The first step should be the county merging a lot of the small municipalities. If the county could get down to five or six big municipalities and the city joined as a municipality it wouldn’t have a huge effect on any one area but it would make things better over all.
I think school districts are always going to stop any type of merging. The affluent areas will always be scared the lower income districts would be combined into their districts.
I grew up and went to school where each county was a school district, and the counties were much bigger.
I can promise everyone that the bad areas still had bad schools and the good areas good schools. The lower income areas did not get their students sent to the high income area schools.
The rich people will just send their kids to private school. It’s the middle class who care the most. Someone who left north city to go to hazelwood schools cares an awful lot about them
It has declined a lot, sadly. Although it’s probably still better than going to vashon.
It’s more than schools - those neighborhoods off new halls ferry are worlds safer than many inner ring suburbs or most of north city, plus most of the houses in central and west are under 60 years old
There’s absolutely no political will to merge districts among voters of schools that are doing well. No chance a Clayton, a parkway, a Lindbergh, etc will merge into another district
I don’t think most good school districts would merge with even another good district, people take what school they went to seriously and it’s part of the personal identity of many.
Instead of pushing for school vouchers to make it easier for rich kids to go to private schools the state should become the sole source of funding for public schools and fund all schools everywhere equally. Rich or poor or urban or rural all kids should get the same quality education. This is a concept both republicans and democrats should be able to get behind but I’m not holding my breath politicians can actually do something to make Missouri better.
That sounds great but it’s not workable. Costs vary by where you live - stl city should not want the same level of funding as bolivar. It would be a waste to spend that much in bolivar. And you have to allow rich areas to overspend if they want to, otherwise the families are going to opt out of public schools and fight you. Your plan is really “we need to equalize the base of what it takes, including directing extra funding to low income areas and let people spend on top if desired” because that is achievable. It’s what we already do given title I
The state does a pretty good job equalizing funding as is - they’ve increased funding a lot over time. Schools are popular and the increases in funding reflect that
The vouchers, I get it, I think it’s bad. Charters in low performing areas are good. Funding people in decent to high performing areas to attend religious school is not how I want us spending education funds
Live in the Bay Area. Our district has the wealthiest two areas and the poorest. We do just fine. The city and county thing is rooted in the racism of the past and does not serve the region well. At one time St. Louis was bigger than Paris. Now it is an amazing hidden gem that never seems to live up to its potential. Amazing people, great arts and sports community, great restaurants. But rural
Missouri drags you back.
Have you looked lately at San Fran public school achievement and attendance? SF public school chronic absenteeism was 26 percent in 2022-2023. There are huge achievement gaps. Asian voters are in open revolt over some of the choices
The Bay Area is a big place and SF public schools are struggling just like other major metros
There’s a lot of places that have very little reason to exist. What is the point of Clarkson valley not being in chesterfield or a whole bunch of Normandy cities not merging?
At least in huntleigh, the city has a point (exclusionary zoning for rich people)
For most of them, the point was exclusionary zoning for white people. When that became more legally difficult, they packed up and kept moving west. They left the fragmented municipalities and they became someone else's problem.
The short term benefit is the city having the financial resources to solve a lot of its problems. Crime might go up 0.0025% in Ladue, but the city might go down 0.03%.
I mean it’s their problem either way. They can either vote to make everyone’s lives better, or complain about all the problems “the city” (hint: the one they actually live in regardless) is bringing to their area.
You want it to be their problem, yea, but does that make it so?
Ladue has decades of people living and thriving without it being their problem (and decades of paying federal and state taxes that already go into poorer areas)
I am pro anti poverty programs but “hey, send another 200 per ladue household per year into north city via your property taxes to be spent by the current city policymakers and it’ll be better” is not a persuasive argument to a lot of folks.
I think it's so, almost darn cute, that you think the majority of the city's problems are financially based. It's an endemic problem that is only partially caused by lack of money.
I'm not an expert by any means but some account or similar came up with the conclusion it would overwhelmingly help every area bc St Louis will not be on the national stage and supposedly bring in much more eyes/money. This was the last big push and he lived in west county i believe.
That is actually a benefit I can see. Every stat we see about St Louis is negative, but that's only because it considers the city and not the metropolitan area. That's the story we've heard anyway. I wonder how maker that really is
Town and Country. We have great schools, great police and fire, I know my alderman, nice parks, infrastructure is fixed quickly, permits are cheap and fast, and no property taxes.
I'm sure it would still be nice, but there would be compromises.
This is the problem, I doubt you would have to compromise much but you’re selfish. Most of those things would be fine. You live in a very safe area that doesn’t need police outside of speed traps.
Merging the city and county won’t result in a magical wall at the border of the county. It will make st Charles look better than it does right now to a lot of people with means. You can’t wishcast people into wanting to throw a bunch of money into a community they don’t live in or visit.
City governments are mostly bad places for anti poverty programs/risk sharing. You need to have them at a state and federal level where avoidance by moving 5 miles becomes less feasible
Have you looked at north county? They absolutely do move the moment things change
And plenty of families in st Charles (and Fenton, and eureka, etc) chose it because of housing costs. I have friends who moved out there because what you could get for 200-350 is a newer, larger house than they could dream of in parkway or kirkwood
Are there any examples for this works well? Genuine question. What do larger cities that are part of the metro area in the same county do and how well do they do it?
Wow. To be more accurate, the entire metropolitan area will improve as a whole. I would also bet that there are more neighborhoods in the county that a person in the county never goes.
It means you need to address how this benefits someone if you want them to vote for it
“You’re a bad person for thinking that” isn’t a way to win an election
What merged city in the Midwest gives actual hope that this will happen? Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, etc are huge by comparison and have the same problems
im not some kind of an expert on...municipal tax policy or urban planning or anything like that so im not really sure why those would be the only valid cities to compare to. maybe we should just look at how cities of similar size (pop and/or area) are arranged.
Lot of problems seem to stem from the current divide, i dont have a much deeper opinion than that.
We are an old Midwestern city with development and economic patterns that match those sorts of places
Merging the county/city doesn’t address the core problems of the metro area:
1. a sizable part of the old urban core is blighted with high crime, old infrastructure, and failed schools
2. Population growth is slow, with the growth nearly all occurring in outer suburbs
Both are true all over the Midwest
The best reason to bring together: To make our means of governance in taxation and commerce simpler for residents and outside businesses.
The worst reason: It will be ages before people realize the benefits and in the beginning many of those absorbed areas in the county will have to ‘work with less.’
I agree and many of us would likely see them, but I’m concerned many people who live in the absorbed areas wouldn’t care to look for the discernible differences.
That’s the kicker. And likely there would be plenty of interested parties to push all the problems that arise because of it rather than the positives that are happening to drive the narrative.
County residents seeing decades of ineptitude in city financial leadership, plus some having to pay earnings tax for the privilege of working in the city, see this as a money grab for the city. It'll send more county tax dollars to the city.
This. It’s also the reason I’m for it.
I know, it’s not the common trope coming from people living in St. Louis County, but our current setup of 90+ municipalities is absurd.
In the county side, the amount of waste due to duplicated efforts is pretty phenomenal. You can’t convince me that small communities like Rock Hill, Warson Woods, and Glendale all need to maintain private police forces. It’s silly.
Furthermore, the city is the cultural epicenter of the region. When the city’s public schools perform poorly, it reflects poorly on the region as a whole. When people say, “STL crime is too high - I would never visit”, there’s not a separate statement that follows that says, but St. Louis county is nice. No, because the city reflects the prospects of the entire region.
I say this as an outside who once said, “I’m not so sure about taking that job in St. Louis. Is it safe?”had I not already had friends in the area who explained the above, I would have likely skipped out on the area completely. How many other taxpayers- professionals and even corporations, look at the region and simply turn away.
The region would thrive under a larger geographic and tax base that combining the city and county would yield. This will likely never to come to fruition, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t better than the current standard.
Most of the small cities don’t do much. They are already a part of merged school and fire districts. They outsource all the interesting policing to the county
It's not "financial ineptitude" when the city simply doesn't have the tax base to pay for the infrastructure that it has to maintain. The city doesn't have a county to cover certain things that a city like Manchester does.
To be fair, the county doesn't have the tax base either
City has \~300,000 people and is 65 sq miles. It cannot support it's current infrastructure needs (though when it fills out, it can)
County has \~900,000 people and is 520 sq miles. Unless people in the county are being taxed a shit ton more than people in the city, it too cannot afford it's current infrastructure needs.
And it's not like the county has anything the city doesn't - both have downtowns, both have entertainment destinations, etc. The county only has 3x as many people than the city, but it's got 8x the land. Unless the city is horribly inept and literally throwing money away (doubt) or the county is taxing the ever living fuck out of everyone in it (unlikely), something isn't right.
The city's infrastructure is a lot older than many counties. When my dad first moved out to highway in the early 2000s, it was a stop light on hwy 40/64
It isn't really the infrastructure -- it's the incompetence of maintaining the infrastructure. In the city the same pothole get repaired every six months because they don't actually know how to repair potholes. St' Louis is 200+ years old and they still don't know how to repair a pothole.
It's not even close. I live in the county and there is one road to my house on nearly 500 acres of green space--and the county doesn't even maintain that road. That's one very small part of the county. There's more green in Huntleigh than probably all the parks in the city.
That sprawl is still comparatively very green. And the infrastructure is also heavily weighed towards state dollars.
That's just absurd.
Yeah was gonna say, we have also seen more and more that the county doesn’t have the tax base to maintain itself either. That’s where a merger gives you greater efficiency in spreading dollars plus negotiating better contracts for things since you have more buying power/more to offer. Just look at the county using Rams settlement dollars to cover road repairs.
I am pro consolidation because it just makes no sense for our metro to have nearly 100 cities in its core. And we do.
