Municipal League Opposes Statewide Vote on St. Louis City-County Unification

IF BACKERS OF A POTENTIAL EFFORT to combine St. Louis City with St. Louis County try for a statewide vote in Missouri to help their plan succeed, they’ll meet fierce opposition from the main advocacy group that represents dozens of municipalities in the region.

Pat Kelly, executive director of the Municipal League of Metro St. Louis, said his group is “adamantly opposed” to a statewide vote, which could take place anytime from 2020 onward.

“If an organization is putting this to a statewide vote, it means they can’t sell it to the people it’s affecting,” Kelly told McPherson in an interview. “It’s not fair that somebody in Kansas City is going to be deciding on the kind of governmental structure I have to live under, when it doesn’t necessarily affect them.”

McPherson reported last week that Better Together, a nonprofit group backed by civic leaders and business executives including retired financier Rex Sinquefield, is working on a proposal for governmental consolidation that it hopes to unveil in January. While specifics of the proposal are still being developed, one leading possibility is that Better Together will put forward a concept for the unification of St. Louis city and county, according to people familiar with the process. Such a move would transform local government and create a “new” St. Louis with 1.3 million people.

The people familiar with Better Together’s work said backers of a possible unification plan believe it would be easiest to win approval at the state level, which includes voters in Republican-dominated outstate counties, instead of facing voters only in Democrat-dominated St. Louis city and county.

The notion of city-county consolidation has been around for several years, and any plan would face numerous obstacles before crossing the finish line. Kelly, former mayor of the mid-county municipality of Brentwood, said the Municipal League tried to have input into Better Together’s process, but was rebuffed. The league, founded a century ago, says its member cities represent 98 percent of the population of St. Louis city and county.

Kelly discussed his organization’s views in an interview with McPherson. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

McPherson: What’s the Municipal League’s overall view on the issue of consolidation?

Pat Kelly: Any type of consolidation should be left up to those residents that are being affected by that consolidation, whatever it is — whether it’s police departments or municipalities. I’m not as much concerned about what the proposal is, as long as it’s only the local people affected who vote on it.

If a city-county merger takes place, are there any best practices or key considerations that need to go into that step? (Whether it’s the re-entry of St. Louis City into the county, or municipal consolidation overall.)

Kelly: Our primary concern is that municipalities maintain local control to make decisions for their communities. That’s one of the things that makes St. Louis County strong: the fact that Webster can have a different zoning code than Brentwood, because that’s what their residents prefer. As long as local decision-making remains in the hands of the residents it affects, we would be supportive of a vote taking place in the city and the county on a merger, just as we would be supportive if municipalities decide they would like to merge. Vinita Park and Vinita Terrace [two small county municipalities] did so a year and a half ago, which got overwhelming support from both cities when they put it to a vote of their residents.

What about the argument that fragmentation makes government more inefficient and expensive in St. Louis County?

Kelly: Numbers can be manipulated. There’s a study out there that says St. Louis spends more than Indianapolis, but there’s another study done by UM-St. Louis that says if you compare apples to apples, residents in St. Louis actually pay less than Indianapolis. But I don’t think we should be comparing ourselves to other regions anyway. The most important thing is: Are residents satisfied with the quality of services they’re being provided? In none of these financial analyses do they ever talk about that quality of service. So if you look at police response times in municipalities that have municipal police departments, those response times are faster than they are in the areas patrolled by other entities. Especially if you compare larger cities like St. Louis City to a city like Manchester or Creve Coeur.

What nobody argues about is that the St. Louis region is very slow-growing, with lots of overlapping tax districts and small municipalities. Should we be OK with that?

Kelly: I would agree that we’re a slow-growing region, but nobody can show me that if we consolidate municipalities, we’re going to grow faster. There’s no correlation there. I would actually contend that the municipalities in St. Louis County are one of the things that have kept people here. People like their neighborhoods; they like to live in the city of Brentwood; they like to live in Webster Groves or Kirkwood. There’s more growth in those neighborhoods than there has been in unincorporated St. Louis County. There’s no correlation between that population growth and the number of municipalities.

“If this is successful, then what’s going to stop people from doing an initiative petition to consolidate school districts? Or a petition to consolidate fire districts?”

