City of Belleville’s new spokesman — its third in eight months — abruptly leaves job

A new spokesman for the city of Belleville left abruptly on Friday after less than two months on the job.

Matthew Allison was the city’s third spokesperson in eight months. The first one quit at the end of November to take another job. The second one was fired in May after 46 days.

Allison had been hired May 6 for a marketing position with the economic development, planning and zoning department. He was promoted in June to public relations and marketing manager for the city.

“(The city is) a great organization to work with,” Allison told the BND Friday morning. “It’s great people doing great things.”

By Friday afternoon, he was gone.

“Matthew Allison is no longer employed with the City of Belleville as the PR & Marketing Manager effective today,” stated an email from Bill Clay, the city’s human resources director.

Allison declined an interview but verified via private Facebook message that he no longer worked for the city. When asked this week if Allison had left voluntarily or involuntarily, Clay stated, “He did not resign.”

Allison earned $75,000 a year. In an interview last week, Clay said it was more than his predecessor’s $65,000 salary because Allison was doing the PR job plus some work in economic development.

Mayor Patty Gregory declined to be interviewed for this story.

“I will not answer questions about a specific employee because of employee confidentiality,” she stated in an email.

Kaiser resigned last fall

The BND had contacted Allison Friday morning for a story on a transition in City Hall communications that began last fall, when Gregory’s close adviser, Kathy Kaiser, who served as the city’s communications director, left for a marketing job in the private sector.

“It was an opportunity that I wasn’t expecting that kind of dropped in my lap,” Kaiser said at the time.

Kaiser’s title of “director” had put her on par with other city department heads. After her departure, the job was renamed and reclassified as an “at-will” staff position that didn’t require City Council approval.

Allison’s move into the job followed a period of shuffling and confusion, according to two former employees.

Madison Faulkner, former web coordinator, said she was offered Kaiser’s position last fall before Gregory reneged three weeks later. Courtney Adams, who was hired for the job in April, said she was fired after 46 days because the mayor had misled her on working conditions.

In between, Faulkner said, responsibilities for the city’s website , public relations and marketing were put on employees in other departments and Gregory herself handled social media.

“There’s so much that Mayor Gregory is hindering because of her lack of processes and her lack of professionalism,” said Faulkner, who quit her part-time city job in February.

“There are so many opportunities for us to be doing well (as a city), and we’re dealing with chump change and gossiping about stuff and talking about Art on the Square, even though we’re not even involved in it anymore.”

Faulkner was referring to Gregory’s former role as founding director of Art on the Square for 20 years.

Faulkner and Adams said Gregory disliked their ideas for improvement, including the idea that a communications professional shouldn’t be spending so much time going with the mayor to meetings and community functions to take photos of her to post on social media.

“It wasn’t necessary,” Adams said, noting that other people at events could take photos and send them to the city.

Former mayor saw need

The late former Mayor Mark Eckert created the position of public relations and communications specialist in 2019.

The City Council approved Eckert’s appointment of Jennifer Ferguson, former spokeswoman for Lindenwood University-Belleville, to the $52,000 city job with a 11-4 vote.

“(The specialist) develops and maintains the city’s image and branding through social media and all methods of communication to further city growth,” according to the job description.

Other duties included working to improve economic development and encourage people to buy homes in Belleville, representing Eckert at events he couldn’t attend and helping him and other employees maintain a relationship with Scott Air Force Base.

Gregory defeated Eckert in the April 2021 election. Aldermen approved her appointment of Kaiser, a local marketing specialist who had worked on the mayor’s campaign, as communications director. Her $52,000 a year starting salary went up to $66,950 last year.

Kaiser functioned as the city’s spokeswoman for two and a half years. She developed a “comprehensive” marketing plan, coordinated posts on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram and accompanied the mayor to meetings and community functions.

In October 2023, Kaiser announced that she was leaving Nov. 25 to become regional marketing manager for Compass Group, an international food-service company. In an email announcement, she indicated that Faulkner would take over some of her responsibilities.

“I’m going to teach her everything I know in the next month,” Kaiser stated. “I don’t want to leave the city hanging by any means. But I don’t know that the final decision has been made on who’s going to be eventually taking my place.”