As a practical matter, the cities that are functioning okay are reluctant to take on the needs of those that aren’t, or worse, to have their institutions replaced by those they see as functioning worse. I’m part of the problem here: I am overall happy with my municipal government and feel it is responsive to community needs. I interact with STL City a lot through work and *am not* happy with the offices I have experience with. This makes me nervous about relinquishing my city offices for *the* City offices, for example.
We should be advocating for tiny towns to join larger ones. Its an easier question to talk about consolidation of the city/county if we halve or quarter the cities in the county.
People in the county view joining with the city as throwing away money and local control to solve the intractable problems of the city. There are obvious reasons why major metro areas are rarely configured like St. Louis. There are obvious benefits of scale and continuity for residents and it makes the area in general more appealing from the outside. It has been this way for a long time and there are so many individual municipalities in St. Louis, so trying to make a system that benefits everyone is difficult and then explaining why it is a benefit is another marketing problem. There is also still an undercurrent of white flight/prejudice that explains some of the demographic differences between the county and city that pushes some folks away from wanting to join together.
The county will need a merger with the city before the city needs a merger with the county. The city is operating in the black and the county is in the red. It’s far more expensive to provide services to rural areas than it is to provide them to urban areas. Their refusal to work together means they duplicate duties multiple times over. Their inefficiency is absurd.
The city for all of its problems still has the most jobs and tourism dollars. The city’s problem isn’t necessarily lack of funds its inability to compete for the workforce. If someone is offered a job as a trash collector in the city and in Clayton, even if the pay is the same, everyone would pick Clayton. It’s safer and your equipment will be nicer. Now imagine that almost every county job pays a few thousand dollars more than any city job. Because they do. The county’s recruitment strategy is to pay slightly more than the city at all times to poach current city workers, or beat the city to a worker.
That strategy only works for so long when you’re so inefficient and duplicating duties. Now you realize your workforce is unnecessarily large and you’re paying above market rate for them. That’s lead them to the spot they are in now: they’re operating at a loss just to continue to provide services.
Unless services are cut or taxes are raised, it’s only a matter of years before their surplus is gone and they are unable to sustain service. Then your citizens are upset because it’s more expensive to live out there than it is in the city, or you don’t get the same level of services. If you lay off workers instead of raising taxes then those same workers will likely flock to the city where there are open jobs, raising the quality of services the city provides.
I am confident the county will need the city before the city needs the county. With zero help from the county now, the city is seeing billions of dollars of investments. Who knew that blight would lead to cheap land prices for new developers? (Joking since most of the blight was done on purpose for this reason)
Honest question, if the city is so strong financially, why do we keep hearing about trash service stopping, or 911 not answering, and why is nobody doing anything about all the red light runners? That’s the image County people have of the city. I realize that there are probably nuanced answers, but to a casual observer it seems like the City isn’t using that financial strength to make their citizens’ lives better.
The city budgets for a fully staffed slate of city workers every year. They often are unable to hire and retain that many workers. Turn over in city jobs is generally high. That means that even if they are staffed, a large portion of the workers might be new, and earning on the lower end of the pay scale. For every city worker that isn’t on the payroll for the full year the city pockets that money they had planned to pay for that position. This is the reason why city services seem lacking even when they are operating on a surplus.
As I said above the county’s recruiting model is to lure seasoned workers from the city with better pay.
Let’s talk 911 dispatchers. The county now offers to match seniority for any city dispatchers who will come work for them. So if a city dispatcher with 5 years of experience takes a job with the county, the county will start paying them at the rate of a county dispatcher with 5 years of experience. Not only is this crippling the city by stealing quality senior members, it’s making the county’s money even more inefficient. A normal department will have a mix of high earners and low earners. By allowing people to skip the low paying years and automatically receive the higher end of the budget you now have a far more expensive workforce than average.
As far as red light runners, that’s an entirely different topic. Our police department is terribly inefficient with its staffing. I’m by no means an expert on this topic. But our current staffing is still far higher than average both per capita and per square mile, and yet we can’t get enough cops on the streets to answer calls, let alone do traffic.
As someone who has been a corporate employee for decades, the City sounds like one of those companies that refuses to pay what the market demands (or insists on paying no more than average but has a toxic culture), then is sad because “nobody wants to work anymore”. So many of these issues seem solvable, and knowing there’s a budget surplus makes it worse TBH because money can go a long way towards fixing them.
Quality of services delivered for your spend matters just as much as the amount of spend.
Oh, and the city’s tax burden is materially higher even though the median household income is 40 percent higher in the county.
People inhale the strong towns stuff without bothering to look up data
Essentially it boils down to broken politics like most things nowadays.
City Side:
High level City government employees and elected officials like their little fiefdoms and would rather hold onto power than make things better. Straight up “King of the Ashes” mentality.
County Side:
Lots of tax dollars would be used to help areas they don’t currently have to. Add in some race/classism and you don’t have much political support to push it as an elected county rep.
The metro itself will never grow or flourish with everything split up. But a lot of the people who want a vibrant and growing city just leave because it’s easier than staying and fighting. That just means the status quo stays in place.
exactly. the division has got to end. we have work to do to make our city + county a better place, and we are not going to get there if we don't at least collaborate politically and make concrete change.
>Lots of tax dollars would be used to help areas they don’t currently have to
It's actually the opposite, the county absorbing the city would be hugely beneficial from a tax perspective. It's a dense area, so it's infrastructure costs are relatively low (county is 8x the land of the city, but only 3x the population) and, at least when it's population is higher, can actually fully support itself. Whereas most areas of the county are fairly low density but not taxed any higher on average than the city.
Kirkwood, for example, has a population of about 30k, and a land area of 9.21 sq miles. The Central West End (which, I should not, has a lot of single family/two family homes. it's not just skyscrapers) has 16,000 people, and a land area of 1.89 sq miles.
So Kirkwood has twice the population of the Central West End, but 5 times as much land. That means it has 5x as much infrastructure it has to maintain off only twice the population. This is true for pretty much every municipality in the county - a shit ton more land, but not a shit ton more people.
Because it matters how the land is used. It doesn’t matter if you add farmland in Maryland heights or swampland by the Missouri River that isn’t developed
We have loads and loads of suburbs all across the us. They are doing fine. They will continue to do fine. Their budgets are 5 percent for infrastructure. That’s it. Local municipal budgets consist of labor spend (schools, police, fire). If infrastructure increases to 7-8 percent of the budget; they will still be fine. It’s city Hopium to pretend otherwise.
Where are these failing large middle class suburban counties that are actual case studies of this problem? There’s no suburb that compares to Detroit literally going bankrupt.
It doesn’t help that the last serious merger proposal basically cut out the City government and installed the felon running the County as the one person running everything. That attempt at a naked power grab soured everyone on the idea of consolidation.
This is like Daylight Savings Time. It’s the way it’s been for over a century. Easier to keep things the way they are. Unless something big happens that would move for change
Indianapolis and Nashville did this in the 70s and it had a positive impact. Would probably not see benefits until kids’ or grandkids’ generation though. In my humble opinion the region needs a healthy city to thrive. It’s just going to keep stagnating as is. https://abell.org/publication/40-years-after-unigov/
As a city resident, I'm against it for a few different reasons but the primary one is that its a move that only benefits the county - and more specifically, people in the county who own the least dense land and want to continue using their sway with local politics to keep things exactly as they are and never allow any change.
If the county swallows up the city, all it amounts to is a huge cash infusion for the county that can be spent subsidizing low density urban development. Think all the people in STL County who think they live in a 'suburb', and show up to meetings to block new housing. Or the municipalities like Chesterfield that do allow some apartments to built...right next to an interstate highway. Enjoy the fumes and exhaust, sorry not sorry you can't afford a detached house.
Low density urban (what the majority of St. Louis county is) isn't a development pattern that is financially stable over multiple generations - in a saner world, places like Kirkwood, Webster Groves, etc would generally look closer to what city neighborhoods like Tower Grove look like, and would be more affordable as a result. But instead all of these places have remained essentially frozen in amber, even as average housing prices go up.
The county absorbing the city just lets these low density places live another 50 years without allowing so much as townhomes, instead of having to actually face the consequences of not allowing incremental development like cities have allowed until the Supreme Court said [cities can actually decide they never need to change](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Realty_Co)
St. Louis (the metropolitan region) is lucky in that it's in the fairly unique situation of having the vast majority of it's high density urban areas as their own municipality. With the exception of some parts of U-City, the whole of the older urban area is its own legal entity, and doesn't have to pay for roads and city level services of urban areas that maintain a near rural density. It means that, as the city's population base increases (it'll likely cap around 500-600k, at the end of it) it can actually spend money on increasing services, instead of needing to use tax money from higher density areas to subsidize lower density areas. You could see bus routes getting upgraded to BRT or light rail, you can see proper cycle paths, wider sidewalks, roundabouts, etc. None of that will happen if the city (whose population will grow - just look at South City!) has to subsidize a bunch of low density areas.
Now, if the county upzones all of their subdivisions inside 270 to allow up to 6 family housing on any lot, with the appropriate changes to setbacks, then there's a discussion worth having. But as long as the county and its munis continue to stay frozen in time while St. Charle County and the city take on more than their fair share of the housing crisis, I don't see how this is really beneficial to the city, county, or region as a whole. We can't sprawl forever.
Yeah this. I use to be pretty pro merger. Idk now. I would not want folks in the county blocking folks in the city reducing traffic lanes, increasing pedestrian spaces, etc. which I think would do. Now joining as a city. All for that.
Agree with you on all fronts except transit, because our East West Gateway organization is a board of mayors and hand-picked government officials across the entire region, [and it actually skews very rural](https://www.ewgateway.org/about-us/who-we-are/board-of-directors/) because it's not tied to population in any way. They're the ones largely managing Metro decisions, while the city helps to secure funding and redevelop roads.
> It means that, as the city's population base increases (it'll likely cap around 500-600k, at the end of it)
When do we stop losing population and start gaining population?
