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ST. LOUIS — Godfrey Ekwenugo’s contracting firm does a lot of work for the city, stabilizing vacant and abandoned buildings.

He’s happy to have the city’s business, but things were better when he was paid promptly.

“They’d cut you a check in less than a week,” said Ekwenugo, owner of Premier Finish Contractors. “But now, shoot, it’s two months-plus.”

Vendors, contractors and city employees say St. Louis isn’t paying its bills on time — and it’s not for lack of money.

They point to problems with payroll and vendor invoices. Turnover and retirements in the St. Louis Comptroller’s office — as well as the forced departures of top staffers in recent years — have aggravated the issues. One government agency even sued the city and the comptroller over unprocessed payments.

The practical impacts are rippling through the city. Employee paychecks have been wrong or even missed entirely. Police officers say they’ve had to wait months to be reimbursed for equipment expenses, and one police group is citing the problems in its call for a state takeover of the department.

Some who work in City Hall are blaming the city’s chief financial officer, Comptroller Darlene Green, as they raise questions about her leadership of a crucial office.

Many say Green is hardly hands-on addressing the problems, pointing to her work schedule. Green, who is paid $112,000 a year, comes into work once or twice a week, City Hall employees and current and former comptroller staffers say, leaving the office’s day-to-day operations to her deputies.

Green’s office said she was unavailable for an interview for over two weeks and canceled one scheduled for Wednesday. In a written statement to the Post-Dispatch, she acknowledged she often worked “remotely” but emphasized, “I am always in the office when required.”

Yet former employees of her office and other city workers say they often had to track her down. Her staff would have city contracts that needed her signature delivered to her house, or she would drive to City Hall to pick up a stack of unsigned contracts.

More than a dozen current and former city employees spoke to the Post-Dispatch about Green and the comptroller’s office, most on condition of anonymity.

Green, 68, was appointed comptroller by Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. in 1995, replacing Virvus Jones who resigned after pleading guilty to income tax fraud. Beginning with a special election in 1996, she has won eight consecutive elections, often running unopposed.

The job is a powerful one. It is an artifact of the city’s 1914 reform charter, which bestowed leadership of accounting functions to an independent elected official rather than giving the mayor control of financial operations. All the city’s invoices run through Green’s office, requiring review and approval from her staff. All city contracts require her signature — or that of her top deputy, Beverly Fitzsimmons. Green also has one of three votes on the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, which must approve all city contracts. A staffer in her office largely controls that body’s agenda.

Given Green’s responsibilities, the city’s Board of Aldermen turned to her for an explanation earlier this year when they started hearing complaints about late payments.

“I’ll just end up hearing, ‘That’s in the comptroller’s office right now,’” Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer, of Boulevard Heights, said at a budget meeting held in May.

Green told aldermen, “It’s kind of like a cliché” to blame her office.

The fault, she said, was with a new accounting system she didn’t want. What was supposed to be an upgrade — replacing a 40-year-old accounting system with cloud-based Oracle software — instead caused headaches that are still lingering more than 18 months after the switch.

Green called the new system “horrific,” and blamed the previous mayoral administration and the consultant it hired, Accenture, to implement it. (Green and her deputy, however, both voted for the contract.)

Green also blamed employees in other departments for not properly submitting invoices and contracts.

“A lot of the things that would be delayed is really held up at the departmental level,” she told aldermen.

Green on Wednesday again laid blame on city departments, not her office, for the problems.

“When a department enters an invoice with proper documentation, the invoice is paid usually within three working days of being received by the Comptroller’s office,” Green told the Post-Dispatch in her written statement. “Every system has hiccups and a learning curve at the beginning. This new system has challenged us all.”

But in multiple interviews with the Post-Dispatch, current and former comptroller staffers said it was Green’s office that caused many of those issues by failing to ensure the proper training was complete before the new accounting system went live in March 2022.

