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By Fred Guarino

The Lowndes Signal

The Hayneville Town Council met on Monday, July 10, but not without controversy.

The council included one member, Carole C Scrushy, who election was declared by Lowndes County Circuit Judge Terri Bozeman Lovell in a court order to be void and illegal.

However, a conflicting order issued by Lowndes County Probate Judge John E. Hulett on Monday, July 10 stated, “The circuit judge has no jurisdiction over any election matters unless an election contest has been filed.”

The order goes on to state that as there has not been an election contest filed, all orders issued by the circuit judge in case CV2016-0000 are “null and void.”

It decreed that Scrushy was elected that she be sworn in as a member of the council in good standing.

Monday night’s meeting resulted in no actions being taken, including approval of the agenda and the payment of bills.

Even the vote to adjourn was spit with three for and three against.

Present for the meeting were Sharon Reeves, Cynthia McDonald, Lula Tyson-Bailey, Daniel, Scrushy and Kim Payton.

Daniel began the meeting by announcing that Scrushy was sworn into office earlier Monday.

Motions to adopt the agenda, pay the bills and to adjourn all resulted in three-three ties with Payton, Scrushy and Daniel voting “yes,” and Reeves, McDonald and Bailey voting “no.”

After the meeting, Bailey said, “Carole Scrushy should not be on this council because Judge Bozeman Lovell ruled it (her election) was illegal and therefore void.”

She said, Lovell ordered Daniel, Payton, Bailey, McDonald and Reeves to meet. And she said, “The mayor has defied a court order. He did it before. So, he’s doing it again.”

Reeves said, “We’re not making any progress in what we need to do because nobody wants to be fair and meet. How could we approve bills that we’ve never seen? We can’t do things that we don’t know about. I’m not going to say ‘yes’ to things I know nothing about.”

However, she said, “I hope we can get together and start settling things.”

According to Reeves, Monday’s meeting was only the second meeting of the new council since council members were sworn in October.

She said one meeting was only attended by the new council members. While she said they were called to meet once with the old council, she said, “Why would we have a meeting with the old council. We need to start fresh.”

Daniel left immediately after the meeting and did not respond to a request for comment.