ST. LOUIS — Mayoral candidate Cara Spencer has added to her attacks on opponent Tishaura Jones’ record as city treasurer, noting that a former aide to Jones pleaded guilty last year in an embezzlement case involving a charity that helps children and families.
“We not only need a mayor that we can trust, we need a mayor with a team we can trust,†Spencer said in a televised debate Tuesday.
Spencer then referred to the case of Leonard C. Johnson III, who was deputy chief of staff and then parking programs coordinator for the treasurer’s office from 2013 to early 2018.
Johnson was sentenced last November to two years of probation and ordered to repay $23,998 to the Lessie Bates Davis Neighborhood House, an East St. Louis nonprofit, after pleading guilty to aiding and abetting embezzlement.
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The U.S. attorney’s office for Southern Illinois said the nonprofit’s former executive director, Christopher Coleman, directed the payment of neighborhood house funds to business entities controlled by Johnson and another defendant.
The two then used the money they received to make cash payments back to Coleman, prosecutors said.
Jared Boyd, Jones’ chief of staff, said “none of the legal issues that he was charged with … arose from his service in the treasurer’s office.â€
Boyd said Johnson left the treasurer’s office in 2018 to become director of neighborhood business development for St. Louis Development Corp., the city’s top development agency.
He was placed on leave from the development job after he was indicted.
Spencer, an alderman, also has criticized Jones’ use of two financial firms that have faced criticism from the federal Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with a bond offering for a library district in suburban Chicago.
One firm, Mississippi-based Comer Capital Group, has been a financial adviser to Jones’ office on some bond financings connected with the city parking division, while the other, Atlanta-based IFS Securities, has been an underwriter.
The SEC, in a complaint pending in federal court, with providing poor advice to the library district in suburban Chicago that will cost the district over $500,000 more in interest on a bond offering. Comer Capital has denied any wrongdoing.
In 2019, IFS agreed to pay a $50,000 civil penalty in a settlement with the SEC over the agency’s allegation that it acted negligently in selling the library bonds.
The company, which didn’t admit or deny the SEC findings, shut down later in 2019.
Boyd said the treasurer’s office had no problems with either company’s performance and that both had helped save the city money.
In an interview with the Post-Dispatch in November, Jones said if SEC complaints were a litmus test of whether a firm should be used, a lot of firms, even some larger local ones, wouldn’t pass the test.
As an example, Boyd noted that St. Louis-based Stifel Financial Corp., which also is in a pool of underwriters used by the treasurer’s office, also has faced SEC allegations.
Among other things, Spencer has previously hit Jones for awarding a $7 million parking management contract to a St. Louis company and past campaign donor. Jones has said the firm was selected in a competitive process.
Spencer in a statement Thursday said people “need to have confidence their tax dollars work for them, not for cronies and questionable insiders.â€
Campaign report flap
Meanwhile, Spencer’s campaign on Thursday pushed back at Jones’ recent criticism of Spencer for delaying until this week the disclosure of about $13,000 in donations that should have been reported before the March 2 primary. Spencer aides say that was unintentional.
Joan Bray, a Spencer campaign aide, noted that Jones in July 2012 had amended a report filed by her own campaign committee to include a $50 contribution it made to the city Democratic Central Committee that should have been reported three months earlier.
Bray said her point was that such reporting mistakes often happen during campaigns.