After it went live, current and former staffers say, they struggled to keep up with a backlog of payments. And overwhelmed supervisors couldn’t quickly respond to questions and issues with the new system. Other City Hall employees say vendor invoices languished awaiting comptroller approval or they were rejected with little explanation.

The late vendor payments have been especially hard for small minority contractors trying to grow their businesses. That has undermined the city’s goal of growing the pool of such contractors, as

“It is a huge burden on them if they’re trying to get off the ground,” a city employee, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue, said about late payments to small contractors.

The St. Louis courts went as far as to sue Green over their unprocessed invoices. Green signed a consent judgment in May pledging to resolve payment issues with the courts within five business days.

“There was a lot of chaos going on,” said one current comptroller employee who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It was very poor planning, poor management. ... The proper training was never provided.”

The disorder is even being cited by the group that represents Black St. Louis police officers as one of the reasons it supports revoking local control of the city’s police department, a change city leaders won a decade ago and that the mayor spent the first part of this year fighting off in Jefferson City.

Donnell Walters, president of the Ethical Society of Police, recently complained about officers waiting “months for a dysfunctional bureaucracy to reimburse them” for uniforms and equipment.

The delays have “severed” relationships with vendors, some of whom now want payment up front, Walters said in an interview. In one instance in the second half of last year, officers who were out of town to retrieve a suspect had a city credit card declined for nonpayment, Walters said.

Some officers have left the understaffed department because of the finance problems, he said. And while the issues with City Hall’s financial management have been a concern since local control was instituted in 2013, he said it has gotten worse over the last 18 months.

“The funds are there,” Walters said, “but it’s like you don’t know who’s paying it out.”

‘A lack of training’

Implementing a new accounting and procurement system is difficult for any organization. The comptroller’s office already tried once, 10 years ago, before abandoning the effort around 2016. Green’s office said that system “did not work well with the complicated payroll requirements of the city.”

The city’s move to Oracle should be an improvement and, eventually, make government more efficient, current and former comptroller employees say. The problems are largely due to insufficient training and getting longtime employees in both the comptroller’s office and elsewhere in City Hall used to the system, they say.

“The software works as it’s supposed to,” the current comptroller staffer said. “The problem is a lack of training and a lack of support.”

Denise Peeples, who retired from the comptroller’s office at the beginning of this year, said she didn’t get training for months after the system went live.

“Our supervisor at the time didn’t even get training,” Peeples said, referring to LaTaunia Kenner, who was a deputy comptroller at the time. “She didn’t even get training. And that we never understood. Because I mean, she’s right up under Ms. Green.”

The Accenture and Oracle contract specifies that the city would choose employees to be trained and use those employees to train the rest of the staff.

“The comptroller’s office has the accounting functions, so I think everyone was looking to that office for guidance,” said a former employee of the comptroller’s office who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Green’s office said planning began just as the pandemic did, limiting the initial training to Zoom meetings even as the COVID-19 emergency placed additional burdens on the city.

“City employees needed to work both on implementation of the new system, and to keep the city afloat because of reduced staffing in a paper-driven environment,” Green said.

Green said her office now offers training to city employees on request and her staff will help any city employees “struggling to get a transaction through the system.”

But others describe blockages in Green’s office. The new system gives multiple comptroller employees the ability to approve invoices, the current comptroller employee said, meaning staff would sometimes assume another person would approve the invoice and leave it in limbo.

If a city department entered a payment the wrong way, or missed a step under the new system, “they don’t even make you aware” why the invoice wasn’t processed, said a City Hall staffer.

“All they do is say no to stuff,” the employee said.

In April, the second phase of the project, a new payroll system, went live. There were problems there, too. Green acknowledged them at the May budget hearing, even telling aldermen to “look at your paychecks” and report any problems.

There were so many problems that the payroll office on the second floor of City Hall stopped allowing city employees to enter. The door is now locked for “security purposes,” and gives employees a number to call instead.

Green conceded that “some unhappy employees did make the staff feel uncomfortable.”

