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The Missouri Court of Appeals at St. Louis said Kinloch officials when they removed Darryl Williams as mayor after he won a write-in contest against current Mayor Evelyn Carter.

Williams had alleged that he wasn’t properly notified of the decision by members of the city’s Board of Aldermen, who backed three articles of impeachment against him after the election had ended.

Among the claims that led to his quick, post-election ouster was that he owed personal property taxes when he declared his plan to run for mayor.

The board also said he was a “fugitive� for misdemeanor traffic matters when he began his campaign.

Court records show he never was seated as mayor of the community, which has a population estimated at 264 residents.

Williams’ attorney, Donnell Smith, declined to discuss the decision.

“I really don’t have a comment on it,� Smith said Tuesday.

Kinloch, Missouri’s first and oldest Black town, was once a thriving city of 10,000 residents. Today, Kinloch residents live in an area of less than a square mile of largely abandoned streets, vacant buildings and roadways blocked by debris. The median household income in the city is about $28,600, according to U.S. census figures.

Much of the decline began in the 1980s when St. Louis Lambert International Airport began buying homes in Kinloch for a noise-abatement program, ultimately purchasing roughly 1,360 properties. Over the next decade, the population plummeted, and Kinloch fell further into poverty and blight.

Williams is the second mayor to be impeached by aldermen in the past decade.

In 2015, the board impeached then-Mayor Betty McCray for a variety of offenses, including allegations that she promised to forgo overdue rents on city-owned property in exchange for votes in the municipal election and misused her office in an attempt to fire two city officials.

The articles of impeachment also accused McCray of falsely claiming that she and her daughter share a home in Kinloch. The daughter, according to charges, resides in Ferguson.

In 2011, another former Kinloch mayor, Keith Conway, was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for using tens of thousands of dollars of city funds to pay for vacation travel and personal expenses.

Conway also was ordered to pay back $62,429.

Conway used city money to pay for several Caribbean cruises, plane tickets and train trips, as well as a $9,000 delinquent federal tax bill and monthly TV and electric bills for the city-owned house where he lived rent-free. The money was part of a $90,000 grant that was supposed to be used for an extra police officer in the impoverished community of about 300 people.