Jennifer Florida walks into one of four separate storage areas located underneath city hall. This is where St. Louis keeps its history. And it is crumbling.
"Almost a million documents, and these are supposed to be stored and preserved forever," she says. "These collections were abysmal. Atrocious."
Tall shelves hold large books of family records, many with pages visibly shredding beneath ancient, stitched covers. Huge maps peel at the edges, and some of the illustrations have almost entirely faded.
Blond, bespectacled and never without her notebook, the former 15th Ward alderwoman behaves a bit like a real-life version of Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope character in Parks and Recreation. The Recorder of Deeds office was not part of Florida's plans. Mayor Slay asked her to take over after Carpenter resigned. But now that she has the job, she's become obsessed with her "nerdy girl" duties and is mounting a vigorous campaign to stay in the position by winning the November election against Carpenter.
"This whole thing has kind of sucked me in, in a way I didn't expect it to," she says.
Back in her office, Florida slides open a desk drawer. Inside there are stacks of envelopes, rubber bands and stickers bearing the name of Carpenter's 23rd ward.
"This is what I keep finding," she says. "You don't keep your campaign literature in your offices."
In her first week, Florida transferred control of the technology and preservation account to the city treasurer. She also requested the city counselor investigate the office's bidding procedures, including why it paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to companies associated with Jim Treis, deputy chief Peggy Meeker's son (neither of whom responded to repeated requests for comment).
Florida butted heads with Meeker right away. After Florida's appointment, Meeker took a long vacation and then an equally long medical leave. While she was gone, Florida found out that for at least two years, Meeker told employees to use a retired worker's log-in account to access the office's vital records. That constituted a security breach of millions of private documents, such as birth records, death certificates and numerous papers containing Social Security numbers and other personal information. Had she not reported the breach herself, Florida says, the state could have punished the entire office by disconnecting its database to such sensitive records, perhaps indefinitely. When Meeker returned from sick leave in September, Florida fired her.
That same week, the city counselor's office published its audit of the bidding process that paid Meeker's son to renovate the office in 2009 and 2013. The Recorder of Deeds office paid about $250,000 for the two renovations, and the audit says Treis and Meeker hid the fact they were related from the Board of Public Service, which was supposed to act as a middleman between the Recorder of Deeds' Office and contractors. The audit also reports that employees complained that Meeker threatened their jobs if they cooperated with the city counselor's investigation.
"She liked to play people against each other," recalls one staffer. "It was a power thing."
The final paragraphs of the audit describe Meeker actively interfering with the investigation. She asked BPS president if he could "just say" that she had consulted his office during the 2013 bidding process. He declined and advised Meeker to tell the truth.
"Yes, it was common knowledge amongst us that Carpenter had not been coming to work," says Florida. "But I didn't have any knowledge of how things were really operating here."
It's a beautiful Saturday morning, and Carpenter is seated at Chris' Pancakes & Dining in south city, her favorite breakfast spot. Her adult son John sits across the table as she corrals eggs and sausage on her plate and chats amiably with the waitress.
Carpenter does not shy away from debating the allegations against her. She contests nearly all of the details and the legal interpretation of city laws that led to her resignation, which she says she did mostly for the good of her employees.
"Basically I'd hoped that I could lessen the stress on the staff," she says. "We were always like a family down there."
Carpenter has lived her entire life in the lap of St. Louis politics. She grew up in the Clifton Heights neighborhood and attended the same south-city parish as Francis Slay Sr. Carpenter says she even babysat for his son, the current mayor.
Despite their long history, she says she was dismayed but not surprised when a week before her resignation Slay told her he was supporting Florida. But she says the withdrawal of his support won't matter.
"I think the citizens should have the right to hire and fire, it's as simple as that. I've trusted them before, and I'll continue that. They'll make their decision in November," she says.
As to why she's determined to take back her old job, Carpenter says many of her supporters were heartbroken that she chose to resign over such a seemingly petty infraction. And there's still so much she wants to accomplish — just weeks before her departure, she says, she finally found a scanner powerful enough to digitize records laminated by archivists in the 1950s, a process that all but destroys the original documents if the plastic is removed. The same scanner will let her finish preserving thousands more marriage documents.
She says she's also become invested in Missouri's progress toward marriage equality. A Catholic, Carpenter says she has no regrets about extending rights to those who deserve them by law.
"I'm glad I did it," she says. "Anytime you discriminate against someone, you discriminate against everyone. And if you follow the New Testament, Jesus didn't totally associate with the righteous, but rather he went to include people that no one else wanted to include. I believe that's the way it is."
She says she's not afraid of the audits, nor of the criticism of her attendance at the office. She says three years ago she took time off to recover from multiple surgeries, and that the gripes about her absence never stopped. She says her husband and children gave her rides to the office, which would account for why so few saw her vehicle in the city parking lot.
"I was there far more than I ever was given credit for," she says.
Meeker is a different story. Carpenter is "disappointed" to read about how her former deputy chief handled the bidding process. She says she hasn't spoken to Meeker in more than a month. If she wins in November, Carpenter says, she has no plans of reinstating Meeker now that Florida has filled that position. However, Carpenter would consider "everyone" if the job were to open up.
"It' a fairly complex position, and you need to be someone from inside the office, someone with experience," she says. "[Meeker] should not have gotten the bids herself, but it was not illegal for her to get them. I knew he was her son, but I had no interest in who got the bid. I wanted the work done."
Carpenter also waves off concerns of her using her Recorder of Deeds office as her base of campaign operations. Things accumulate over 30 years, and she doesn't consider storing mailing material at the office a violation of Missouri's campaign-ethics laws.
In the upcoming November general election, Carpenter insists she's ready for a fight, but she'll take the high road in her campaign against Florida. No mudslinging.
"I'm just going to talk about what has been done," she says. "It's going to be simple. It's the only way I know how to campaign."
On the last Tuesday in September, Just John, a gay nightclub in the Grove neighborhood, and local LBGT magazine the Vital Voice held an "informal wedding reception" to thank Slay and the other major players from the June 25 marriage plot. All four couples were in attendance, and Slay cut the first slice from a large white cake.
Just John had hosted a nearly identical party two months earlier, but there was one major difference: On July 25, Carpenter was at Slay's elbow. Last month, it was Florida.
It seems Carpenter is being erased from an important moment in St. Louis' history. City attorneys and Missouri attorney general Chris Koster are still arguing the marriage case in front of a St. Louis circuit court judge, but the case is now called State of Missouri v. Jennifer Florida. The mayor's camp does not want its fight for marriage equality to get bogged down in the political squabble for Carpenter's job.
"Obviously we needed Sharon Carpenter to physically issue the licenses, but the mayor has been talking about marriage equality since 2004,"says Maggie Crane, a spokeswoman for the mayor's office.
Despite her former allies distancing themselves from her, Carpenter is not going to simply step aside.
"What I know is that I know how to record deeds," she says. "I know how to serve citizens, and I know how to build a staff that is the best in all city government. And I like doing that."