But the issues with the payroll system have subsided with time, said St. Louis Police Officers Association Business Manager Joe Steiger.

“Initially there were some big problems, like they missed people’s entire checks,” Steiger said. “But those big things were when we first switched over and since then it’s been mostly resolved. ... When people’s checks aren’t right they’re certainly upset, so we hear it.”

‘The office had taken a turn’

Amid the turmoil, longtime staffers at the comptroller’s office have been leaving.

City budget documents show only 72 of 95 positions in the comptroller’s office and associated divisions were filled as of July 10, and at least a handful of other staff have left since then, leaving about a quarter of the office’s positions empty.

“People just weren’t happy anymore — the office had taken a turn, and it wasn’t really getting any better in terms of morale,” said the former comptroller employee. “There were a lot of bad management decisions.”

Green said her office faces the same challenges as every other enterprise finding qualified employees and hopes the lifting of the city’s residency requirement will draw more applicants. She pointed out the city’s civil service commission recently approved her request to create two new assistant comptroller positions that are part of the office’s “succession plan.”

Green over the summer demoted Kenner, one of her two top deputies, who later retired. Her other top deputy, 43-year City Hall veteran Fitzsimmons, is slated to retire at the end of the year, according to current and former employees.

Kenner’s departure over the summer left some city departments unsure of their contact in the comptroller’s office. Kenner had led the side of the office that dealt with city real estate and public finance, including handling the city’s bonds on the convention center expansion. Green declined to explain why she was demoted. Kenner later retired.

Kenner wasn’t the first top aide Green has pushed out. Though she oversees a staff of civil servants rather than political appointees, Green has ousted at least three top aides. In 2016, Green put her chief of staff, longtime employee Elaine Spearman, on forced leave, according to court documents. Spearman declined to comment.

Before Kenner, Green put former Deputy Comptroller Jim Garavaglia on forced leave. A 32-year veteran of the office, he said he was blindsided by the 2019 move and escorted out of City Hall by an armed marshal, according to a lawsuit he filed against Green and the city. Garavaglia alleged he was ousted to make way for Kenner. His lawsuit was dismissed and Garavaglia declined to comment.

Lower-level employees have departed more recently. Over the summer, the retirement of two employees in the comptroller’s office who oversaw the calculation of tax increment financing payments, a development incentive, retired. The developer of Union Station said his firm had been waiting about a year for the comptroller’s office to provide the information necessary to redeem $18 million in TIF incentives approved for the project by city lawmakers.

The comptroller’s office ultimately had to hire an outside firm, on the recommendation of City Counselor Sheena Hamilton, to help the comptroller’s office review its TIF calculations.

Missing in action

While many of the comptroller’s experienced employees have left the office, the manager herself is rarely showing up.

Her current and former staff describe her appearances in City Hall as infrequent — maybe once or twice a week.

“������Ƶ would have couriers deliver stuff to her,” said one former employee who spoke on condition of anonymity and remembers delivering documents to her through her car window in front of City Hall. “We would have to try and track her down.”

City Hall employees say it’s been like that for years. Garavaglia, the former deputy comptroller, said in a deposition from his lawsuit that he only interacted with her once a week or every other week and that he could “count on one hand” the number of times he met one-on-one with her.

In her Wednesday statement, Green said it was “more important to be accountable and responsive to constituents and does not always require being in the office.”

“In the coming months I expect more time will be spent in the office as in the past,” she wrote.

Green’s attendance has long been part of City Hall lore, but her deputies and a staff of dozens of longtime civil servants were able to get the bills paid and the contracts into Green’s hands.

But with the loss of employees and the impending retirement of Fitzsimmons, many are wondering who will make sure the city’s bills are paid on time.

“In a city of our size,” said Linda Martinez, who served as the deputy mayor for development under Mayor Lyda Krewson and experienced the delays firsthand, “someone should be available to sign checks and contracts every day.”

Austin Huguelet of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

Originally posted Friday, Nov. 17.