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Are there any useful lessons for St. Louis to draw from the experience of places like Louisville and Indianapolis, where governments have already consolidated?

Kelly: I think there are. If you talk to the leaders in those areas, it’s really the leadership of those regions that brought them together. It doesn’t matter what they’re bringing together, to a certain extent. It’s just the fact that they all agreed to work together. The fragmentation we have here in the St. Louis region is (because) we have no regional leadership. We have a St. Louis County Executive, we have a Mayor of St. Louis City, we have all the different county executives throughout the region. When Amazon was looking to come to St. Louis, they wanted to go to the region to submit that proposal, and who did they go to? Two weeks before the proposal was due, the County Executive and East-West Gateway [a local planning agency] were arguing about who was going to submit the proposal. We need that coordination and that ability to work together, instead of pointing the finger all the time, and we need that leadership to bring us together.

But wouldn’t that be easier if there were fewer municipalities, fewer fire districts, fewer overlapping tax districts and less competition between municipalities?

Kelly: I don’t agree with the theory that there’s competition between municipalities. Municipalities have a certain role in providing services to their residents, and county governments have certain roles. It’s not the fault of the city of Bridgeton and the city of St. Ann when a developer comes in and goes to the two cities and says, ‘What are you going to offer me to build a store?’ The cities are just utilizing the [economic development] tools that are available to them. That happens a lot less frequently than the media portrays it. There really isn’t a correlation between municipalities and growth from an economic standpoint.

There’s a possibility there will be some kind of statewide vote. What are the dangers versus the benefits of that?

Kelly: We’re adamantly opposed to a statewide vote. If an organization is putting this to a statewide vote, it means they can’t sell it to the people it’s affecting. It’s not fair that somebody in Kansas City is going to be deciding on the kind of governmental structure I have to live under, when it doesn’t necessarily affect them. Any political subdivision should be concerned about this. If this is successful, then what’s going to stop people from doing an initiative petition to consolidate school districts? Or a petition to consolidate fire districts?

What’s the Municipal League’s assessment of the financial condition of the City of St. Louis?

Kelly: I can only go by what I read in the papers and hear on the radio, but the city is struggling. They’ve had years of businesses leaving the city, and population [declines]. Those leaders in that community need to try to figure out how they’re going to reverse that trend, or look for some help from other entities.

How big a factor is St. Louis City’s 1% earnings tax for businesses that are leaving the city?

Kelly: I actually don’t think it’s as much of a factor as the media likes to make it out to be. An earnings tax is not unique to St. Louis and Kansas City. Plenty of cities across the country have it — Philadelphia’s is 6 percent, and Philadelphia is growing. The citizens of St. Louis City overwhelmingly support it. So do the citizens of Kansas City. It’s a source of revenue for those cities. If the residents want services, they have to be paid for in some way. At some point you have to respect the people that are voting on it, and support it.

If there were a merger between the city and county, would it amount to a bailout of St. Louis City by St. Louis County taxpayers?

Kelly: You have to wait to see what the proposal is, but the reality is that St. Louis County is not in great shape, either. They’re running out of reserves to balance their budget on an annual basis. The ‘conspiracy theorist’ in me thinks the reason they want consolidation of municipalities is because they want revenue from those municipalities to offset some of the deficiencies in the county and city government. When Better Together’s reports say [consolidation] is more efficient, they never say the taxes are going to go down, but that they’re going to spend those dollars differently. That means to me they’re going to take tax dollars away from somewhere like the city of Clayton and spend them in another area of the “new” county.

Rex Sinquefield is a big backer of Better Together, and publicly associated with various political issues in the city, county and state as a whole. If Better Together puts forward a proposal, and its allies start lobbying, how worried are you about the resources that Mr. Sinquefield would bring to bear?

Kelly: I don’t know that we could ever battle [against] a statewide campaign from a money standpoint. I don’t think there’s anybody who can. If Mr. Sinquefield is going to be putting all these resources out there, it must mean that he’s not too confident, or that he thinks he needs to sell this to the outstate people to change the governmental structure of St. Louis City, which is a disservice to the residents it’s going to affect.