Powerful St. Louis personnel director facing disciplinary charges, hearing

ST. LOUIS — Sonya Jenkins-Gray, the powerful director of the city’s personnel department, is facing disciplinary charges her attorney says are part of an unjust effort by the mayor’s office to oust her.

The charges, the first of their kind in recent memory, were revealed Thursday morning at a meeting of the Civil Service Commission, which oversees the personnel department.

Steven Barney, commission chair, did not disclose the specifics of the charges at the meeting or who filed them. But he said a future hearing was imminent.

The news marked the latest in a series of peculiar developments at the department, which oversees one of the city’s most important functions: the hiring, firing and promotion of more than 4,000 civil servants. Earlier this summer, aldermen greenlit a state audit of the department in response to whistleblower complaints of mismanagement. Then in August, Jenkins-Gray went out on a monthslong medical leave for what her husband described as a stress-related issue. And now, upon her return, she faces the prospect of becoming the first personnel director in the city’s history to be removed from office.

Jenkins-Gray said in a text message Thursday that she had not yet received formal notification of the charges, which she must receive 10 days before the commission can hold a hearing on them. The commission could then recommend to the mayor that Jenkins-Gray be removed.

Conner Kerrigan, a spokesperson for Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, who appoints civil service commissioners and oversees the bureaucracy that the personnel department staffs, declined to comment.

But Jenkins-Gray’s attorney, Ronald Norwood of law firm Lewis Rice, said Mayor Tishaura O. Jones was pushing the charges, and they were baseless.

“Once the facts of this matter are fully revealed, it will become evident to everyone that Director Sonya Jenkins-Gray is being wrongly and unfairly targeted by Mayor Jones for purely petty political reasons,” Norwood said in a statement.

The broadside was a remarkable break between Jenkins-Gray and the mayor who once fought to hire her.

Neither Jenkins-Gray nor Jones expressed concern about the audit when it was authorized in late June. A preliminary state investigation into one whistleblower complaint conceded that auditors found “no indication of fraud or corruption,” or direct evidence that any rules were broken.

But since the initial complaint was lodged, several others have been forwarded to the state auditor’s office. And a source familiar with the complaints has said they included concerns about Jenkins-Gray’s husband, the Rev. Darryl Gray, making regular appearances in personnel department offices and influencing policy. Gray, who has used his position as chair of the city’s Detention Facility Oversight Board to criticize the administration’s management of the city jails, has denied wrongdoing.

Also this summer, Jenkins-Gray courted potential controversy when she opposed Jones’ push to give the mayor’s office greater power over Jenkins-Gray’s job.

Unlike in other city departments, once a personnel director is hired, he or she can’t be fired except through a process that includes formal charges of malfeasance. The setup is designed to insulate city hiring, firing and promotion from the patronage politics that consumed them before the civil service reforms of the 1940s. And it has worked largely as intended: multiple personnel directors have served long tenures across multiple mayoral administrations and exercised considerable independence.

No personnel director has ever been removed. Jenkins-Gray is only the fifth permanent personnel director — the fourth to serve longer than a year — since the city civil service system was created in 1941.

But in recent years, aldermen have publicly criticized the personnel department for outdated hiring procedures that haven’t kept up with labor shortages and city job vacancies. And department heads and mayors have complained about the department’s power to speed or slow hiring and decide who is even eligible for a job.

Former Personnel Director Richard Frank, for instance, brushed back Jones in late 2021, when he said his department would run the search for a new police chief to replace the retiring John Hayden, a departure from the 2017 search when the city used a consultant. Frank’s unexpected retirement shortly thereafter created the opening for the mayor to replace him with Jenkins-Gray, a longtime human resources executive hired in late 2022.

But earlier this year, Jones asked a citizen commission tasked with recommending changes to the charter to consider a new setup giving the mayor direct hiring and firing power over the director’s position, and Jenkins-Gray lobbied against it, saying it would weaken civil service.

Ultimately, the commission did not make any recommendation on the matter.