Incumbent Orange Beach mayor Tony Kennon and sitting council president Jeff Boyd squared off Tuesday evening in a debate hosted by 1819 News.
The recurring theme of the debate saw Boyd painting Kennon as a tirading tyrant whose frequent outbursts have caused the city legal troubles and the loss of potential partnerships. Kennon, in return, argued that he is a “bulldog” when he needs to be, but also a statesman and diplomat, and that his aggressive style gets results.
Boyd said he initially did not want to run for mayor, but changed his mind when he got a call from Police Chief Steve Brown informing Boyd he planned to retire.
“When the police chief called me, and he said ‘I’m retiring tomorrow; I’m turning my paperwork in,’ my body just shifted,” Boyd said. “There were many meetings in backrooms discussing ht police department—this didn’t just happen in one thing … I was sick to my stomach when he decided to retire.”
Kennon chided Boyd for bringing up Brown’s retirement, arguing that it is the policy of the city not to discuss personnel issues.
“Just because you’re a good person, doesn’t necessarily make you a good employee,” Kennon said. “For whatever reason, you’ve tried to make this a good guy, bad guy issue about the police chief. No, police chief is just like any other department; they have a standard they’re expected to uphold … We’re not going to diminish that bar for anybody, and if any place needs to be excellent, it has to be the police department—it has to be as close to perfect as it gets. That’s the difference: you’re a councilman, all you have to do is slap people on the back and smile. I gotta wear the black hat, I’ve gotta be the bad guy. I have to make difficult decisions that hurt.”
That led Boyd into discussing the recent controversy surrounding a police report from September 2024 in which an employee at the Pleasure Island Tiki Bar claimed to witness a naked man—presumably Kennon—on the balcony of the Coastal Resources building punching a woman in the face repeatedly.
“It’s interesting that you would take that journey and go down that path,” Boyd said. “… It’s really interesting to tell me that you have got to hold a high standard at a police department when you have officers that left because they couldn’t stand taking you home at 3 o’clock in the morning. I completely disagree when you’ve got a call—what caused most of this—to the Coastal Resources Center with four cops that don’t want to do their job because they’re afraid for their jobs and they’re afraid to talk.”
The exchange came near the ned of the debate, but the tension could be felt throughout the event.
When Boyd would criticize Kennon for his leadership of the city, Kennon would counter by pointing out where Boyd voted to support the mayor’s actions.
Boyd pinpointed the city’s decision in 2022 to pay $35.5 million to create a city school system as the point when he began to diverge from Kennon.
“The council that exists now spent 10 years, every single meeting, everything we did getting out of debt; it was a monumental task,” Boyd said. “Every department head was on board. Everybody had the exact same goal, and we worked and we got there. And when we got there, we had our reserves and we bought a school system. And when we bought the school system, is truly where the mayor and I started truly disagreeing.
“The school system was a big bite from a budget—when I started in 2012, our budget was about $33 million … We had to tax our lodging taxes to fund it, which did not exist before that happened. When you think of $100 million, we’d already bought a school, we’d spent about $10 million on a performing arts center, we’d taken on all of this and then we took on a $47 million athletic complex. That’s half of our annual budget on one building.”
Boyd said he supports the school and athletic complex generally, but had a different vision of how the city would get there. But Kennon pointed out that Boyd voted in favor of the actions.
“But you voted for it, so I don’t understand,” Kennon said. “You had a diatribe a mile long about how you would not, but when it shows up in the council meeting, you voted for it. That’s not a man of principle—I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude.”
Kennon said he started the plan in 2008 to get the city out of debt by 2018 so that “when something presented itself, such as wonderful as the school system, we were in the position to go into debt picking our terms.”
“We got $125 million at 3 percent—today, that’s free money. We’re making money on that,” Kennon said. “Our debt ratio is one of the lowest in the state, debt to revenue. We are in fantastic shape.”
Boyd criticized the mayor for not including the council more heavily in the decision-making process and said he regretted voting for the school system, although a dissenting vote would not have changed the outcome.
“It was one of the largest and worst discussions we ever had in a work session because the council and I asked you, specifically, where is plan B?” Boyd said. “And you went into a tirade so bad I thought your head was going to explode arguing that we weren’t going to get a plan B.”
Similar stories peppered the debate, including one from Boyd about Secretary Hal Taylor of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency taking a meeting in Orange Beach regarding traffic and never speaking one word due to Kennon’s approach.
Kennon would counter each time that he has successfully led the city to numerous achievements and through difficulties, including the BP oil spill.
Voters will make their decision at the polls on Tuesday, August 26.
