FAIRHOPE, Ala. — The City Council voted Monday to add Interim Police Chief Terry Sanders to the list of finalists for the permanent top police position in Fairhope.

Five candidates had been selected by a search committee last Tuesday after a round of 30-minute interviews with a list of top 10 applicants.

After a report from the search committee Chairman Vann Saltz, Councilman Dan Stankoski asked the council to consider adding Sanders to the list of candidates.

Stankoski said that some police officers had approached several committee members and recommended that Sanders be added to the list of candidates to be interviewed. He said the committee reached a consensus not to do that, deciding to leave that decision in the council’s hands.

“The council has the ultimate authority for appointing a new chief, including selecting which candidates to interview,” he said.

He also said there was another reason for raising the issue with the council on behalf of the committee.

“There was one committee member who delegated that authority to (General Superintendent) Gregg Mims and (Human Resources Director) Rhonda White,” Stankoski said, referring to search committee member Mayor Tim Kant, who let those staff persons rank the original pool of 116 candidates for him.

“When we got it down to 25 (candidates), he changed his vote and his rating procedure. That skewed the result. It was an attempt to put in someone other than Sanders. It was well known that had that not occurred, (Sanders) would have made the top 10 list (of candidates who received interviews last week),” Stankoski said.

The council voted unanimously to add Sanders to the list of candidates it will interview.

“I think (Sanders) should have been on the (interview) list from the start, as well as some local candidates to make sure that we had someone from Fairhope on the list,” Kant said Tuesday morning. “I think it would have been nice to have added (Sanders) from the start.”

Those statements differ from statements attributed to him at two recent search committee meetings, according to minutes from those meetings.

According to minutes of the May 5 meeting, Rhonda “White spoke up and said that she feels that the derogatory statements made by Mayor Kant at the (April 7) meeting had a direct impact on how the committee members voted.” The minutes further state: White said “that if Mayor Kant’s scores were thrown out, that (Sanders) would have ranked in the top 10. (Committee members) Bob Callahan and Rick Wilson felt that in order to protect the integrity of the process and the committee that it should be up to the City Council as to whether or not Chief Sanders receives an interview.”

The April 7 minutes also state that Kant made several allegations about Sanders, which did not reflect positively about him. However, Tuesday morning, Kant said in an interview with the Courier reporter, that Sanders was “a fine man” and deserved to have a chance to interview for the job.

Kant also said the minutes from both meetings were improperly approved by e-mail instead of in an open meeting, and that he did not give his approval to them.

“I have not seen them,” Kant said at first, referring to the minutes from those meetings. But when pressed, he said, “I did see some last night (at the council meeting). I didn’t know if those were the minutes or not. I question a lot of what I saw in there.”

Kant said he has asked Mims to investigate the issue.

“I did tell him to look into it,” Kant said. “I asked how did all this get out. I thought we were supposed to keep some of this confidential. He is going to look into it.”

The minutes for both meetings were approved shortly before the Monday night council meeting, but were not included in the council packet.

Neither Saltz nor Stankoski could be contacted late Tuesday morning to determine whether any changes would be made in the minutes in response to the actions that Kant asked Mims to take.

Sanders, 52, was appointed on an interim basis in January after the council decided not to reappoint then-chief Mike Comalander, now a captain in the department.

Stankoski chaired an effort to conduct a nationwide search for a new chief, which included appointing a five-person search committee. Kant serves on the committee, with Stankoski serving in a liaison, and White in an advisory, capacity.

The committee updated the police chief job description to include a college degree among other qualifications, and the job was advertised with a salary range of $85,000 to $110,000.

At the committee’s request, White developed a job criteria scoring sheet for each committee member to use to narrow the original pool of 116 applicants to a list of 25 candidates.

According to the April 7 minutes, Kant asked Mims and White to score the candidates and bring him the list of 25 candidates they ranked on his behalf. It was at the April 7 search committee meeting, according to the minutes, that the mayor’s scoring procedure became an issue.

“Mayor Kant did not agree with the numbers,” the April 7 minutes state. “He stated that the committee should not move forward (with accepting the list of 25 applicants) since these numbers and this ranking did not reflect his scores accurately.”

After Kant was presented with the list of 25 candidates by Mims and White, he told White to make some changes, according to the minutes.

“He requested that she change five of the candidates’ scores to a 10 (out of a scale of from 0-10),” the April 7 minutes state. “Mayor Kant then commented that this was correct, however, his requested changes had not been made because if they had been, then the top 25 candidates would be different than what appeared before him now.”

White said, according to the minutes, that just changing those scores to 10s would not necessarily change who ended up in the top 25.

“He replied that she didn’t change all of the other scores to a Zero as he’d requested and had she done that then top 25 would indeed be different,” the April 7 minutes state. “(White) stated that she only understood his request to be to change five candidates’ scores to 10 and did not realize that he wanted her to also change everyone else’s scores to zero.”

Kant said Tuesday that the other local police department employee he wanted to see receive an interview was Capt. Steve Griffis.

After a discussion at the April 7 meeting, the committee decided to not change the existing 25 list, despite Kant’s comments, according to the minutes.

During that April 7 meeting, according to the minutes, Stankoski “asked the mayor, ‘If you’re having all these problems with him, then why don’t you get rid of him and fire him for just cause?’ The mayor responded, ‘Oh, I’m working on that. Believe me, that’s what I want to do.’

Stankoski said Tuesday that “what (Kant) wanted to do, in his opinion, is make sure an in-house candidate scored higher in hopes of getting in. His intent was to give all the others a zero is what I understand but that was between him and Rhonda. I find it very difficult to understand why they were all to be given zeros at that stage, but as to why he wanted that done, you would have to ask him that.”

Kant said he did not want to get into the specifics of all the allegations of the minutes without reviewing them in greater detail.

Stankoski has said on several occasions during the course of the search committee’s work that all interviews of the finalists will be held in open meetings.

“I came here in good faith to do a job,” Sanders said Tuesday morning. “I understood that I would be given serious consideration for the job but not any special consideration. I am just pleased that the council decided to give me an interview.”

The council will meet at 6 p.m., Monday, May 18, to discuss the process for conducting the interviews.