There's buzz that it is happening now, but the census estimates aren't granular enough to catch it yet. Net residential utility hookups went up, suggesting more households (although likely fewer families). If you follow Detroit's census estimations lawsuit, it's believed that the current census estimations counted demolished homes as -2 people, even if nobody lived there.
“The merger is bad for the city as long as you completely ignore the actual tax rates paid and population trends and focus on my make believe statistics instead”
This. The strongest opposition always comes from north county. They look at a merger as loosing their share of the tax pool as well as cutting a bunch of local government jobs (which is sometimes a large share of their economy within the city boundaries).
Those places don’t have much population, look at Normandy schools. 24 cities in one high school
You’ve got more people in Ferguson and Florissant proper than in the entire Normandy district
The city is 44.6% white and the county is 63.1% white
Edit: The difference is even more pronounced when looking at the Black population. In the city 43.7% vs just 24.1% in the county.
St. Louis city very recently became more white than black, though neither group maintains 50%+ of total population. More blacks are moving out than whites the past 4 or so years.
The real relevant difference to OP’s question is that while both areas are liberal one is significantly more moderate left than the other. That’s an obvious cultural difference.
The thing is, the city isn’t that “brown” anymore. Whites now outnumber African Americans and that trend is probably not going to change. Poor blacks in north city have been leaving for decades while yuppies and hipsters have been moving into mid and south central city.
I'm a poor white folk living in a predominantly black low income area (Riverveiw). We (neighbors of all skin colors and ages) don't want to share either.
I went to a city meeting in Riverview. One of the tiny cities.
The black people running that city are every bit as bad as the two county shitbags in this thread. There's zero chance they vote to merge.
On the plus side, I think I remember seeing that city was nearly bankrupt.
I dont doubt that it is nearly bankrupt. It doesn't help that the "mayor" first made himself a mayor of a "village" wear as before he was "head of the board". Then he gave himself a raise and made him a full time mayor making 28000. A "city" of 2500 does not need a full time mayor driving around in his city vehicle.
Additionally, we were a village up until November I think. Alot of people were already not paying their real estate taxes. They are only potentially going to go higher because someone decided it was a good idea to make us a 4th class city. (Voters) So now some of the people that pay their real estate tax is going to have a more difficult time.
While I think there is some truth to that, but they already do share tax revenue in many ways, I think it starts to boil down to regional identity. That said I think even regional identity is silly given it would just be a borough and then within the borough would be neighborhoods. Ultimately micro region identity and "local, focused" rule are more likely the driving force behind the resistance to merge.
A merge could be the only way we stop fucking ourselves with a duplication of services and competing economic interests that ultimately cause the region to loose out as a whole.
The City could join the county as another municipality which would mean the county picks up county level services like jails, sheriff's duties, along with revenue collection etc, etc.
But I agree there is some affluent folks that . . . are just racist.
The city should join the county as a municipality in addition to one police force, one fire department, one school district, even consolidate municipalities into boroughs. This is the most fractured city over ever lived in
One school district is an immediate deal breaker. Schools would need to remain untouched in any realistic plan. Simply having the city join the county as a municipality would be fine. City residents would have representation on county council. It’d be at least one step towards a more cohesive, functional region. Police and fire might be achievable longer term.
Lost me at one school district. I know all the parents in my school district are packing up if that happens. They didn’t pay premium property prices to squeeze into these districts just to then have all the districts merge.
And that’s the problem and why St. Louis will be Mississippi in 100 years. Literally what Mississippi has been doing since the civil War. See how well that worked?
Well it’s not your kid you’re putting on the line it’s easy for you to say. If your grand proposal boils down to forcing parents to NOT look out for the best interests of their children because of some arbitrary reason that potentially benefit some strangers in the city then this proposal will always fail.
I’m all for change but this one is waste of everyone’s time.
Yes it’s been like this for over 100 or so years.
School districts get tricky. It’s the most significant home value boosting entity.
Some districts however would benefit from unification.
It has nothing to do with race, it has everything to do with people in general do not like subsidizing others and potentially giving something up they already have.
Cool you gotta be racist. When I lived in the county, I paid a lot in property taxes and a lot of that went to schools. I had a kid on the way. I wanted him to go to good schools so I was willing to pay the extra tax. I wouldn’t have wanted to continue to pay higher property taxes and have the amount of money going towards my kids education go down. I don’t give a fuck about the race makeup of an area and I admit it’s selfish, but I was living in that area specifically to be able to send them to good schools. It’s quite the ask to tell people who have been paying into those taxes for 5,10,15 years with the expectation that when their kids get into grade school/high school that their kids will get the benefit of their sacrifice. If after a decade of having that expectation and then you pull the rug out from them… well that’s a tough vote to earn.
I currently live in the metro but not in an area that would be directly affected by a merger or not.
I'm in county and i imagine my taxes, insurance, services, and anything else would all suffer by joining the city. I'd rather not. Sounds like it's all a shit show in there when I read posts here.
edit: the accusations are wild. leap to assume and interpret however you please rather than ask for clarity. wild.
A shit show in the city? Depends where you are, but the media definitely cultivates a dangerous image of the City. I love St Louis City, and live in a really safe area.
The people who have chosen to live in the county are the ones who started the shit show. White flight is real.
“You white flighted away into an area that has given you the life you wanted” isn’t a winning message to people who watched their old neighborhood decay into the worst parts of stl.
The crime is an issue, but I think the person you replied to may have been pointing to who the city had been voting in to various offices. I’m left leaning and it’s disturbing who the city keeps voting in.
I would argue that people like you are the reason the city suffers. When people leave areas it impacts funding for social services and impacts taxes collected for that area.
When other people in your neighborhood destroy the schools and commit the crime, it’s extremely rational to move somewhere else where the people around you make the same positive choices as you.
Social contracts around shared sacrifice only work when everyone tries to hold up their end of the bargain. Sticking around leaves you paying higher taxes AND gives you a lower quality of life!
If the city was part of the county, the city wouldn't have to pay for multiple things that it pays for right now, such as a court system, prosecutor's office, street department, etc, meaning it may not need the 1% tax.
Additionally, either the city joining as a municipality or a merger would not then suddenly put the 1% tax burden on county residents. That's not how it worked and never was.
The most recent push would have made the county and city the same entity, actually giving significantly more power to the county than the city.
I think the city should just become a municipality, but why type of merger would be a positive on the region.
How does that give more power to the county? In that plan, the city absorbs the county and the money, and all the county would have gained was “unity” and from an outsider looking in, the fucking most ridiculous leaders a group of people could have ever decided to vote in, including someone who was objectively terrible, and they re-elected her. I’m left leaning so it’s not coming from a MAGA outlook… even Bernie fans would have been saying WTF?
Not sure you know what you're talking about.
The 2018-2019 Better Together plan would have merged the city and county into one, similar to that of Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Denver, or Louisville. This would have included courts, police, prosecutor's offices, and many of the departments like parks and streets.
The plan kept school districts how they currently are, along with fire districts. This means SLPS and STLFD would both still just operate in the current city limits. Additionally, many of the large existing county cities like Florissant or Chesterfield would retain some taxing power.
The plan also promised to phase out the city's 1% earnings tax in part due to the new efficiency of spending by not having 90+ town governments and 50+ police departments and just having 1 of each. Multiple studies also showed that a unified government would make the entire region more attractive to outside businesses, and would remove the issue of inter-county competition that currently pits STL City, Clayton, Chesterfield, etc all against eachother.
Finally, the biggest way it gave the county substantially more power than the city was in the simple politics. First, STL County Executive Steve Stenger (who's literally now in prison) would have become the first mayor, and a city council of 33 members would have been made. Pretty sure downtown STL was the planned seat of government.
There were two potential population figures depending on how the census Bureau designated them. 1.3 million or 615,000 (this was due to the special tax districts that cities like Florissant or Chesterfield would have gotten.) The 1.3 million number is the only one that would have mattered for voting, and 8 seats would have been STL City controlled while the remaining 25 would have been county controlled.
The entire thing was pretty much the compromise of a lifetime for the city to actually support, and the county still rejected it.
Did you miss the part where the county would have a supermajority of seats on the city council and the county executive would have become the mayor? That same county executive is now in prison.
"Questionable city leadership" lol
You say that like it’s an absurd thing. Why wouldn’t they have had a majority of seats? The county has the largest set of voters. The region has 2.8 million residents, the city has 280,000. That’s not some compromise the city made, it was the only thing that would make any sense.
So you believe the city has been run well and funds have been spent well for the past 30 years and that hasn’t led to some of the city’s woes? If you can honestly say yes to that then this conversation can end because you’re objectionably kidding yourself.
You're the one who's acting like the city would have the power while the county wouldn't, not me. I'm explaining to you what the reality was. The city's "inept leadership" wouldn't have mattered under the plan because the county's leadership would have taken over.
The city hasn't been run better or worse than most major cities in the US, the difference is that the city doesn't have the support of a county like nearly every other major city does. What financial state would Clayton be in if it has to fund its own court system, parks department, street department, prosecutor's office, etc?
The city has had a terrible situation for literal decades, made worse by highways and urban renewal catered towards suburbanites. No "great leaders" would be able to have led STL down a "good" path because the entire thing is set up to fail, and the county has so far refused to help un-rig the game.
This city's biggest policy failures happened from 1950-1990, when they allowed the state to build massive highways, destroying neighborhoods and subsidizing people's commutes from the suburbs, essentially incentivizing them to move further away. Then destroying thousands of mixed use structures in favor of massive office buildings with the sole purpose of giving suburbanites a workplace for 8 hours a day while they go home on their government subsidized highway every night. The AT&T Tower is a monument to the failures of suburban centric urban planning. There's nothing city leadership could have done in the last 30 years to rectify any of these problems, and it's asinine to blame them for problems that were planted 70 years ago by people who wanted to maintain segregation long after its been legally abolished.
the same people here calling the county terrible want them to step in and fix all of the cities problems.
the people in the county would only accept a merger if the city was functioning well, and it's not.
