The 92nd City: Slay floats idea of city joining the county
The city must reform its charter. The city, the inner suburbs and outer suburbs must combine services. And I strongly believe that we must begin to lay the groundwork for the city of St. Louis to enter St. Louis County.
So spoke St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay last week after taking the oath of office for the third time. Inaugural addresses traditionally are full of bold ideas, and this one is a doozy, sort of like a call for world peace.
Four years ago, in his second inaugural address, Mr. Slay floated the same trial balloon: “In four years,” he said then, nodding to St. Louis County Executive Charlie A. Dooley, “Charlie and I may share fire engines, airports, a health district, a bond issue, a tax base — or even an office.”
Alas, none of that came to pass. However great the economies that such collaboration would create — and they are significant — the politics of the reuniting the city and county are tremendously difficult.
“The Great Divorce” took place in 1876, when city voters in the then-unified St. Louis County grew tired of dealing with rural issues in far-flung places like Florissant and Kirkwood. It worked fine until after World War II, when the balance began to tip in the county’s favor.
Returning servicemen looking for cheap housing moved to new suburbs. The booming automobile industry and the Interstate Highway Act eased the transition. By 1960, the city’s population was in free-fall, and the county was booming. For the next 50 years, county residents grew tired of hearing about financial and social problems in the city.
The county developed its odd political structure: 91 separate municipalities delivering most services, a county government delivering municipal services in unincorporated areas and supervising state functions for everyone else. Counting fire districts, school districts, library districts and a host of other taxing bodies, the county developed a huge cadre of entrenched political districts, each with its own prerogatives to protect.
Meanwhile, back in the city, the African-American population briefly reached a majority in the 2000 census (it’s now down to about 48 percent). Blacks gained a measure of political power that would be diluted by absorption into the county.
Mr. Slay is hoping to finesse some of the political opposition to city-county collaboration by calling not for metrowide government or merger, but for the city to join the county as its 92nd municipality. The city would govern itself for municipal purposes, keep its aldermen and city officials, but turn over “county” functions like revenue collection, prosecutors and courts, to the county.
The city’s population has now stabilized at about 355,000. Meanwhile, the county finds itself with growing numbers of older, service-dependent people and no place to grow. In short, it has begun to experience the revenue and social problems the city has known for the last 60 years.
Clearly Mr. Slay’s idea makes economic sense for residents throughout the city and county. A single police force, a single circuit court, a single buyer for equipment and services all would produce major efficiencies for taxpayers.
The politics are difficult, perhaps insurmountable, but it never hurts to dream. Turning dreams into reality is the tough part.
The County municipality governments will hate it. They’ll be afraid of losing their useless, phony-baloney jobs as mayors, councilmen and the like. It’ll be a real circus watching all those little power-mongers make excuses to keep the merger from happening. They won’t be worried about anyone’s economy but their own.
Theoretically if this was approved and went into effect; what would be the cost, time for full implementation, and major hurdles? Isn’t this a huge endeavor? Wouldn’t that be a huge police/fire/ems/gov’t entity to manage? Even though we rank 2nd for std s and murders, we are not a top tier city as far as brains. We (the city) can even take care of our own problems let alone a new set of ones from the county. How far would STL expand into? Cedar Hill? Sunset Hills? Troy? Slay cant run a lawn mower much less a metropolis.
This would mean the end of two party politics in St. Louis County. No Repbulican could ever be elected to any office. Sorry, no sale. This would lead to more “soak the rich” taxation to pay for the City’s mismanagement. I can just hear it now, “in the interest of fairness, we are going to impose the City Earnings Tax on everyone, so no community has an advantage over any other.” This idea pokes its head out from under its rock every 20 years or so and is quickly kicked back under. A few “civic leaders” will have a few breakfasts on this and it will quietly go away again. While Slay seems like a nice fellow, Dooley has lost whatever political capital he once had and the rest will go away next month when tax bills hit the mailboxes. There simply isn’t a powerful enough personality to sell this idea. Let’s not waste any more time on it.
St. Louis is one of the few metro areas in the US that has a separate gov’t for city and county. Why can’t this cow town ever evolve?
We moved to Saint Louis from Chicago almost 4 years ago (but have also lived in Miami and Washington DC at some point in the last decade). I have to say the Saint Louis region needs to wake up!! Not correcting the 130 year old mistake when the city was separated from the county is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. The region has been at a competitive disadvantage ever since and that disadvantage is becoming more significant every year. You bicker, fight and point fingers like children instead of realizing you are on the same team. We have friends all over the country and everyone of them thought we were crazy for taking a job here because of the city’s reputation (which is the same reputation for the entire region because the only people that have a distinction between the two are people from St. Louis). But from our personal experience Saint Louis is radically better than it is perceived by most of the country. It is unfortunate that everyone here is completely clueless to how damaging that fact is. We were shocked after moving here to find this beautiful historic city (that has enormous potential) and a region that is much larger than one would think based on a tiny city of 350,000. The rest of the world doesn’t want to visit Saint Louis and they definitely don’t want to move here (us included). But after living here for 4 years we have had almost nothing but good things to say about St. Louis. We live in the Central West End and I would compare it to our Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago or Georgetown in DC but at about 1/2 of the price. We really enjoy it. But the rest of the world will never know or care about any of the good qualities of Saint Louis because it they will always be overshadowed by the negative stigma as the crime capital of the U.S. People in your own region can’t get over it. Without question there are some bad parts of this city. But almost every major city has their own version of north Saint Louis. The difference is almost every other city is represented by a much bigger swatch of their region. The crime laden zones are diluted compared to here. Your bad neighborhoods are promoted and advertised to the world. And the comments I read from people that give their reasons for opposing the city joining the county again are so incredibly short sighted it makes me sick to read them. St. Louis has been used to this broken and destructive rivalry for so long that people will endlessly defend it to the point that they are incapable of grasping the important larger picture. In this global economy there are thousands of places people can choose to move to or relocate or expand a business in. Nobody will even consider looking at this region until you change your image. Absorbing the city into the county would almost instantaneously make Saint Louis significantly more competitive. You would be a top 10 city again and have statistics like crime (and others) that would no longer misrepresent Saint Louis. Government and public services could be streamlined and it would create a more united mentality. Plus your region would have more pull in both Jefferson City and Washington D.C. You would basically be on the same playing field as the rest of the country again. My family presently plans on being here awhile and we would like to see this region succeed. We wish all you natives felt the same way.
The time is now for the city to join the county as well as time for many of these little municipalities to be incorporated into the city as well.
This region does not need 91 municipalities. We need to join the rest of the country and live in the 21st century.
Some of these comments assume the re-entrance of the City into the County would eliminate all the other municipalities in the County. All it would do is laden the County with the costs of running all the services counties usually run.
……….Not with my support or vote, thank you. I’m doing fine in St Louis County, I like my small municipality and do not want ANYTHING to do with that Late Great City.
How about when this happens we abolish partisan elections for county and city government?
Jeesh. It’s the 21st Century, St. Louis! Get with it. I’ve wondered ever since I moved here why it is that St. Louis city and county don’t merge. It seems to me that this metro area is completely complacent living in the dark ages. I used to wonder when I first moved here why there was hardly ANYONE who didn’t grow up here their entire lives (for proof, the most common question I get asked is “where did you go to high school?”), but now I am starting to see why. Merging will benefit everyone in the long run…but many don’t see that…kind of like what happened with METRO. County people afraid those evil inner-city kids are gonna come to their neighborhoods and rob them. Meanwhile, most cities are becoming more and more technologically advanced, while St. Louisians (city and county) reject any sort of change that might advance us into the 21st Century. For shame.