs board for Tuesday, with the only action item a motion to remove Davis. A press release from Ivey’s office said the governor has “lost confidence in (Davis’) ability to lead the department.”
“I respectfully disagree with the inaccurate claims made against the Alabama Department of Veterans Affairs this week,” Davis said in the statement. “At no time did our actions jeopardize the State of Alabama in fulfilling its obligations of the $2.1 billion in (American Rescue Plan Act) funds.”
Davis’ statement came in response to a letter Ivey sent him on Thursday, asking for his resignation and informing him that she had removed a Veterans’ Affairs board member. Ivey said cause exists to fire Davis – should he choose not to resign – over the department’s mishandling of ARPA funds and his ability to cooperate with the heads of other state agencies.
While her letter didn’t mention it, the action against Davis appears to be directly tied to his filing of an ethics complaint against Alabama Department of Mental Health Commissioner Kim Boswell.
That complaint was the result of an inter-agency squabble concerning potential legislation that would have required ADVA and ADMH to work together – and share some funding – for veterans’ mental health care. According to two sources familiar with the details of the spat between the agencies, ADVA officials believed that Boswell and others at ADMH worked with lobbyists and friendly lawmakers to try to kill the legislation, and were ultimately successful in significantly scaling it down.
The sources said the two lawmakers who did the most work on the bill – Sen. Andrew Jones and Rep. Chip Brown – told Davis that ADMH officials were working against the bill, and that the scaled-back version had been written by ADMH lobbyists.
Alabama Daily News reported that Davis, in his ethics filing, noted that Brown and Jones told him that they “didn’t understand how ADMH was legally/ethically able to so overly use lobbyists to do its bidding with elected officials.”
Both Brown and Jones told ADN that they regretted the inter-agency disagreement, that they hated to be dragged into it and that they weren’t aware of the ethics complaint prior to its filing, but neither denied making the comments to Davis that were included in his ethics complaint.
For his part, Davis noted that he had reservations about filing the ethics complaint, because he wasn’t sure the allegations constituted a violation, but he said he was ultimately bound by state law, as an agency head, to file the complaint.
Given his history, that’s a requirement that Davis would take seriously. After 10 years in the U.S. Navy, Davis left active duty to receive his law degree. He then went back on active duty with the U.S. Army, working in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and serving as a trial advocate and ethics attorney for two years.
However, the bickering between ADVA and ADMH was not the only issue raised by Ivey. In her letter Friday, Ivey also included letters from the Department of Finance and ADMH that raised concerns about the proposed use of ARPA funds. The problems administering the funds, Ivey said, put the department in jeopardy of not receiving the money.
