“It’s peaceful,” Jennings Councilman Rodney Epps said at the beginning of the City Council meeting on Monday, January 25. “We haven’t been peaceful in a long time.”
The council has been riven by controversy since newly elected Mayor Yolonda Fountain Henderson filed suit against every council member and department head last March, in a foiled bid to assume all hiring and firing power for the city.
The public meeting on Monday stayed peaceful, but only because council members moved behind closed doors into executive session to take up the meeting’s most controversial piece of business: whether or not to move forward with impeachment proceedings against the mayor.
They voted 7-1 to do just that, City Clerk Cheryl Balke confirmed.
Epps said that Councilwoman Yolanda Brown was the sole vote against impeachment. “She still wants to try to work with the mayor,” Epps said.
Though Henderson’s suit against the city was dismissed, she quickly ran afoul of the council again by trying to award a contract to a vendor, Tony Weaver, when the council had voted against it. Weaver had to be escorted from the November 23 council meeting by police when he persisted in sitting at the staff table after his contract had been voided.
At that point, the mayor said that Weaver would be paid anyway. City attorney Mary Jamis Kresyman read the law that the mayor would violate if she paid Weaver with city money, along with the sentencing guidelines, which include up to one year in jail.
“That was dangerous,” Epps told The American.
Jennings contracted with attorney John M. Hessel of Lewis Rice to handle the impeachment proceedings. He is the longstanding city attorney for Florissant and Kirkwood. The council deferred questions about the impeachment process to Hessel, who did not immediately return a phone call and email from The American.
One contentious note from the public portion of the meeting on Monday hints at a board squabble to come. Councilwoman Francine Dugger pointedly remarked that the mayor had obtained a draft version of the city’s request for proposals (RFP) for its police contract, which comes open this year. Dugger pointed out that the city could be sued if any outside party saw a draft of the RFP before it is made public.
Henderson said she only asked for a copy of the draft RFP so she could type it more professionally.
Since March 2011, the city has contracted with the St. Louis County Police Department for police services, at the rate of $3 million per year. “I just feel like we’re paying a lot for police service, and we’re paying more than when we had our own,” Henderson told KMOX in September.
Epps told The American that the mayor is misinformed.
“With the police department we had, it was hard to balance the budget,” Epps said. “They did so many wrong things, we had so many law suits against us. The liability insurance was killing us.” He also said crime in Jennings is “down 30 percent” under the county police contract.
Just as her suit sought to give the mayor unilateral hiring and firing authority, Epps said he thinks the mayor also wants a police department under her control.
“With her, I think it’s more about control than safety,” Epps said. “I want our citizens to be as safe as they can be, at the cheapest rate.”
Mayor Henderson and the attorney who filed her suit against the city, Elbert Walton, did not immediately return an email from The American requesting comment.
The Jennings City Council meets at 7 p.m. on the last Monday of each month at City Hall, 2120 Hord Ave.
