urbanSTL

The result is tantalizing, but how do you get there besides actual merger? What's the point if we don't get the real benefits of actual merger or even reentry for that matter? It sounds easy to do, but what is it that you actually do to get that outcome? Do they do something special just for us? Not likely, if "St Louis" is St Louis City + County, then Chicago will say "Chicago" is Cook County, "Cleveland" is Cuyahoga County, etc. Then we're not going to be 8th.

This grasping for that result without actually changing any borderline or functions of local gov't is what turned me off about their focus on the statistics. It just kept going in circles. Only actual merger brings about the result of the statistics for "St Louis" covering 1.3M people. Merger won't pass. Also, I was really bothered that they were trying to sell reentry with the results of merger.

I agree the stats are a problem, chiefly the crime ranking, and they should be one motivator of this conversation. But finding some cleaver trick and not actually changing the structures of gov't here is hollow.

Maybe I got this from the stlworldclass people but one of the points favoring re-entry into the county was that the boundaries of the city would no longer be fixed and there would be a chance to grow in size down the road by annexation of surrounding cities, something which is not possible currently across county lines.

That's right. Post reentry the City could annex unincorporated areas or consolidate with other cities, provided mutual interest. Currently to add one acre of land to the city requires a Board of Freeholders process and a separate majority vote of the County and City.

That's the best part of using a constitutional amendment to make reentry happen. It allows us to get rid of the Board of Freeholders mechanism which has only worked once since 1876- the creation of MSD.

That possibility of growing territory and population through annexation might encourage the city to shape up in order to attract people to be annexed. On the flip side the entrenched power structure might view annexation as a threat. Hard to say how the forces might play out.

STLEnginerd wrote:

imran wrote:Maybe I got this from the stlworldclass people but one of the points favoring re-entry into the county was that the boundaries of the city would no longer be fixed and there would be a chance to grow in size down the road by annexation of surrounding cities, something which is not possible currently across county lines.

Or it might cause the smaller county municipalities in a panic at the prospect of being absorbed by the city to consolidate into larger municipalities and we would shink the count fro 90+ to 10 or less more manageable munis. If this is the case its still a positive outcome IMHO and inching toward a merged city county government divided into bailanges (similar to New York's bouroughs).

How does a borough system work? What could be cited to residents of a large unincorporated portion of the county to make them want to form a borough of the city of St. Louis rather than a separate city or stay unincorporated? I assume they sold the people around New York on this many years ago with the promise of city services they wanted. But I don't know of anyplace that has done it since. I can't think of any way they would go for a borough system. What could the city provide in exchange?

Why does Kinloch even exist? We need to get rid of these little fifedoms. Everyone knows bureaucracy = waste and fraud so why have 100 little bureaucracies especially in places like Kinloch that have 300 people?

At first, I thought maybe I was going to read an article about a salvage yard owner being arrested for accepting stolen copper but in this case it was stolen cars. Nobody knows who owns City Hall in Kinloch. The mayor stole thousands. The Fire Chief stole 140K. It's just completely absurd. There's too many examples to list.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crim ... b43a6.html

Ideas for dealing with the naughty ninety.

An accountability system akin to the one for school districts. The municipal league proposed one recently where cities in trouble get put in a probation period and if they don't shape up disincorporation goes on the ballot and only a simple majority is required.

Make it easier for citizens to put disincorporation on the ballot and require only a simple majority to pass it

Put disincorporation on the ballot for munis with less than 10k (or 5k or whatever) people every five years. Or in lieu they can put up for vote a consolidation plan. That bit is tricky. There'd need to be a way to avoid a sham plan between two cities wherein they make one that would never pass.

Change the sales tax pool formula to starve tiny munis. That may just promote the sales tax chase or further encourage speed trap towns. More thought on that one.

I don't suggest a county-wide vote to get rid of a bunch of them. A top down approach won't pass. There would be too much in the details not to like. My ideas are about convincing the people in those cities that continuing with the status quo is a bad idea. I wonder how many would go away if just given the opportunity to vote on it?

We should make it a goal to get down to 30 by 2030. "30 by 30"

If the 24:1 cities consolidated (call it Normandy) they'd have about 44K people and be the third largest city in the county. A much better position to deal with their problems and better their community. Now the 24 average 1834 residents and are easily ignored. We just need to help them realize that.

I suspect the reason Kinloch endures is that it's a historically black city and no one on the outside wants to spend political capital trying to dissolve it.

Well HJR39 sure sounds like StL City goes away. HJR40 is reentry.

The city of St. Louis and St. Louis County shall become a single governing entity with duplicative functions and services eliminated to the extent feasible and operating under the charter of the current St. Louis County.

STL-World Class City Poll

Do you agree with choice 1 or 2 below:

1. The city of St. Louis shall become part of St. Louis County and thereafter exist as a city within the county in the same manner as any other city in the county of St. Louis.

OR

2. The city of St. Louis and St. Louis County shall become a single governing entity with duplicative functions and services eliminated to the extent feasible and operating under the charter of the current St. Louis County.


I e-mailed the folks in charge of this group inquiring about which of these two options results in St. Louis officially becoming classified as the 8th largest city in America and they said it would be choice number 2 listed above.