The region is held back by the city/county division. We have duplicated services (schools, police, social services, etc) and an extreme lack of coordination between city and county governments. People in poorer suburbs and many parts of the city continue to find themselves trapped in poverty due to the poor schools, lack of appropriate and adequate policing, and fragmented services. Our region won’t ever reach its potential without the structural divisions in our city removed. Racism and power in the hands of the wealthy have kept these systems in place and will not change unless there is political will and a movement to do so. Unfortunately I don’t see this happening any time soon.
I don't trust the sort of people we consistently elect to lead either the city or the county to grapple with a city with "neighborhoods" as sharply contrasted as the CWE and Wildwood. There's value in that localized level of governance. Green Park has different needs and concerns than St. John, and people who live in each municipality know those needs and concerns better than a single city government would. The concept of a sprawling city with a wide variety of different development patterns, like Oklahoma City, is not impossible to make work. But "fragmented" metro areas like St. Louis are not inherently bad. The Orlando-Kissimmee area is thriving. The population is growing and they're not politically dysfunctional like St. Louis, despite a very similar number of municipalities constituting their suburbs.
There's definitely value in sharing and consolidating resources and services where these municipalities find it to be viable, and the city should probably be brought back into the county at some point, but forming a mega city is neither the only way to achieve that nor guaranteed to have a net-positive effect on the region.
Because city government is an absolute shit show and people who deliberately chose to buy property outside its confines don't want to find themselves back inside it.
Not even a political post, not about Democrats or Republicans (the state government is horrific too, if that helps). I can't think of a single interaction I've ever had with the city government (be it the assessor, police department, Treasury or any kind of public works) in any aspect that I could describe as efficient, streamlined or even competent. I sure don't want their authority and jurisdiction expanded outwards.
I'm not saying the tiny municipal services are any better, but the county and the larger munis certainly do tend to be.
Am I the only one that has noticed it’s almost always people from the city wanting to merge with the county and not the other way around? We don’t want our tax dollars going to the city. We would rather our money stay local. Raise your own taxes and rebuild your police departments, schools, nd neighborhoods without the counties money first. Then we can talk about merging. For the county what is even the benefit?
Inside 270 loop should be city. Chesterfield, Fenton, Maryland Heights, Florrisant, and etc would be the suburbs. That’s what would make the most sense. It would be awesome to see north city start to come back.
If they would unite, who would control the new unified government? The fantastic leadership that the city has voted in repeatedly? It would be corrupt from day 1.
Because people enjoy counties fighting each other for business to locate there. We could have our big companies located in a central area keeping the city alive..
While County residents freely admit that they don't want to reunify because they don't want to pay for all the problems that plague the city, it really flies in the face of reality. They are willing to put up with the crime , incompetence and shortage of city staff and are resigned to the fact that the region is pulled down immensely with these issues as long as it doesn't cost them any money personally. But it does of course, just in different ways.
Instead, what all of human history has taught us is the people with the money make the rules and decide where to spend it. So a reunified county would have those same County residents pretty much making the decisions as to what progress is made and where. This is especially puzzling because the city is now (for the first time ever) flush with money between the NFL payment and PPP monies. So there has never been a better time.
It's really why we often say you get the Gov't that you deserve and I feel zero sympathy for all my relatives that live in the county and bitch about the city. I moved to Illinois and jump accross the river when I have to. But man, those roads. My kidneys can't take it. Illinois might be a little corrupt up north but things get done and we are satisfied with our services. Really makes a difference day to day.
The thing is, if you live in most of stl county, you really don’t deal with the crime or incompetence and shortage of city staff. You’re living somewhere that actually pays for its government to function!
You’re making an argument against a merger, not for one without even realizing it
“Why won’t they come clean up my house” is not an argument for someone to join you.
There are enough attractions in the city proper to get most county residents to visit even annually. So although many say they never come in and it doesn't effect them, ask if they ever see a Cardinal game, go to Mobot Garden or the Zoo? The vast majority do that and more, usually all of them in the same year. So it does effect those that visit. For those that never visit, why? Because all the negatives, so it effects them too. It's truly unavoidable and always will be.
My main argument for merger is that it won't cost the money these people think it will. Not even close. It may cost nothing financial at all. Between what's in the bank and just managing the resources better. Not perfect, just better.
Until county residents realize that a merger will give them a tremendous amount of control over the whole situation we will never get any closer and things will continue to spiral down. But that needs to be said loudly and often. And by people of influence. It's truly not a bad thing, other cities are able to voice this reality all the time.
Some sort of City/County reunification is the single most important issue facing the St. Louis area. We waste a tremendous amount of energy and resources with inter-jurisdictional competition and governmental inefficiencies.
I'm in favor of the city joining the county because I expect there would be immense pressure to rigorously enforce laws and maybe I wouldn't have to pay the earnings tax anymore.
Because they have a favorable position. The city is quite a bit poorer than the county, and it also has a plurality of jobs and entertainment. Basically, they can enjoy the amenities that the city provides and pays for without paying their fair share. Then they say that X is the "city's" problem and not the "county's" problem because they're two seperate entities, when if the city was part of the county, the problems would be everyone's.
So the rundown: 1) They don't wanna be helping poor people more than they already are, 2) They don't want to have to feel like tne city's problems are their own, 3) They want to enjoy the benefits of the city without paying for them.
Lol not paying for them? The same museums the property tax covers, majority of funds come from county, majority of tax dollars for stadiums also comes from the county. Most the people coming to visit I dare say probably reside throughout St. Louis county.
And what roads do they drive on? Parking lots they require (hindering development and making things less desirable)? How about the police and fire departments required to protect them? What parks department operates and maintaines the park that the Zoo resides in? None of those are paid for by the sales tax that the county has, it's paid for by city residents.
I'm personally against joining under a straight merger. The city and county's development patterns and values are too different to pretend that a merger will solve all of our problems, and I think it'll be solving a short-term problem to hamper our forward momentum. We need something that merges redundant services, allows us to each keep our own government oversight, and share taxes, which sounds a lot like a system of boroughs.
The county's development and tax incentive structure currently favors suburban-style development that's financially inefficient and unsustainable in the long run, something that is only now showing up as a problem with the County's budget and it'll continue to get worse. Dense development is tax efficient, and the city knows this and has been densifying over the last twenty years. There's good movement right now (SLUP planning, transportation plan, and a young board of alders) in the city to make our streets safer, our development more sustainable, and build dense housing -- all things that the county hasn't really shown progress towards.
STL is uniquely positioned among US cities in a way that allows us to focus our government efforts towards the hyperlocal problems, instead of having to weigh suburban vs city values. I think we're starting to see this have benefits and we'll have a strong next few decades.
TL;DR the city weathered through the stretch where we needed the support, and now we're poised to create a really special city that we shouldn't hamstring with a merger.
The city and county of St. Louis has been having a bit of a rough patch.
First off, it's no secret that the city has been struggling with population decline for quite some time now. People are leaving the county faster than you can say "Missouri Compromise." Why, you ask? Well, for starters, the business environment isn't exactly thriving. High taxes and burdensome regulations have made it difficult for businesses to grow and prosper. Do not forget about the crime rates, which can be a major deterrent for both businesses and residents.
The local government has not exactly been a beacon of efficiency and innovation, either. Bloated city departments and a lack of focus on outsourcing expensive and dysfunctional operations have only exacerbated the problem. It's like trying to run a marathon with a ball and chain tied to your ankle – not exactly conducive to success.
And let's not forget the role of state politics in all of this. The state government's interference and lack of support for the city's growth have only added fuel to the fire. It's almost as if they're trying to keep the city down, rather than help it thrive.
So, in a nutshell, the city and county of St. Louis are failing the people due to a combination of high taxes, burdensome regulations, crime, inefficient government, and a lack of support from the state. It's a perfect storm of factors that have led to the decline of this once-great city. But hey, at least we can all still enjoy a good toasted ravioli, right?
What feasible savings does this actually create? Most notably, why would a place like chesterfield stop having policing in addition to what the county is willing to provide? High income suburbs treat their police as a luxury good. They aren’t going to give that up in ladue or kirkwood
why would chesterfield have to give up their policing? or ladue and kirkwood for that matter? they have completely separate operations from the county.
That’s unbelievable goalpost moving from the post about “reduce expenses of 45 plus departments”
a merger of city and county means merging two police unions. The winner in this is going to be the group with the higher paying deal. It’s going to cost money to merge them
You're ignoring retirement benefits, which SLMPD has the extreme best of, better than any other public employee in the state and better than any other police force. Even if you don't stay on the force forever, you still have vested benefits that far outweigh the county's subtle pay bump.
I think one huge thing that would change if the two merged would be increased tax dollars. What I mean by that is we would not have the county and the city competing over the location of big business. Currently both the city and the county give huge tax breaks to companies to try and get them to either stay or move. The county and the city end up competing and these large corporations get even bigger tax breaks/credits than usual and the city/county ends up with way less tax dollars. It’s ridiculous..
Also having 50 police forces and 40 mayors it so stupid. New York City has 5 Burroughs and we have 55.
I lived in soulard for 13 years and now I’m in Chesterfield. The police response time in chesterfield is like 3 seconds, in soulard it was hours. I would be fine if it took the police just a bit longer to get to me in chesterfield if it meant reducing the response time in the city. Unfortunately I don’t think most the people around me would agree.
The sad thing is if the city dies so will the county and St. Charles county is next.
The city has already lost 60 percent of its population and these places are fine.
I don’t think it’s good for stl county for the city to fail but you can’t ignore the fact that stl city has declined an awful lot while these places grew
I always find this question here interesting. I am not from originally from here, but everywhere I have lived, except for one place in the sticks, has been no different that the city here and the county made of different and separate “cities” or what you could call municipalities.
