ST. CHARLES COUNTY EXECUTIVE STEVE EHLMANN is sharply criticizing a draft plan from a new business group in St. Louis that aims to spur investment from corporations, universities and foundations to create more high-paying jobs, especially in St. Louis City.
Ehlmann, who leads the metro area’s second-largest county, warned in a letter Tuesday that the draft “STL 2030 Jobs Plan,” from a group called Greater St. Louis, Inc., fails to address issues such as crime and the city’s earnings tax, even as the plan calls for businesses to sign an “STLPledge” that urges them to consider locating some of their employees in the urban core.
“We need new jobs and new investments throughout the region. Relocating existing jobs to one jurisdiction is tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and is a serious departure from present economic development practices,” Ehlmann wrote in the e-mailed letter to former Washington University Chancellor Mark Wrighton, who chairs a team overseeing development of the plan.
Ehlmann also called for geographic and political balance on the leadership team and board of Greater St. Louis, Inc., which will begin operating officially on Jan. 1. The group is the result of a merger among five area business organizations including Civic Progress, Downtown STL Inc. and the St. Louis Regional Chamber.
McPherson obtained Ehlmann’s letter on Wednesday. The full text is available here.
“The City of St. Louis remains, culturally and recreationally, the center of our region,” Ehlmann wrote.
He added, however, that a map of the region’s employment density “makes it obvious that the jobs center of the region is significantly to the west of downtown; even to the west of Clayton. That center ought to be the starting point for a discussion of economic development. To do otherwise will only create resentment among the majority of people in the region who do not live in St. Louis city or county.”
Jason Hall, who will serve as chief executive of Greater St. Louis Inc., said in a telephone interview with McPherson on Wednesday that issues such as crime are important. He added that his group welcomes feedback from officials like Ehlmann, which is why Greater STL released the draft version of the plan on Dec. 3 for the public to review until the end of January.
“We look forward to more engagement,” Hall said. “We’ve got to find…where can we move this region forward. The process of economy-shaping should have healthy tension points. It should have different viewpoints.”
But regarding the draft document, Hall was clear about its scope: “This is a jobs plan. This is not intended to be a comprehensive community plan that looks across all civic sectors. This is about the economic development community putting a focus on job creation, and there are three main ways to do that: recruiting new businesses, expanding existing businesses, and creating start-ups.”
The debate begins
The pushback from Ehlmann, first elected St. Charles County executive in 2007, is the first significant public challenge Greater STL has faced since the group announced its formation in late October. It could be a preview of more dissent ahead, particularly from officials in outlying areas of the 15-county region straddling the Mississippi River that Greater STL intends to serve.
The 2030 Jobs Plan is the cornerstone of an ambitious effort to turn around the economic fortunes of the St. Louis area as it emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, and restore the core of St. Louis City as the region’s employment center with 50,000 new jobs there over the next decade.
Part of this involves the proposed STL Pledge, under which major corporations and other institutions would commit to hiring locally and sourcing goods and services locally. They would also be asked to locate some of their jobs in the city.
Other aspects include an “Inclusive Capital Initiative” to pool money from families, corporations, universities and others in order to carry out Greater STL’s plans, and a foundation to manage the group’s charitable activities.
Specific goals of the plan include: the creation of more “innovation districts” that replicate the success of the Cortex district; a vast expansion of St. Louis’s existing hub in biosciences; the development of “ecosystems” to support entrepreneurs and small businesses, particularly those run by and employing people of color; and an “Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center” near Ranken Technical College and the new campus of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency on the city’s North Side.
Ehlmann is skeptical. “What are the chances businesses would voluntarily move jobs to the city for free when they have received incentives to do it in the past?” he asked in his letter.
The St. Charles County executive spoke to McPherson in a telephone interview on Wednesday afternoon.
“I’m glad we’re trying something different, in terms of all these organizations creating one new organization,” Ehlmann said, referring to the merger that created Greater STL. He added, however, that he’d like to see “something right down the middle” regarding the political leanings of the organization’s leadership, with an equal split between left-leaning and right-leaning people.
