Judge Orders St. Louis to Promote Firefighters after 'Misconduct' in Process

Promotions in the St. Louis Fire Department, on hold for four years, are expected to resume after a judge found in favor of more than 20 firefighters who claimed the city improperly blocked their advancement.

The 45-page ruling from St. Louis Circuit Judge Joseph Whyte, released New Year's Eve, could cost the city more than $1.1 million to compensate the firefighters for lost wages since a February 2022 promotion freeze.

Whyte also slapped the city with the firefighters' multi-year legal bill, writing that they were entitled to attorney fees because "there is sufficient evidence" city officials "engaged in intentional and reckless misconduct by unlawfully halting promotions." Plaintiff attorneys are expected to file an estimate for those fees next week.

Robert "Dan" Eveland, a St. Louis fire captain who became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit after his promotion to battalion chief was blocked four years ago, said he is happy with the ruling and hoping for a speedy resolution. He and his fellow plaintiffs were denied promotions, but assigned to those jobs anyway, without the corresponding increase in pay and future pension benefits, Eveland said.

“We’d like to get these positions filled so we can get on to the important things, which is the safety of firefighters and the safety of citizens,” he said. "I think the whole department is ready to move on.”

The ruling reverses a policy put in place under former Mayor Tishaura Jones' public safety director, Dan Isom, who contended the fire department was top heavy with management and that firefighting resources should be shifted to emergency medical services, which handle the bulk of calls for service. Leaders with Local 73 of the International Association of Fire Fighters, while not a party to the lawsuit, had been critical of the Jones administration's freeze on promotions, arguing the staffing issues it created were dangerous and unfairly hurt members' finances and careers.

Unlike her predecessor, Mayor Cara Spencer is an ally of the fire union. While she stopped short of saying the city would forgo an appeal, the mayor said allowing the department to fill supervisory roles is "incredibly important" for staffing and morale.

"It's my hope that promotions within the fire department can resume soon," Spencer said Friday.

The ruling is the latest in a decades-long legal saga, fraught with racial politics, over promotions within the St. Louis Fire Department.

The Jones administration's 2022 promotion freeze allied it with the Firefighters Institute for Racial Equality, a nonunion organization also known as FIRE whose membership is made up of many Black firefighters. FIRE for years had fought to halt promotions from a list based on a 2013 promotion test. The group, along with more than 130 Black firefighters, sued in 2015, claiming the test was racially discriminatory.

In 2017, the city reached a settlement with FIRE, agreeing to continue using the 2013 promotion list until a new test could be held. City officials had hoped to hold the new test in 2018.

The city Personnel Department did not hold a new test that year due to lack of funding, however, and the city continued to promote from the 2013 list until the freeze was implemented in 2022.

The affected privates and captains sued soon after the freeze, at first trying to reopen the 2015 federal case and then filing a new lawsuit against the city and FIRE in federal court.

In July 2024, U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry sided with the city against the firefighters, dismissing many of their claims and writing the firefighters "have no protected property interest in promotions." A federal appeals court reached the same conclusion.

The federal courts, however, declined to rule on the firefighters' state law claims, and in 2024 the firefighters sued the city and FIRE in St. Louis Circuit Court.

Meanwhile, the city and FIRE in 2023 agreed to amend the 2017 settlement agreement so the city could stop using the 2013 promotion list. Former Mayor Jones' Personnel Director, Sonya Jenkins-Gray, canceled the promotion list that November.

The city earlier had entered a $370,000 contract for a new fire promotion test. The firefighters asked Judge Whyte to block the city from using the new test, pointing out the city "bizarrely" had set a pass/fail bar at 44%, a standard Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson said was too low and resulted in nearly every one of the test takers passing.

The new test, Eveland and his cohorts argued, would allow a large, new crop of firefighters to qualify for promotion. The city contended the firefighters are not "entitled to be promoted" and the lawsuit was "a shameless attempt by a predominately white group of firefighter plaintiffs to hijack a 2017 settlement agreement secured by Black firefighters."

Judge Whyte sided with Eveland, blocking the use of the promotion list from the city's new test.

Whyte's ruling could hold implications for the fire department's governance. Before the disputed 2013 test, the city's first Black fire chief, Sherman George, got caught up in promotion politics when he refused an order from then-Mayor Francis Slay to make several promotions that had been pending since 2004. George was demoted in 2007, outraging much of the city's Black leadership. The promotions George refused similarly were caught up in a court challenge brought by an African-American firefighters group.

The lawsuits the George promotion episode spurred led to court rulings affirming the fire chief was required to follow the executive authority of the public safety director and the mayor.

Firefighter union officials and their attorneys had argued in 2022 the city's public safety director had no authority to block promotions within the fire department. Whyte agreed, acknowledging that while the public safety director and mayor could compel a fire chief to make promotions, they could not halt them.

"The Fire Chief has the discretion to fill vacancies and the courts will not intervene with that discretion," Whyte wrote.

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