Mayor and city council slapped with another lawsuit

By Charles Sercombe
The lawsuits keep rolling in.
Add another lawsuit that Mayor Adam Alharbi and city councilmembers are now facing.
This time, however, it’s not the mayor or a councilmember who is filing a lawsuit against one of their colleagues.
Instead, Ed Wolyniec, a resident, is accusing the mayor and council of violating the state’s Open Meetings Act (OMA) by agreeing to pay for Alharbi’s private legal bills to prevent 37 ballots from being counted from last November’s election.
Mayor Alharbi sought legal help on his own to make sure the ballots are not counted, but recently got the council’s OK for the city to pick up his legal bills.
What’s at stake for him is that if the ballots are counted, the mayor could find himself out of a job as mayor and with his challenger, former councilmember Muhith Mahmood, taking his place.
“Under any circumstances, using taxpayer funds for Alharbi’s personal benefit is grossly inappropriate, but the magnitude of this impropriety is far greater because the individual defendants actually voted to use taxpayer funds to support the election of one candidate for mayor over another,” Wolyniec said his lawsuit, which was filed in Wayne County Circuit Court.
On top of that, Wolyniec has also filed a lengthy ethics violation complaint against Alharbi, for orchestrating the vote by the city council to OK having the city pay for his legal fees – which is estimated to amount to around $200,000.
The lawsuit regarding the OMA violation mentioned the first attempt to pay for Alharbi’s legal bills being included on the council agenda after the council had met in a closed session and then came back to vote on the matter in an open session.
That portion of the meeting, however, was not live-streamed for the public to see, the ethics violation complaint noted.
The vote taken after the closed meeting was later ruled invalid because it lacked a quorum of participating councilmembers.
Wolyniec’s lawsuit accuses the mayor and council of violating a number of required procedures to enter into a closed meeting, such as stating the reason for the meeting.
Wolyniec, in his lawsuit, took issue with Alharbi allowing the closed session to go forward.
“As presiding officer, Alharbi bore responsibility for ensuring the Council followed the procedures required to call a closed session, including the 2/3 roll call vote required by MCL15.267(1).
“Alharbi called for and accepted a voice vote in place of a roll call vote, notwithstanding that a roll call vote was used for every other motion at the meeting, evidencing that Alharbi knew, or was aware, that the vote to enter closed session did not satisfy MCL 15.267(1), and (was) intended to violate that section.”
On top of that, Wolyniec’s lawsuit contends that the closed meeting was called to consider “the potential commitment of city funds to pay Alharbi’s personal legal fees.”
The lawsuit asserts that Alharbi knew the rules for going into a closed session, and also had previously admonished councilmembers over adding items onto the council agenda at the last minute without giving advance notice to the public.
Alharbi had told councilmembers that “Open Meetings Act violations have occurred far too often among council members. If I filed a complaint every time a procedural line was crossed during meetings, I’d be filing them after almost every single session.”
As for the motion to pay for Alharbi’s legal fees, the lawsuit quotes Councilmember Mohammed Alsomiri in his ethics complaint against the mayor.
“The motion to approve (the) mayor’s legal fees was coerced to the floor with no citizens present and no recording,” Alsomiri said in his complaint.
At a later meeting, a resolution to pay for the mayor’s legal fees for his fight to prevent the ballots from being counted was on the agenda before the meeting, and was passed by a minimum majority of council votes.
The Review reached out to Alharbi for comment via his Facebook Messenger, but he did not reply.
The maximum penalty for violating the state’s OMA is a $500 fine. Wolyniec is also seeking his legal fees.
So far, there are multiple ethics violations that councilmembers are facing, and Alharbi is also facing a lawsuit filed by Councilmembers Alsomiri and Yousuf Saed over his legal fees. The mayor has also sued the council over its firing of former city manager Adel Al-Adlani.
At the same time, the mayor has called for unity among the council.
“We have to make sure that we’re focused on the city and try to not make any disagreements, division,” Alharbi said at an Aug. 11 council meeting.
Posted Oct. 2, 2026