The signs are everywhere that St. Louis is a city in serious crisis. The trash can’t get picked up. Police cars are broken down and unusable. City contractors aren’t getting paid on time. Political leaders keep fantasizing about all the great things they can do with all the money available through federal aid and the Rams settlement — and yet, nothing is getting done. Meanwhile, frustrated residents are abandoning the city in droves.
The politicians elected to run the city’s top offices are unquestionably great at impressing voters and getting elected. But rare is the politician with actual experience running a metropolitan government. It’s time for St. Louisans to stop handing over the city’s operations to rank amateurs and, instead, let a professional municipal manager take over the job.
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The breakdown in city services has reached the point of embarrassment. Enough police cars have been removed from service for lack of repairs that officers are now having to patrol three in a car so they can perform their duties on the streets. That’s pathetic, especially in a city with the severe crime problems St. Louis has.
When garbage dumpsters can’t be emptied according to schedule — a service taxpayers have paid for — many feel they have no alternative than to dump their household waste into recycling and green-waste dumpsters instead. The practice, while condemnable because it spoils recycling and composting efforts, is also understandable if there’s nowhere else to put their garbage.
When city contractors can’t get paid on time, they risk defaulting on paychecks and loans, or they walk away in frustration. Mistrust builds. The more bills don’t get paid, the higher will be the cost to taxpayers to attract contractors willing to do business with a city bureaucracy with a deadbeat reputation.
All of these problems and others should be manageable, but they’re not being managed properly because politicians are trying to perform work for which they aren’t properly trained. Professional managers are the ones in charge in thriving cities like Dallas, Phoenix, Cincinnati and Sacramento, to name a few among scores. Fairfax County, Virginia — among the richest counties in the country — also has a manager system. Why? Because it works.
The strongest argument for not putting politicians in charge of management is the current fiasco in the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office. For whatever talents Kim Gardner might have brought to the job, managerial competence was not one of them.
For St. Louis to decline nearly 5% in population in merely two years — from 301,574 in 2020 to 286,578 in 2022 — should be astonishing to everyone, especially those in leadership. The region’s flagship city is flagging and foundering. Professional management might not fix every problem, but it would certainly instill a level of confidence that is sorely lacking today and prompting people to pack up and leave en masse.