Promotion didn’t happen

Faulkner, 29, who had become web coordinator on Oct. 2, 2023, said Gregory did offer her the PR position in the presence of several employees, including Gigi Dowling Urban, administrative liaison to the mayor; and that Faulkner met with Clay, who told her the salary would be $55,000.

Faulkner said Kaiser later mentioned that Gregory was rethinking the plan, but no one discussed it with her again for nearly a month.

“The mayor finally came to me and said they couldn’t put me in that role because there wasn’t enough money in the budget,” Faulkner said. “I knew that was a lie. I understand how budgeting works. When a person leaves, their salary is not poofed out of existence.”

The City Council approves a city budget each spring for the fiscal year beginning May 1, although budgets are often amended.

Last week, Clay said he remembered only that Faulkner was “under consideration” for the PR position at one time and that the administration was reassessing the job’s description and classification.

Clay acknowledged that the four-month job vacancy caused a “deficiency.” “There was no one to do it,” he said.

Faulkner left the city staff on Feb. 23. She said Gregory had asked her to take on additional social-media tasks without a change in title, hours or pay, and she declined, leading the mayor to bad-mouth her around City Hall. She had been working 20 hours a week for $20 an hour.

Urban declined to comment for this story, citing personnel privacy laws. Kaiser couldn’t be reached for comment.

Faulkner now is a digital media manager in St. Louis.

Employee fired by email

Courtney Adams, 42, served as manager of Belleville Main Street, an arm of The Greater Belleville Chamber of Commerce, for nearly two years before she became the city’s public relations and marketing manager in April.

Adams said she really didn’t want to leave her part-time Main Street job because, as a mother of two children, she liked having a flexible schedule and the ability to work remotely at times, but that Gregory persuaded her to join the city staff by promising the same flexibility.

“I was under the impression that I would be reporting directly to the mayor, so I assumed that she checked with (the human resources department) before I even applied,” Adams said, adding that Gregory left her a voicemail saying that she did check.

Adams started the city job, which combined Kaiser’s position and Faulkner’s website duties, on April 8. She earned $65,000 a year.

Adams said a dizzy spell at the office in May prompted her to go to the emergency room, and a doctor prescribed medication for use as needed but warned against driving while taking it.

Adams said she had been working at home intermittently with Gregory’s blessing when the human resources department notified her by email that city ordinances didn’t allow for remote work and asked that her doctor fill out a form for medical leave.

Adams said she submitted the form, then received an email from human resources the following day, May 23, stating that she’d been terminated. She believes officials misinterpreted the section where the doctor estimated a three-month period of care, thinking she was requesting that time off.

“I wanted to explain, but nobody would return my phone calls,” Adams said, noting that the city later opposed her request for unemployment, forcing her husband to take a second job.

Last week, Clay verified that Belleville city ordinances do not allow remote work by employees, including department heads, nor does the employee handbook. He declined to discuss the circumstances of Adams’ termination, citing personnel privacy laws.

Clay suggested changes

Faulkner said she believed the change in the PR position’s title and classification reflected Gregory’s desire to exert more control over city staff and business without City Council approval.

Clay, the city’s former police chief who retired to become human resources director in June 2022, said he was the one who determined that officials had been putting too many new hires through the appointment and approval process unnecessarily.

Public relations and marketing manager was just one of the jobs involved in this reassessment, according to Clay.

“They were appointing everybody, and I just brought it to their attention, ‘You guys can’t show me in the ordinance that all these appointments are required by city or state statutes,’” he said.

“These are just at-will employees. They’re not in a union. They don’t need to be appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council.”

Before Allison’s departure, Clay said officials had shelved the new marketing position in the economic development, planning and zoning department for which he originally was hired.

Allison served as graduate program liaison and ambassador of arts and humanities at Lindenwood University-Belleville before the campus closed in 2020.

Allison holds a doctorate degree in music arts and a master’s in flute performance, according to his online bio. He’s been teaching flute and performing with symphonies for 20 years. He said he got into grant-writing and development at other universities and also did marketing for a group of music stores.

“I’m looking forward to promoting current businesses, encouraging economic growth, and highlighting this inclusive community!” Allison wrote on his LinkedIn page when announcing his new city job in May.