Jenny Gain Meyer went from Ponderosa’s salad bar to Belleville mayor’s office
Jenny Gain Meyer knows more about the inner workings of the city of Belleville than just about anyone.
That knowledge comes from being a lifelong resident, a former city employee, a community volunteer and, most important, city clerk for the past eight years. She was sworn in as mayor on Wednesday.
“Jenny would have that information” is a phrase that reporters and other City Hall observers often hear from officials.
But there’s one thing Meyer doesn’t know, and that’s exactly what her new administration will look like. She isn’t coming in on Day 1 with a list of hirings and firings, as is common.
Meyer expects to make staff decisions by early June, after having one-on-one meetings with all department heads and assistant department heads. That’s about 40 people.
“I feel like they deserve enough respect to sit down with me and share their vision of Belleville,” Meyer said in a recent interview. “I’m going to share mine, and we’ll see if we can meet somewhere in the middle.”
Meyer, 49, acknowledges that the election was hard on city employees. She challenged incumbent Mayor Patty Gregory, who was finishing a four-year term after defeating the late former Mayor Mark Eckert.
Meyer and Gregory worked in the same building and presided over City Council meetings together while trading criticism in campaign literature and otherwise appealing to voters.
On April 1, Meyer won a decisive victory. The vote was 3,510 (63%) to 2,067 (37%), according to the St. Clair County clerk’s office. Write-in candidates, including declared candidate Ryan Musick, received 18 votes.
“You’re going to do a great job,” Gregory told Meyer at her last City Council meeting on April 21. Gregory also gave her a hug.
‘We can do better’
A standing-room-only crowd gathered in Belleville City Council chambers late Wednesday afternoon to watch swearing-in ceremonies for Meyer, Shelly Schaefer as the new city clerk, returning Treasurer Sarah Biermann and new and returning aldermen.
Newcomers include Ward 2 Alderwoman Gigi Dowling Urban and Ward 5 Alderwoman Kathy Kaiser.
Meyer thanked supporters and indicated that she’d be ready on Thursday to take the reins of a city with more than 40,000 residents and 300 employees (350 in the busy summer months).
“I am so excited,” she said. “We know we can do better, we can be better, and I can’t wait to lead you to do that.”
Mayors are not only responsible for appointing department heads, they also assign aldermen to committees and chairmanships, so Meyer expects to meet with them in the coming weeks.
Another top agenda item is her campaign promise to step up efforts to solve the problem of derelict and vacant housing in the city and reverse a trend of decreasing population.
“Scott Tyler and I have had some frank discussions about what the city needs to do to be a friendlier community to our investors and to our residents so that we can bring people in here to make these homes into single-family (owner-occupied) residences,” she said.
Tyler is the city’s director of health, housing and building. His department is responsible for code enforcement, as well as demolition of structures deemed too dilapidated to be saved.
Meyer also plans to meet with real-estate agents, contractors and community groups that specialize in neighborhood redevelopment.
“At the end of the day, I see things from the city’s perspective, but if I don’t get their perspective, I’m really doing a disservice to the city because we don’t have all the answers,” she said.
“You get so caught up in, ‘OK, this is what our code says,’ or ‘This is what our process is,’ but maybe there are better ways.”
Streets and City Market
During the campaign, Meyer promised to initiate a second update to Belleville’s comprehensive plan, which was developed in 2000 and updated in 2013 under Mayor Eckert.
Last week, Meyer said she wants a second plan.
“We need a plan specifically for our streets, our infrastructure,” she said, noting it would list street repairs in order of importance, going from emergency to long-term projects.
“We have to figure that out.”
The Gregory administration obtained a matching state grant in 2023 to convert a city-owned building next to City Hall into a City Market with vendor booths and a commercial kitchen. Aldermen agreed to spend nearly $440,000 on the $1 million project.
Supporters saw it as an economic-development tool for the downtown area. Opponents argued that the location wasn’t suitable for farm trucks and didn’t have enough public parking.
Meyer said last week that information on the project was kept “pretty close to the vest” for the past two years, and she needs to know more before deciding how or if to proceed.
“I handle all the bid openings, so I know it hasn’t gone out for bid,” she said. “I could not honestly tell you where we are in the process.”
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First job at Ponderosa
Meyer grew up in Belleville’s Henry Raab neighborhood and later on North Sixth Street, near St. Clair County Jail. She attended St. Mary’s Catholic School and Althoff Catholic High School.
Meyer was 15 when she got her first job at Ponderosa, managing the salad bar. She later earned money doing everything from data programming to insurance health checks, tax preparation to legal assistance in the law office of Democratic power broker Bob Sprague.
Meyer was attending Southwestern Illinois College when she joined the first local AmericaCorps group in the 1990s. It focused mainly on tutoring and summer camps for students at Franklin Elementary School.
“We did other projects, too,” Meyer said. “When we had flooding down in that area, we helped clean out houses, clean out basements. We did litter and trash pickups throughout the city.”
It was during that time that Meyer met Eckert, then director of Franklin Downtown Neighborhood Association. She later worked part-time for his chimney-sweep business and the florist shop he operated with his wife, Rita, and became a close friend of the family.
Meyer transferred to McKendree College, now McKendree University, where she graduated with a biology degree. She dreamed of working as a marine biologist or a scientist studying diseases in a lab.
Instead, Meyer became a “sanitarian” for St. Clair County Health Department. She collected mosquitoes and tested water in wells and private sewer systems in unincorporated areas.
“It was still fun,” she said. “I was in the field, and I was doing things that I never knew existed.”
That job kicked off a career of more than 25 years in government.
Eckert served as mentor
Meyer spent five years with the health department, rising to the position of environmental health manager before being hired in 2005 as administrative assistant to Eckert, then mayor of Belleville.
A few months later, Eckert appointed Meyer as director of a department that at times included health, housing, sanitation, zoning, building, the city cemetery and emergency preparedness.
Meyer served one year as full-time campaign manager for Illinois Rep. Jay Hoffman (D-113th District). Then she went back to the health department as director of environmental programs for four years.
Running for city clerk in 2017 almost seemed like a “natural progression” for Meyer, who was 41 when she defeated 34-year-old candidate Libby Barbeau in a vote of 4,233 to 1,967.
“All those years, I was helping with politics in the city and the county and the state, working in the background,” she said.
Meyer won reelection in 2021, but it was a bittersweet victory due to Gregory’s defeat of Eckert, who had been serving as mayor for more than 16 years. He died of cancer two years later.
In January 2023, friends and family gathered for Eckert’s 67th birthday at Cutter’s Bar & Grill, while he was undergoing medical treatment. It was Meyer who lit the candles on his birthday cake.
“It would definitely be safe to say that he was a mentor,” she said.
In her free time, Meyer keeps up her 99-year-old two-story brick home and goes on long walks with her dog, Loki, a German shepherd and great Pyrenees mix, named after the god of chaos or mischief in Norse mythology. She also enjoys reading novels and autobiographies.
Leading up to the election, Meyer spent nearly every weekend and many weeknights going door to door, handing out flyers, introducing herself to Belleville residents and presenting her ideas for change.
Meyer knows expectations are high for a new administration, but she emphasizes that a mayor isn’t the sole decision-maker.
“The city can only function if we’re a team, and that team includes the department heads and the City Council,” she said. “Ultimately, (aldermen) make the final decisions. We can only provide them with the information and say, ‘Hey we think this is going to benefit our city,’ and tell them why.”
BND reporter Mike Koziatek contributed to this story.
This story was originally published May 1, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