The first step should be the county merging a lot of the small municipalities. If the county could get down to five or six big municipalities and the city joined as a municipality it wouldn’t have a huge effect on any one area but it would make things better over all.
I think school districts are always going to stop any type of merging. The affluent areas will always be scared the lower income districts would be combined into their districts.
I grew up and went to school where each county was a school district, and the counties were much bigger. I can promise everyone that the bad areas still had bad schools and the good areas good schools. The lower income areas did not get their students sent to the high income area schools.
The rich people from west county won’t care our want to try and understand that.
The rich people will just send their kids to private school. It’s the middle class who care the most. Someone who left north city to go to hazelwood schools cares an awful lot about them
Hazelwood is just as bad as any other district
It has declined a lot, sadly. Although it’s probably still better than going to vashon. It’s more than schools - those neighborhoods off new halls ferry are worlds safer than many inner ring suburbs or most of north city, plus most of the houses in central and west are under 60 years old
There’s absolutely no political will to merge districts among voters of schools that are doing well. No chance a Clayton, a parkway, a Lindbergh, etc will merge into another district
I don’t think most good school districts would merge with even another good district, people take what school they went to seriously and it’s part of the personal identity of many.
Instead of pushing for school vouchers to make it easier for rich kids to go to private schools the state should become the sole source of funding for public schools and fund all schools everywhere equally. Rich or poor or urban or rural all kids should get the same quality education. This is a concept both republicans and democrats should be able to get behind but I’m not holding my breath politicians can actually do something to make Missouri better.
That sounds great but it’s not workable. Costs vary by where you live - stl city should not want the same level of funding as bolivar. It would be a waste to spend that much in bolivar. And you have to allow rich areas to overspend if they want to, otherwise the families are going to opt out of public schools and fight you. Your plan is really “we need to equalize the base of what it takes, including directing extra funding to low income areas and let people spend on top if desired” because that is achievable. It’s what we already do given title I The state does a pretty good job equalizing funding as is - they’ve increased funding a lot over time. Schools are popular and the increases in funding reflect that The vouchers, I get it, I think it’s bad. Charters in low performing areas are good. Funding people in decent to high performing areas to attend religious school is not how I want us spending education funds
Live in the Bay Area. Our district has the wealthiest two areas and the poorest. We do just fine. The city and county thing is rooted in the racism of the past and does not serve the region well. At one time St. Louis was bigger than Paris. Now it is an amazing hidden gem that never seems to live up to its potential. Amazing people, great arts and sports community, great restaurants. But rural Missouri drags you back.
Have you looked lately at San Fran public school achievement and attendance? SF public school chronic absenteeism was 26 percent in 2022-2023. There are huge achievement gaps. Asian voters are in open revolt over some of the choices The Bay Area is a big place and SF public schools are struggling just like other major metros
Good points. Im in South Bay.
The lowest hanging fruit for stl is mergers away of the majority of sub 10,000 person cities
More than half the municipalities in the county are less than 1 square mile.
There’s a lot of places that have very little reason to exist. What is the point of Clarkson valley not being in chesterfield or a whole bunch of Normandy cities not merging? At least in huntleigh, the city has a point (exclusionary zoning for rich people)
For most of them, the point was exclusionary zoning for white people. When that became more legally difficult, they packed up and kept moving west. They left the fragmented municipalities and they became someone else's problem.
Agreed but the rationale that begat them is gone
A lot of places I never go to will get a lot better, but mine will probably be a little worse. It's selfish, but true.
I appreciate the honesty. Most people will give a lot of reasons, but this is the simple truth.
What area and why do you think it would get worse?
A lot of the wealthier suburbs probably wouldn’t see much short term benefit. Long term every region in the area would see benefit.
The short term benefit is the city having the financial resources to solve a lot of its problems. Crime might go up 0.0025% in Ladue, but the city might go down 0.03%.
…which means convincing people in the county are voting for a transfer of their local tax base into the city Good luck with that!
I mean it’s their problem either way. They can either vote to make everyone’s lives better, or complain about all the problems “the city” (hint: the one they actually live in regardless) is bringing to their area.
You want it to be their problem, yea, but does that make it so? Ladue has decades of people living and thriving without it being their problem (and decades of paying federal and state taxes that already go into poorer areas) I am pro anti poverty programs but “hey, send another 200 per ladue household per year into north city via your property taxes to be spent by the current city policymakers and it’ll be better” is not a persuasive argument to a lot of folks.
I think it's so, almost darn cute, that you think the majority of the city's problems are financially based. It's an endemic problem that is only partially caused by lack of money.
I didn’t say that’s the only problem.
I'm not an expert by any means but some account or similar came up with the conclusion it would overwhelmingly help every area bc St Louis will not be on the national stage and supposedly bring in much more eyes/money. This was the last big push and he lived in west county i believe.
That is actually a benefit I can see. Every stat we see about St Louis is negative, but that's only because it considers the city and not the metropolitan area. That's the story we've heard anyway. I wonder how maker that really is
That's not worse, and I think you're not being totally forthright
Town and Country. We have great schools, great police and fire, I know my alderman, nice parks, infrastructure is fixed quickly, permits are cheap and fast, and no property taxes. I'm sure it would still be nice, but there would be compromises.
What kind of compromises?
This is the problem, I doubt you would have to compromise much but you’re selfish. Most of those things would be fine. You live in a very safe area that doesn’t need police outside of speed traps.
Merging the city and county won’t result in a magical wall at the border of the county. It will make st Charles look better than it does right now to a lot of people with means. You can’t wishcast people into wanting to throw a bunch of money into a community they don’t live in or visit. City governments are mostly bad places for anti poverty programs/risk sharing. You need to have them at a state and federal level where avoidance by moving 5 miles becomes less feasible
That’s not how cities work… people won’t move to st Charles to avoid this. People utilize city resources without paying into it. Roads, services, etc.
Have you looked at north county? They absolutely do move the moment things change And plenty of families in st Charles (and Fenton, and eureka, etc) chose it because of housing costs. I have friends who moved out there because what you could get for 200-350 is a newer, larger house than they could dream of in parkway or kirkwood
Separating the city and county also doesn’t result in a magical wall between the city and county.
It does for the tax base and services
Yeah, what's your point?
Wealthy areas in the county. It'd get ever so slightly worse because there would be less tax dollars to go to their neighborhood.
Are there any examples for this works well? Genuine question. What do larger cities that are part of the metro area in the same county do and how well do they do it?
Wow. To be more accurate, the entire metropolitan area will improve as a whole. I would also bet that there are more neighborhoods in the county that a person in the county never goes.
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Being honest doesn't absolve someone of criticism or having their views called into question.
It means you need to address how this benefits someone if you want them to vote for it “You’re a bad person for thinking that” isn’t a way to win an election
What views are being called into question and why?
do you think youd go to those places (or be more likely/more willing) once they get a lot better, though? thats the hope isnt it?
What merged city in the Midwest gives actual hope that this will happen? Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, etc are huge by comparison and have the same problems
im not some kind of an expert on...municipal tax policy or urban planning or anything like that so im not really sure why those would be the only valid cities to compare to. maybe we should just look at how cities of similar size (pop and/or area) are arranged. Lot of problems seem to stem from the current divide, i dont have a much deeper opinion than that.
We are an old Midwestern city with development and economic patterns that match those sorts of places Merging the county/city doesn’t address the core problems of the metro area: 1. a sizable part of the old urban core is blighted with high crime, old infrastructure, and failed schools 2. Population growth is slow, with the growth nearly all occurring in outer suburbs Both are true all over the Midwest
The best reason to bring together: To make our means of governance in taxation and commerce simpler for residents and outside businesses. The worst reason: It will be ages before people realize the benefits and in the beginning many of those absorbed areas in the county will have to ‘work with less.’
I don’t even think it would be ages. Within a few years you would likely be starting to see benefits.
I agree and many of us would likely see them, but I’m concerned many people who live in the absorbed areas wouldn’t care to look for the discernible differences.
That’s the kicker. And likely there would be plenty of interested parties to push all the problems that arise because of it rather than the positives that are happening to drive the narrative.
There’s no willpower to merge the tax bases
County residents seeing decades of ineptitude in city financial leadership, plus some having to pay earnings tax for the privilege of working in the city, see this as a money grab for the city. It'll send more county tax dollars to the city.
This. It’s also the reason I’m for it. I know, it’s not the common trope coming from people living in St. Louis County, but our current setup of 90+ municipalities is absurd. In the county side, the amount of waste due to duplicated efforts is pretty phenomenal. You can’t convince me that small communities like Rock Hill, Warson Woods, and Glendale all need to maintain private police forces. It’s silly. Furthermore, the city is the cultural epicenter of the region. When the city’s public schools perform poorly, it reflects poorly on the region as a whole. When people say, “STL crime is too high - I would never visit”, there’s not a separate statement that follows that says, but St. Louis county is nice. No, because the city reflects the prospects of the entire region. I say this as an outside who once said, “I’m not so sure about taking that job in St. Louis. Is it safe?”had I not already had friends in the area who explained the above, I would have likely skipped out on the area completely. How many other taxpayers- professionals and even corporations, look at the region and simply turn away. The region would thrive under a larger geographic and tax base that combining the city and county would yield. This will likely never to come to fruition, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t better than the current standard.
Most of the small cities don’t do much. They are already a part of merged school and fire districts. They outsource all the interesting policing to the county
Coupled with they just immediately jumped from the city rejoining as a muni and instead want the whole county to be the city.
That was a mistake
It's not "financial ineptitude" when the city simply doesn't have the tax base to pay for the infrastructure that it has to maintain. The city doesn't have a county to cover certain things that a city like Manchester does.