“Let’s have a debate involving people of opposing views, and let’s move forward,” Ehlmann said. “There are going to be many things we disagree on, but there ought to be a few things everyone can agree on. One of those things should be addressing crime, but they pretend like crime doesn’t exist.”
Ehlmann noted his involvement in regional issues in St. Louis as a Missouri state senator from 1993 to 2001, as well as his effort earlier this year to persuade the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, a planning group, to take a more active interest in one of the region’s major assets: St. Louis Lambert International Airport. That effort did not succeed.
Troubled history
Long divided by things like government fragmentation and a history of racism, the St. Louis area has endured two acrimonious debates over big plans in recent years. Both those plans failed.
Last December, before Ehlmann’s efforts at East-West Gateway took shape, St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson killed a process that sought bids to privatize the airport. This followed opposition from activists, city aldermen and some area business leaders. (One of these leaders, Enterprise Holdings Executive Chairman Andrew Taylor, has been a driving force behind the creation of Greater STL. Taylor is set to be the group’s first board chairman in January.)
The other plan came in early 2019, when the Better Together think tank promoted a municipal consolidation proposal that would have abolished the city’s government and concentrated power in the hands of a single “metro” mayor and council for St. Louis city and county. That plan died in May 2019 when St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger was indicted (and later jailed) on federal corruption charges.
But there are at least two crucial differences between those plans and the new 2030 Jobs Plan, at least where public debate is concerned.
First, the jobs plan does not require a vote by the public in order for Greater STL to implement it. Second, the plan lays out a diffuse enough range of priorities, involving a wide array of partners, that failure in one or two areas is unlikely to sink the effort as a whole.
Economic development expert Bruce Katz, whose firm New Localism Associates was brought on board by Civic Progress to assess the St. Louis area and draft the plan, disputed Ehlmann’s “deck chairs” analogy.
Katz said his research over the past 15 years shows that when companies cluster together to form what he calls a “geography of innovation,” there are clear benefits in terms of new businesses and jobs.
“What is happening is that in the advanced part of our economy – the technology services part of our economy – there’s a desire for companies, universities, start-ups, incubators, accelerators, skills providers – to co-locate in relatively small geographies,” Katz told McPherson.
“St. Louis, outside of Cortex, is the opposite of that phenomenon,” Katz continued. “You’re an intensely de-centralized, dispersed economy, where many companies are all on their own campuses. And what’s being missed is the ability for that synergistic 2+2=5 effect.”
Hall emphasized that Greater STL seeks to promote inclusive job growth all over the St. Louis area.
“A win anywhere in the metropolitan region is a win for the region,” Hall said. “That is not inconsistent with the geography of innovation.” –McP–
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Mr. Ehlmann is overlooking the place we are at in this point in history and the direction the way the world works is moving into the future. Innovation, particularly in areas like tech, biosciences and geospatial sciences are the keys to large scale economic growth and value. As an example of this, just earlier this year, the valuation of the two tech behemoths, Apple and Microsoft eclipsed the cumulative value of the 2,000 small cap companies that comprise the Russell 2000. So innovation matters. We need it to grow as a region.
The point that Mr. Katz said about the synergy in innovation that comes when companies and workers are located in a close geographical proximity is borne out by a number of different economic studies. Thus, having a focus on concentrating certain segments of workers in innovation centric fields makes a ton of sense for the St. Louis region. This does not mean that ALL jobs have to be in a tight geographic area. The jobs center west of the City may very well still remain the regions gravitational center of jobs. Relocating the gravitational center of jobs into downtown is not the end game. Creating innovation centers that grow the region synergistically is the point.
A second item Mr. Ehlmann seems to be overlooking is the fact that accelerating trends to permanent partial work from home and, eventually, driverless cars, is going to make it so that there is less of a time burden and hassle for workers to live further away from where their jobs are located. Thus, having a concentration of innovation centric jobs in the core of the region should not be seen as a threat to St. Charles County or others even further out. The main driver of economic growth for these parts of the region will continue to be residential growth, driven by the improvement and addition of new amenities in those communities that make people want to live there. Remote work and easier commuting make the two strategies of a dense jobs center in the core of the region and increasing residential growth of the suburbs complementary and not opposing strategies.
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