My question now is this: If that were to happen, would people and companies elsewhere take notice and suddenly become more interested in relocating to St. Louis? I feel as though they look us up and see the population at about 300,000 and get turned off by it. If it suddenly were re-classified as 1,200,000 (city and county combined), would that spark their interest more? Might that help encourage ACTUAL population growth? Would major companies want to open/expand branches in STL that would create jobs and transplant new residents?

Those options are the language in HJR 39 and HJR 40. What I don't understand is what does option 2 really mean? In makes no mention of the 90 munis. If not then does it really mean the city becomes a part of unincorporated St Louis County?

Merging all the munis, the city, and the county gets you to 8th largest city.

Option 2 won't pass. No matter what it really means people will feel very threatened if they think their town or school district will go away.

We need to focus on option 1. Reentry and getting rid of the Board of Freeholders (Electors) process will be a great victory and step forward.

Personally, I'm not for full city-county merger. I think that it would reduce the power of urban voters and push the government pretty far from residents. In Toronto they merged the city with surrounding (large) suburbs and they elected a mayor that campaigned on removing bike lanes. Also, in Indianapolis their merger of the inner city and surrounding county didn't really help revitalize the inner city, in fact, it is likely the old Indianapolis had more population decline than did St. Louis in the 2000s: http://www.urbanophile.com/2013/01/20/t ... ianapolis/
I generally think we need to look at the merger idea with more reasons than having St. Louis be the nation's 8th largest city (mind you with very low density).

Sounds like the county GOP is pretty staunchly against city-county merger, even on the level of merging the economic development agencies (Beacon article):

The St. Louis County Republican Central Committee has unanimously passed a resolution opposing any sort of city-county merger, including the merger of the economic development agencies now underway.

The article also states that the county GOP opposes not just a merger, but also reentry, though the resolution doesn't differentiate between the two. Apparently resistance is based on concerns that the county might be on the hook for city expenses:

[County GOP chairman] Buwalda said the concern centers on a belief that the county’s costs would go up if it had to maintain city roads and other city services. Slay has denied that the county would have to assume such costs.

It doesn't make sense to me why this would be true--the county only provides general road and city-type services in unincorporated areas, right? The St. Louis County Department of Roads and Transportation gets to designate roads as "arterials" that are paid for on a county-wide level (remember the Delmar kerfuffle), but since that decision is made at the county-level it seems unlikely that they would decide all of a sudden to start paying for all these streets inside St. Louis City. It's not clear to me why, if the city of St. Louis re-entered the county, it would be any different than, say, Maplewood or Ferguson.

I wish the author of the article would actually settle the question of whether Slay or Buwalda is correct here, rather than just reiterating what each side "believes." This seems like an answerable question.

^ The political part of me that believes myself to be a fiscal conservative gets annoyed at GOP for this mentality. One hand the GOP wants to stump for smaller and less government or another way to put it, government should be more like business.

The re-entry of St. Louis City into the county is a slam dunk in pragmatic, meaningful way to reduce duplicate services for the region. Consolidating the economic development offices makes even more sense. However, the nonsense by the GOP is about politics nothing more, nothing less.

At the same time, I will also state that merging the county and city makes no sense to me when the county has 93 separate municipal governments. The city is in a much better position going forward. Especially with residents deciding that they want less alderman instead of more.

I think it should obvious that the county republicans are most concerned about the influx of hundreds of thousands of voters that gave Obama ~80% in the last election. Unless the GOP here transforms itself into something very moderate ala Michael Bloomberg, they can kiss any hopes of winning a countywide election goodbye if the city reenters. I tend to think this is their primary reason, the increased costs doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

^That's the most difficult outcome of reentry to respond to. The bigger county will be more Democratic; there's no getting around it. It also may be the case already that the current county has very little chance of electing a Republican to a county-wide office or have a majority on the County Council. I'd rather it not be the case because I think a competitive political environment is important. Republicans are moving to St Charles Co and Jeff Co. Maintaining the status quo gov't structure in St. Louis County won't help the issues (schools, crime, taxes, gov't bloat) that Republicans are concerned about, in my opinion.

Ambassador Herbert "Bert" Walker is the Republican champion of the issue. The hope is he along with the small business community could get Republican support for reentry. Perhaps he's seen as a member of the out-of-touch party elite. Regardless it's very important that reentry not be framed as a Democratic power grab no matter whether it's a local vote via the Board of Electors (Freeholders) scheme or a state-wide amendment vote.

I would think any county maintenance of roads in the city would only be by choice. Also county property taxes would be paid on city properties.

This is also a real issue:

The perception long has been that St. Louis' African-American Democrats are on the same side as the county's tea-party Republicans when it comes to any merger talks because, aside from any philosophical objections, there is fear their political influence might be diluted in the city and county joined.

My response is that currently the African-American population is 1/4 of the county and 1/2 the city. After reentry it would be 1/3 of the county and 1/2 of the city. Seems like they come out ahead.

They are all worried about losing their piece of the pie and don't realize that there would be a bigger pie through cooperation and consolidation.

Maybe we should make a blog post to respond to this.

St. Louis, county police agree to merge their bomb and arson units

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crim ... 2e783.html