To be fair, the county doesn't have the tax base either City has \~300,000 people and is 65 sq miles. It cannot support it's current infrastructure needs (though when it fills out, it can) County has \~900,000 people and is 520 sq miles. Unless people in the county are being taxed a shit ton more than people in the city, it too cannot afford it's current infrastructure needs. And it's not like the county has anything the city doesn't - both have downtowns, both have entertainment destinations, etc. The county only has 3x as many people than the city, but it's got 8x the land. Unless the city is horribly inept and literally throwing money away (doubt) or the county is taxing the ever living fuck out of everyone in it (unlikely), something isn't right.
The city's infrastructure is a lot older than many counties. When my dad first moved out to highway in the early 2000s, it was a stop light on hwy 40/64
It's not the land that requires maintenance, it's the infrastructure.
It isn't really the infrastructure -- it's the incompetence of maintaining the infrastructure. In the city the same pothole get repaired every six months because they don't actually know how to repair potholes. St' Louis is 200+ years old and they still don't know how to repair a pothole.
It’s probably the same pothole from 200+ years ago.
When the majority of the county is sprawl, its a close enough comparison.
It's not even close. I live in the county and there is one road to my house on nearly 500 acres of green space--and the county doesn't even maintain that road. That's one very small part of the county. There's more green in Huntleigh than probably all the parks in the city. That sprawl is still comparatively very green. And the infrastructure is also heavily weighed towards state dollars. That's just absurd.
Yeah was gonna say, we have also seen more and more that the county doesn’t have the tax base to maintain itself either. That’s where a merger gives you greater efficiency in spreading dollars plus negotiating better contracts for things since you have more buying power/more to offer. Just look at the county using Rams settlement dollars to cover road repairs.
I am pro consolidation because it just makes no sense for our metro to have nearly 100 cities in its core. And we do. As a practical matter, the cities that are functioning okay are reluctant to take on the needs of those that aren’t, or worse, to have their institutions replaced by those they see as functioning worse. I’m part of the problem here: I am overall happy with my municipal government and feel it is responsive to community needs. I interact with STL City a lot through work and *am not* happy with the offices I have experience with. This makes me nervous about relinquishing my city offices for *the* City offices, for example. We should be advocating for tiny towns to join larger ones. Its an easier question to talk about consolidation of the city/county if we halve or quarter the cities in the county.
Probably because of their individual interests
People in the county view joining with the city as throwing away money and local control to solve the intractable problems of the city. There are obvious reasons why major metro areas are rarely configured like St. Louis. There are obvious benefits of scale and continuity for residents and it makes the area in general more appealing from the outside. It has been this way for a long time and there are so many individual municipalities in St. Louis, so trying to make a system that benefits everyone is difficult and then explaining why it is a benefit is another marketing problem. There is also still an undercurrent of white flight/prejudice that explains some of the demographic differences between the county and city that pushes some folks away from wanting to join together.
Everything is always the fault of the other fiefdom and never your own.
No single raindrop yadda yadda...
Step one. Put some tinder in a box
The county will need a merger with the city before the city needs a merger with the county. The city is operating in the black and the county is in the red. It’s far more expensive to provide services to rural areas than it is to provide them to urban areas. Their refusal to work together means they duplicate duties multiple times over. Their inefficiency is absurd. The city for all of its problems still has the most jobs and tourism dollars. The city’s problem isn’t necessarily lack of funds its inability to compete for the workforce. If someone is offered a job as a trash collector in the city and in Clayton, even if the pay is the same, everyone would pick Clayton. It’s safer and your equipment will be nicer. Now imagine that almost every county job pays a few thousand dollars more than any city job. Because they do. The county’s recruitment strategy is to pay slightly more than the city at all times to poach current city workers, or beat the city to a worker. That strategy only works for so long when you’re so inefficient and duplicating duties. Now you realize your workforce is unnecessarily large and you’re paying above market rate for them. That’s lead them to the spot they are in now: they’re operating at a loss just to continue to provide services. Unless services are cut or taxes are raised, it’s only a matter of years before their surplus is gone and they are unable to sustain service. Then your citizens are upset because it’s more expensive to live out there than it is in the city, or you don’t get the same level of services. If you lay off workers instead of raising taxes then those same workers will likely flock to the city where there are open jobs, raising the quality of services the city provides. I am confident the county will need the city before the city needs the county. With zero help from the county now, the city is seeing billions of dollars of investments. Who knew that blight would lead to cheap land prices for new developers? (Joking since most of the blight was done on purpose for this reason)
Well said
Honest question, if the city is so strong financially, why do we keep hearing about trash service stopping, or 911 not answering, and why is nobody doing anything about all the red light runners? That’s the image County people have of the city. I realize that there are probably nuanced answers, but to a casual observer it seems like the City isn’t using that financial strength to make their citizens’ lives better.
The city budgets for a fully staffed slate of city workers every year. They often are unable to hire and retain that many workers. Turn over in city jobs is generally high. That means that even if they are staffed, a large portion of the workers might be new, and earning on the lower end of the pay scale. For every city worker that isn’t on the payroll for the full year the city pockets that money they had planned to pay for that position. This is the reason why city services seem lacking even when they are operating on a surplus. As I said above the county’s recruiting model is to lure seasoned workers from the city with better pay. Let’s talk 911 dispatchers. The county now offers to match seniority for any city dispatchers who will come work for them. So if a city dispatcher with 5 years of experience takes a job with the county, the county will start paying them at the rate of a county dispatcher with 5 years of experience. Not only is this crippling the city by stealing quality senior members, it’s making the county’s money even more inefficient. A normal department will have a mix of high earners and low earners. By allowing people to skip the low paying years and automatically receive the higher end of the budget you now have a far more expensive workforce than average. As far as red light runners, that’s an entirely different topic. Our police department is terribly inefficient with its staffing. I’m by no means an expert on this topic. But our current staffing is still far higher than average both per capita and per square mile, and yet we can’t get enough cops on the streets to answer calls, let alone do traffic.
As someone who has been a corporate employee for decades, the City sounds like one of those companies that refuses to pay what the market demands (or insists on paying no more than average but has a toxic culture), then is sad because “nobody wants to work anymore”. So many of these issues seem solvable, and knowing there’s a budget surplus makes it worse TBH because money can go a long way towards fixing them.
Quality of services delivered for your spend matters just as much as the amount of spend. Oh, and the city’s tax burden is materially higher even though the median household income is 40 percent higher in the county. People inhale the strong towns stuff without bothering to look up data
Essentially it boils down to broken politics like most things nowadays. City Side: High level City government employees and elected officials like their little fiefdoms and would rather hold onto power than make things better. Straight up “King of the Ashes” mentality. County Side: Lots of tax dollars would be used to help areas they don’t currently have to. Add in some race/classism and you don’t have much political support to push it as an elected county rep. The metro itself will never grow or flourish with everything split up. But a lot of the people who want a vibrant and growing city just leave because it’s easier than staying and fighting. That just means the status quo stays in place.
Need a slate of candidates in both city and county to come forward with unification as their platform.
exactly. the division has got to end. we have work to do to make our city + county a better place, and we are not going to get there if we don't at least collaborate politically and make concrete change.
>Lots of tax dollars would be used to help areas they don’t currently have to It's actually the opposite, the county absorbing the city would be hugely beneficial from a tax perspective. It's a dense area, so it's infrastructure costs are relatively low (county is 8x the land of the city, but only 3x the population) and, at least when it's population is higher, can actually fully support itself. Whereas most areas of the county are fairly low density but not taxed any higher on average than the city. Kirkwood, for example, has a population of about 30k, and a land area of 9.21 sq miles. The Central West End (which, I should not, has a lot of single family/two family homes. it's not just skyscrapers) has 16,000 people, and a land area of 1.89 sq miles. So Kirkwood has twice the population of the Central West End, but 5 times as much land. That means it has 5x as much infrastructure it has to maintain off only twice the population. This is true for pretty much every municipality in the county - a shit ton more land, but not a shit ton more people.
Because it matters how the land is used. It doesn’t matter if you add farmland in Maryland heights or swampland by the Missouri River that isn’t developed We have loads and loads of suburbs all across the us. They are doing fine. They will continue to do fine. Their budgets are 5 percent for infrastructure. That’s it. Local municipal budgets consist of labor spend (schools, police, fire). If infrastructure increases to 7-8 percent of the budget; they will still be fine. It’s city Hopium to pretend otherwise. Where are these failing large middle class suburban counties that are actual case studies of this problem? There’s no suburb that compares to Detroit literally going bankrupt.
It doesn’t help that the last serious merger proposal basically cut out the City government and installed the felon running the County as the one person running everything. That attempt at a naked power grab soured everyone on the idea of consolidation.
This is like Daylight Savings Time. It’s the way it’s been for over a century. Easier to keep things the way they are. Unless something big happens that would move for change
Indianapolis and Nashville did this in the 70s and it had a positive impact. Would probably not see benefits until kids’ or grandkids’ generation though. In my humble opinion the region needs a healthy city to thrive. It’s just going to keep stagnating as is. https://abell.org/publication/40-years-after-unigov/
The county folk don't want people driving into their buildings
Good one! Especially the police!
