CLAYTON — Tony Weaver has been involved in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County politics and government for decades, but his most recent job was as “change management coordinator†at the troubled ºüÀêÊÓƵ County jail in December 2019.
County Executive Sam Page hired Weaver to the job from his post as an aide to County Councilwoman Rochelle Walton Gray, D-4th District.
His new job came with an $82,500 salary, nearly double his $45,406 salary as Gray’s assistant.
His hiring was blasted by council Republicans who said it was political payback to shore up Walton Gray’s support for Page on the council.
Weaver, 63, has served under four different jail directors, joining top officials in monthly meetings of the Justice Services Advisory Board and positioning himself as a mediator in conflicts between supervisors and frontline corrections officers while officials attempted reforms at the facility in the wake of six inmate deaths over 2019 and early 2020.Â
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Walton Gray, a former Democratic member of the state House from 2009 to 2016, was elected to the County Council in 2016. She was unseated in the August 2020 Democratic primary by Shalonda Webb, who won the November election.
Weaver is a longtime associate of Walton Gray’s father, disbarred attorney and former Missouri State Rep. Elbert Walton Jr., whose family is a powerful force in north ºüÀêÊÓƵ County. Walton’s other daughter, Angela Mosley is a state senator. Mosley’s brother-in-law, Alan Gray, and her husband, Jay Mosley, are also serving in the Missouri House.Â
Weaver led the North County political organization Unity PAC, which Elbert Walton founded, and he also did work with Walton for the Northeast Ambulance and Fire Protection District, which was embroiled in allegations of financial mismanagement a decade ago.Â
Weaver was also Walton Gray’s appointee to the county Charter Commission, a 14-member panel that meets every few years to study structural changes to county government. In November 2019, a month before he was hired by Page, Weaver was one of nine commissioners to block a measure that would have ended “non-merit†executive assistants and secretaries for department heads.
Weaver’s work for Walton Gray also came under scrutiny in 2019 in federal indictments against former County Executive Steve Stenger, who had tried to arrange a bribe to sway a female County Council member’s vote on the redevelopment of Jamestown Mall by having the developer hire her father. The scheme was partly revealed in an FBI search warrant in Stenger’s case, which detailed federal agents’ recordings from inside Stenger’s house in September 2018 that captured conversations between Stenger and his chief of staff Bill Miller.
Walton Gray, who represented the district that includes the Jamestown Mall site, was the only person to match the description of the official Stenger sought to bribe, but it was unclear whether she or her father ever knew about the scheme or participated in it. Weaver had met with Stenger campaign adviser, Ed Rhode, and a donor, Dan Devereux, who was friendly with the developers about the project, and had told reporters he had considered the donor a middleman who could set up meetings with the developers for Walton Gray.
After Stenger resigned and was succeeded by Page, Walton Gray was among county officials supporting the county Port Authority's decision to issue a new call for redevelopment proposals for the Jamestown Mall site.
Weaver himself ran unsuccessfully for the 4th District County Council seat in 2008, while leading Unity Pac, seeking to unseat then-Councilman Mike O’Mara, D-Florissant.
He also ran unsuccessfully in 2014 to fill a seat vacated by former state representative Steve Webb, who had resigned and pleaded guilty to stealing $3,000 in campaign funds. Steve Webb is the husband of Shalonda Webb.Â
Weaver has been a committeeman since 2004 and was previously a member of the Jennings School Board in the early 1990s. He was also active in the Hazelwood School District, where his children attended school, running unsuccessfully for the school board each year between 2002 and 2006. Â