A St. Louis Civil Service Commission hearing on whether the city’s personnel director should be fired ended Tuesday after eight days of testimony over two months.
The presiding hearing officer, retired Judge Edward Sweeney, said it’s now up to the commissioners.
“The commissioners make a recommendation to the mayor about what should happen, and then it's up to the mayor to accept or reject that recommendation,” Sweeney said.
Sweeney said both parties have 14 days to submit legal briefs before a recommendation is made.
Lawyers for the city and Sonya Jenkins-Gray gave their closing arguments in a case centered around Jenkins-Gray taking a city vehicle with a subordinate to Jefferson City for a personal matter. Jenkins-Gray has said she was there to pick up documents left in her car that her husband, the Rev. Darryl Gray, activist and chair of the city’s detention facilities oversight board, used to travel to the capital.
City lawyers have argued that Jenkins-Gray’s behavior amounts to malfeasance and that she put Anthony Byrd, the personnel worker who drove her, in a perilous position.
“The director behaved in a way that demonstrated clearly that she should not be the director of personnel for the City of St. Louis,” said Reggie Harris, a lawyer representing the city.
Harris has argued that the real reason Jenkins-Gray traveled to Jefferson City was to find out if her husband was having an affair. The Grays have denied those allegations. The mayor’s chief of staff later said he “inferred” that claim based on vagueness surrounding the trip and his investigation.
“The fact of the matter is that she asked [Byrd] to get a city car, she requested that it not be a marked car. She asked him to accompany her,” Harris said.
Lawyers for the city on Tuesday also played parts of a conversation secretly recorded by Jenkins-Gray between her and Byrd more than a month after the July incident in which she questioned if she did anything wrong. She said those worries came after she spoke with another city worker who had indicated that there might have been an issue with taking the vehicle. Jenkins-Gray said she needed to record Byrd explaining if there was an issue taking the car.
“You're either going to be on my side or you're going to be on the other side,” Jenkins-Gray said in the recording. “I'm not going to ever ask you to do anything illegal. There's no abuse of power, nothing. I depend on my team to tell me if I'm getting ready to do something wrong or if I am doing something wrong and if you all don't tell me that, I think that what I'm doing is OK.”
Lawyers for Jenkins-Gray never denied the trip took place and said she didn’t know it broke city policy. She asked Byrd before the trip if she could take the vehicle for personal reasons, to which he replied yes. Jenkins-Gray’s lawyers have highlighted that she paid the city back the $170 cost of the trip.
The city hired Harris from the Stinson law firm. Invoices from October to January total more than $114,000 for Harris and associates representing the city, First Alert 4 reported Tuesday.
The unprecedented hearing is the first time the city has held a legal proceeding to determine if the personnel director should be fired.
The crux of Jenkins-Gray’s argument is that Mayor Tishaura Jones is engaging in attacks against her and her husband over political differences. Jenkins-Gray has objected to the mayor’s calls to bring the personnel department under her control. Darryl Gray has also cited political differences, including his endorsement of Wesley Bell in the August congressional primary against Cori Bush, an ally of Jones.
Her lawyers also relied on witness testimony, including that of former Personnel Director Rick Franks and deputy personnel director Sylvia Donaldson, who said they hadn’t seen an individual get fired for breaking the city vehicle policy. Jenkins-Gray’s lawyer Ronald Norwood also argued that the mayor and her staff have had a history of political interference.
“Malfeasance requires some willful intent. It requires something that you do deliberately to violate your office,” Norwood said. “This was a rule violation, a rule that no employee in the history of the rule … has ever even received a slap on the wrist.”