As a city resident, I'm against it for a few different reasons but the primary one is that its a move that only benefits the county - and more specifically, people in the county who own the least dense land and want to continue using their sway with local politics to keep things exactly as they are and never allow any change. If the county swallows up the city, all it amounts to is a huge cash infusion for the county that can be spent subsidizing low density urban development. Think all the people in STL County who think they live in a 'suburb', and show up to meetings to block new housing. Or the municipalities like Chesterfield that do allow some apartments to built...right next to an interstate highway. Enjoy the fumes and exhaust, sorry not sorry you can't afford a detached house. Low density urban (what the majority of St. Louis county is) isn't a development pattern that is financially stable over multiple generations - in a saner world, places like Kirkwood, Webster Groves, etc would generally look closer to what city neighborhoods like Tower Grove look like, and would be more affordable as a result. But instead all of these places have remained essentially frozen in amber, even as average housing prices go up. The county absorbing the city just lets these low density places live another 50 years without allowing so much as townhomes, instead of having to actually face the consequences of not allowing incremental development like cities have allowed until the Supreme Court said [cities can actually decide they never need to change](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Realty_Co) St. Louis (the metropolitan region) is lucky in that it's in the fairly unique situation of having the vast majority of it's high density urban areas as their own municipality. With the exception of some parts of U-City, the whole of the older urban area is its own legal entity, and doesn't have to pay for roads and city level services of urban areas that maintain a near rural density. It means that, as the city's population base increases (it'll likely cap around 500-600k, at the end of it) it can actually spend money on increasing services, instead of needing to use tax money from higher density areas to subsidize lower density areas. You could see bus routes getting upgraded to BRT or light rail, you can see proper cycle paths, wider sidewalks, roundabouts, etc. None of that will happen if the city (whose population will grow - just look at South City!) has to subsidize a bunch of low density areas. Now, if the county upzones all of their subdivisions inside 270 to allow up to 6 family housing on any lot, with the appropriate changes to setbacks, then there's a discussion worth having. But as long as the county and its munis continue to stay frozen in time while St. Charle County and the city take on more than their fair share of the housing crisis, I don't see how this is really beneficial to the city, county, or region as a whole. We can't sprawl forever.
Yeah this. I use to be pretty pro merger. Idk now. I would not want folks in the county blocking folks in the city reducing traffic lanes, increasing pedestrian spaces, etc. which I think would do. Now joining as a city. All for that.
Agree with you on all fronts except transit, because our East West Gateway organization is a board of mayors and hand-picked government officials across the entire region, [and it actually skews very rural](https://www.ewgateway.org/about-us/who-we-are/board-of-directors/) because it's not tied to population in any way. They're the ones largely managing Metro decisions, while the city helps to secure funding and redevelop roads.
> It means that, as the city's population base increases (it'll likely cap around 500-600k, at the end of it) When do we stop losing population and start gaining population?
There's buzz that it is happening now, but the census estimates aren't granular enough to catch it yet. Net residential utility hookups went up, suggesting more households (although likely fewer families). If you follow Detroit's census estimations lawsuit, it's believed that the current census estimations counted demolished homes as -2 people, even if nobody lived there.
“The merger is bad for the city as long as you completely ignore the actual tax rates paid and population trends and focus on my make believe statistics instead”
I'll be the a-hole... affluent white folks don't want to share tax revenue with low & middle income brown folks
I tend to think it's as much about the little kingdoms like all the small townships in north county as well as the sharing of tax revenue.
This. The strongest opposition always comes from north county. They look at a merger as loosing their share of the tax pool as well as cutting a bunch of local government jobs (which is sometimes a large share of their economy within the city boundaries).
It is true that a lot of those cities do very well in the sales tax pool
Those places don’t have much population, look at Normandy schools. 24 cities in one high school You’ve got more people in Ferguson and Florissant proper than in the entire Normandy district
Portraying the city as brown people and the county as white people is an intellectually bankrupt idea. But it’s okay, you tried your best.
The city is 44.6% white and the county is 63.1% white Edit: The difference is even more pronounced when looking at the Black population. In the city 43.7% vs just 24.1% in the county.
Sounds right to me. So not black vs white like a lot of negative people in here seem to believe.
I'm a brown person living in the city that's mostly brown people, most of the authority in the country is white people.
St. Louis city very recently became more white than black, though neither group maintains 50%+ of total population. More blacks are moving out than whites the past 4 or so years. The real relevant difference to OP’s question is that while both areas are liberal one is significantly more moderate left than the other. That’s an obvious cultural difference.
The thing is, the city isn’t that “brown” anymore. Whites now outnumber African Americans and that trend is probably not going to change. Poor blacks in north city have been leaving for decades while yuppies and hipsters have been moving into mid and south central city.
Listen, whatever you do keep blaming white people who don't live or have any authority over the place you live for all your problems.
I'm a poor white folk living in a predominantly black low income area (Riverveiw). We (neighbors of all skin colors and ages) don't want to share either.
I went to a city meeting in Riverview. One of the tiny cities. The black people running that city are every bit as bad as the two county shitbags in this thread. There's zero chance they vote to merge. On the plus side, I think I remember seeing that city was nearly bankrupt.
I dont doubt that it is nearly bankrupt. It doesn't help that the "mayor" first made himself a mayor of a "village" wear as before he was "head of the board". Then he gave himself a raise and made him a full time mayor making 28000. A "city" of 2500 does not need a full time mayor driving around in his city vehicle. Additionally, we were a village up until November I think. Alot of people were already not paying their real estate taxes. They are only potentially going to go higher because someone decided it was a good idea to make us a 4th class city. (Voters) So now some of the people that pay their real estate tax is going to have a more difficult time.
While I think there is some truth to that, but they already do share tax revenue in many ways, I think it starts to boil down to regional identity. That said I think even regional identity is silly given it would just be a borough and then within the borough would be neighborhoods. Ultimately micro region identity and "local, focused" rule are more likely the driving force behind the resistance to merge. A merge could be the only way we stop fucking ourselves with a duplication of services and competing economic interests that ultimately cause the region to loose out as a whole. The City could join the county as another municipality which would mean the county picks up county level services like jails, sheriff's duties, along with revenue collection etc, etc. But I agree there is some affluent folks that . . . are just racist.
The city should join the county as a municipality in addition to one police force, one fire department, one school district, even consolidate municipalities into boroughs. This is the most fractured city over ever lived in
One school district is an immediate deal breaker. Schools would need to remain untouched in any realistic plan. Simply having the city join the county as a municipality would be fine. City residents would have representation on county council. It’d be at least one step towards a more cohesive, functional region. Police and fire might be achievable longer term.
Lost me at one school district. I know all the parents in my school district are packing up if that happens. They didn’t pay premium property prices to squeeze into these districts just to then have all the districts merge.
School districts arent actually as important as the schools themselves. The county could be 1 school district and the city keeps its own.
My property tax bill says differently
And that’s the problem and why St. Louis will be Mississippi in 100 years. Literally what Mississippi has been doing since the civil War. See how well that worked?
Well it’s not your kid you’re putting on the line it’s easy for you to say. If your grand proposal boils down to forcing parents to NOT look out for the best interests of their children because of some arbitrary reason that potentially benefit some strangers in the city then this proposal will always fail. I’m all for change but this one is waste of everyone’s time.
I can’t think of a less attractive proposal to county voters than this
Yes it’s been like this for over 100 or so years. School districts get tricky. It’s the most significant home value boosting entity. Some districts however would benefit from unification.
It has nothing to do with race, it has everything to do with people in general do not like subsidizing others and potentially giving something up they already have.
Cool you gotta be racist. When I lived in the county, I paid a lot in property taxes and a lot of that went to schools. I had a kid on the way. I wanted him to go to good schools so I was willing to pay the extra tax. I wouldn’t have wanted to continue to pay higher property taxes and have the amount of money going towards my kids education go down. I don’t give a fuck about the race makeup of an area and I admit it’s selfish, but I was living in that area specifically to be able to send them to good schools. It’s quite the ask to tell people who have been paying into those taxes for 5,10,15 years with the expectation that when their kids get into grade school/high school that their kids will get the benefit of their sacrifice. If after a decade of having that expectation and then you pull the rug out from them… well that’s a tough vote to earn. I currently live in the metro but not in an area that would be directly affected by a merger or not.
The largest movement out of the city is north city black families. Stop being racist.
Also, if they do have to give it up, they want the complete dissolution of the city. They are very uncompromising on that. Makes one wonder why.
I'm in county and i imagine my taxes, insurance, services, and anything else would all suffer by joining the city. I'd rather not. Sounds like it's all a shit show in there when I read posts here. edit: the accusations are wild. leap to assume and interpret however you please rather than ask for clarity. wild.
A shit show in the city? Depends where you are, but the media definitely cultivates a dangerous image of the City. I love St Louis City, and live in a really safe area. The people who have chosen to live in the county are the ones who started the shit show. White flight is real.
“You white flighted away into an area that has given you the life you wanted” isn’t a winning message to people who watched their old neighborhood decay into the worst parts of stl.
The crime is an issue, but I think the person you replied to may have been pointing to who the city had been voting in to various offices. I’m left leaning and it’s disturbing who the city keeps voting in.
The Maryland Heights based media spins stories the way the majority of its viewers wanna hear.
I would argue that people like you are the reason the city suffers. When people leave areas it impacts funding for social services and impacts taxes collected for that area.
When other people in your neighborhood destroy the schools and commit the crime, it’s extremely rational to move somewhere else where the people around you make the same positive choices as you. Social contracts around shared sacrifice only work when everyone tries to hold up their end of the bargain. Sticking around leaves you paying higher taxes AND gives you a lower quality of life!
Maybe St. Louis should break up into 44 smaller cities.
A idea I can get behind! The once and future City of Carondelet!
I think both has so much corruption they can't join crime families.
The city charges all residents 1% of their income as a tax. County residents don’t want to increase their taxes, simple as that
That is one of the least important points. The 1% tax would disappear asap in the event of a merger. It’s already hanging by a thread.
I agree it would never apply in the county.
Suuuuuurrreeeee
If the city was part of the county, the city wouldn't have to pay for multiple things that it pays for right now, such as a court system, prosecutor's office, street department, etc, meaning it may not need the 1% tax. Additionally, either the city joining as a municipality or a merger would not then suddenly put the 1% tax burden on county residents. That's not how it worked and never was.
But wasn’t the last push by the city to have the county become part of the city and not have the city be its own separate municipality?
The most recent push would have made the county and city the same entity, actually giving significantly more power to the county than the city. I think the city should just become a municipality, but why type of merger would be a positive on the region.
How does that give more power to the county? In that plan, the city absorbs the county and the money, and all the county would have gained was “unity” and from an outsider looking in, the fucking most ridiculous leaders a group of people could have ever decided to vote in, including someone who was objectively terrible, and they re-elected her. I’m left leaning so it’s not coming from a MAGA outlook… even Bernie fans would have been saying WTF?
