ST. LOUIS — Mayor Tishaura O. Jones said this week her office should have full hiring-and-firing power over who serves as the city’s personnel director, a position long insulated from elected leaders by 1940s-era civil service reforms.
The mayor made her proposal on Wednesday to a citizen commission tasked with recommending changes to the city charter for voters to consider later this year.
Jones and other mayors have long wished for greater control over the personnel department. It oversees a critical function: the hiring, firing, payment and promotion of the city’s more than 5,000 civil service employees. But unlike in other city departments, once a personnel director is hired, they can’t be fired except through a process that includes formal charges of malfeasance. That setup has allowed personnel directors to serve long tenures across multiple mayoral administrations and exercise considerable independence from each of them.
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That independence was a selling point for reformers trying to curb political patronage in city government in the early 1940s.
But in recent years, aldermen have publicly criticized the personnel department for outdated hiring procedures that haven’t kept up with labor shortages and city job vacancies.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.
Notably, Frank, who had overseen personnel since 2004, announced he would retire shortly thereafter, giving Jones a rare opportunity to shape the department’s leadership.
Jones got the three-member civil service commission, which mayors appoint, to allow her to name her own interim director for several months. And then in late 2022, Jones hired a permanent director, Sonya Jenkins-Gray, from a three-person list the commission sent her.
Jones said Wednesday that since Jenkins-Gray took over, the city has made significant progress in overhauling an outdated personnel system.
But she said there is still a lot left to do to fix outdated processes that were allowed to take root in the department when mayors were largely powerless to intervene. The city continues to struggle to fill hundreds of vacant jobs, hobbling work to fix roads, trim trees, police the city and run the jail. And Jones said that’s forced the city to spend money on outside contractors less reliable than regular city workers.