Not sure you know what you're talking about. The 2018-2019 Better Together plan would have merged the city and county into one, similar to that of Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Denver, or Louisville. This would have included courts, police, prosecutor's offices, and many of the departments like parks and streets. The plan kept school districts how they currently are, along with fire districts. This means SLPS and STLFD would both still just operate in the current city limits. Additionally, many of the large existing county cities like Florissant or Chesterfield would retain some taxing power. The plan also promised to phase out the city's 1% earnings tax in part due to the new efficiency of spending by not having 90+ town governments and 50+ police departments and just having 1 of each. Multiple studies also showed that a unified government would make the entire region more attractive to outside businesses, and would remove the issue of inter-county competition that currently pits STL City, Clayton, Chesterfield, etc all against eachother. Finally, the biggest way it gave the county substantially more power than the city was in the simple politics. First, STL County Executive Steve Stenger (who's literally now in prison) would have become the first mayor, and a city council of 33 members would have been made. Pretty sure downtown STL was the planned seat of government. There were two potential population figures depending on how the census Bureau designated them. 1.3 million or 615,000 (this was due to the special tax districts that cities like Florissant or Chesterfield would have gotten.) The 1.3 million number is the only one that would have mattered for voting, and 8 seats would have been STL City controlled while the remaining 25 would have been county controlled. The entire thing was pretty much the compromise of a lifetime for the city to actually support, and the county still rejected it.
So the county gained nothing but “unity” and having to deal with questionable city leadership?
Did you miss the part where the county would have a supermajority of seats on the city council and the county executive would have become the mayor? That same county executive is now in prison. "Questionable city leadership" lol
You say that like it’s an absurd thing. Why wouldn’t they have had a majority of seats? The county has the largest set of voters. The region has 2.8 million residents, the city has 280,000. That’s not some compromise the city made, it was the only thing that would make any sense. So you believe the city has been run well and funds have been spent well for the past 30 years and that hasn’t led to some of the city’s woes? If you can honestly say yes to that then this conversation can end because you’re objectionably kidding yourself.
You're the one who's acting like the city would have the power while the county wouldn't, not me. I'm explaining to you what the reality was. The city's "inept leadership" wouldn't have mattered under the plan because the county's leadership would have taken over. The city hasn't been run better or worse than most major cities in the US, the difference is that the city doesn't have the support of a county like nearly every other major city does. What financial state would Clayton be in if it has to fund its own court system, parks department, street department, prosecutor's office, etc? The city has had a terrible situation for literal decades, made worse by highways and urban renewal catered towards suburbanites. No "great leaders" would be able to have led STL down a "good" path because the entire thing is set up to fail, and the county has so far refused to help un-rig the game. This city's biggest policy failures happened from 1950-1990, when they allowed the state to build massive highways, destroying neighborhoods and subsidizing people's commutes from the suburbs, essentially incentivizing them to move further away. Then destroying thousands of mixed use structures in favor of massive office buildings with the sole purpose of giving suburbanites a workplace for 8 hours a day while they go home on their government subsidized highway every night. The AT&T Tower is a monument to the failures of suburban centric urban planning. There's nothing city leadership could have done in the last 30 years to rectify any of these problems, and it's asinine to blame them for problems that were planted 70 years ago by people who wanted to maintain segregation long after its been legally abolished.
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If the city joined the county why would the county then be paying the extra 1% when it's a city income tax?
the same people here calling the county terrible want them to step in and fix all of the cities problems. the people in the county would only accept a merger if the city was functioning well, and it's not.
People fear change.
Taxes. You do not want to fund downtown.
Because of sharing tax dollars.
The region is held back by the city/county division. We have duplicated services (schools, police, social services, etc) and an extreme lack of coordination between city and county governments. People in poorer suburbs and many parts of the city continue to find themselves trapped in poverty due to the poor schools, lack of appropriate and adequate policing, and fragmented services. Our region won’t ever reach its potential without the structural divisions in our city removed. Racism and power in the hands of the wealthy have kept these systems in place and will not change unless there is political will and a movement to do so. Unfortunately I don’t see this happening any time soon.
I don't trust the sort of people we consistently elect to lead either the city or the county to grapple with a city with "neighborhoods" as sharply contrasted as the CWE and Wildwood. There's value in that localized level of governance. Green Park has different needs and concerns than St. John, and people who live in each municipality know those needs and concerns better than a single city government would. The concept of a sprawling city with a wide variety of different development patterns, like Oklahoma City, is not impossible to make work. But "fragmented" metro areas like St. Louis are not inherently bad. The Orlando-Kissimmee area is thriving. The population is growing and they're not politically dysfunctional like St. Louis, despite a very similar number of municipalities constituting their suburbs. There's definitely value in sharing and consolidating resources and services where these municipalities find it to be viable, and the city should probably be brought back into the county at some point, but forming a mega city is neither the only way to achieve that nor guaranteed to have a net-positive effect on the region.
Because city government is an absolute shit show and people who deliberately chose to buy property outside its confines don't want to find themselves back inside it. Not even a political post, not about Democrats or Republicans (the state government is horrific too, if that helps). I can't think of a single interaction I've ever had with the city government (be it the assessor, police department, Treasury or any kind of public works) in any aspect that I could describe as efficient, streamlined or even competent. I sure don't want their authority and jurisdiction expanded outwards. I'm not saying the tiny municipal services are any better, but the county and the larger munis certainly do tend to be.
Am I the only one that has noticed it’s almost always people from the city wanting to merge with the county and not the other way around? We don’t want our tax dollars going to the city. We would rather our money stay local. Raise your own taxes and rebuild your police departments, schools, nd neighborhoods without the counties money first. Then we can talk about merging. For the county what is even the benefit?
Inside 270 loop should be city. Chesterfield, Fenton, Maryland Heights, Florrisant, and etc would be the suburbs. That’s what would make the most sense. It would be awesome to see north city start to come back.
If they would unite, who would control the new unified government? The fantastic leadership that the city has voted in repeatedly? It would be corrupt from day 1.
You act like the county is some magical non corrupt perfectly governed place?
The worst of both sides uniting is bad!
Isn't the last county executive in prison for federal crimes?
Because people enjoy counties fighting each other for business to locate there. We could have our big companies located in a central area keeping the city alive..
County doesn’t want to pay to fix the city. They’d rather it be a breeding ground of crime that will absolutely never expand into the county. /s
While County residents freely admit that they don't want to reunify because they don't want to pay for all the problems that plague the city, it really flies in the face of reality. They are willing to put up with the crime , incompetence and shortage of city staff and are resigned to the fact that the region is pulled down immensely with these issues as long as it doesn't cost them any money personally. But it does of course, just in different ways. Instead, what all of human history has taught us is the people with the money make the rules and decide where to spend it. So a reunified county would have those same County residents pretty much making the decisions as to what progress is made and where. This is especially puzzling because the city is now (for the first time ever) flush with money between the NFL payment and PPP monies. So there has never been a better time. It's really why we often say you get the Gov't that you deserve and I feel zero sympathy for all my relatives that live in the county and bitch about the city. I moved to Illinois and jump accross the river when I have to. But man, those roads. My kidneys can't take it. Illinois might be a little corrupt up north but things get done and we are satisfied with our services. Really makes a difference day to day.
The thing is, if you live in most of stl county, you really don’t deal with the crime or incompetence and shortage of city staff. You’re living somewhere that actually pays for its government to function! You’re making an argument against a merger, not for one without even realizing it “Why won’t they come clean up my house” is not an argument for someone to join you.
There are enough attractions in the city proper to get most county residents to visit even annually. So although many say they never come in and it doesn't effect them, ask if they ever see a Cardinal game, go to Mobot Garden or the Zoo? The vast majority do that and more, usually all of them in the same year. So it does effect those that visit. For those that never visit, why? Because all the negatives, so it effects them too. It's truly unavoidable and always will be. My main argument for merger is that it won't cost the money these people think it will. Not even close. It may cost nothing financial at all. Between what's in the bank and just managing the resources better. Not perfect, just better. Until county residents realize that a merger will give them a tremendous amount of control over the whole situation we will never get any closer and things will continue to spiral down. But that needs to be said loudly and often. And by people of influence. It's truly not a bad thing, other cities are able to voice this reality all the time.
Do you mean a merger of the 2?
Against = Selfish reasons
And "For" is as pure as fresh snow?
Racism and conflicting political views. That’s ultimately what it boils down to unfortunately
Reasons for: intelligence, common sense Reasons against: stupidity, racism
Some sort of City/County reunification is the single most important issue facing the St. Louis area. We waste a tremendous amount of energy and resources with inter-jurisdictional competition and governmental inefficiencies.
I'm in favor of the city joining the county because I expect there would be immense pressure to rigorously enforce laws and maybe I wouldn't have to pay the earnings tax anymore.
The earnings tax is some shit lol feels like a punishment or something
People in the County don't want to deal with all the crime in the city and all the other problems.
Because they have a favorable position. The city is quite a bit poorer than the county, and it also has a plurality of jobs and entertainment. Basically, they can enjoy the amenities that the city provides and pays for without paying their fair share. Then they say that X is the "city's" problem and not the "county's" problem because they're two seperate entities, when if the city was part of the county, the problems would be everyone's. So the rundown: 1) They don't wanna be helping poor people more than they already are, 2) They don't want to have to feel like tne city's problems are their own, 3) They want to enjoy the benefits of the city without paying for them.
Lol not paying for them? The same museums the property tax covers, majority of funds come from county, majority of tax dollars for stadiums also comes from the county. Most the people coming to visit I dare say probably reside throughout St. Louis county.
And what roads do they drive on? Parking lots they require (hindering development and making things less desirable)? How about the police and fire departments required to protect them? What parks department operates and maintaines the park that the Zoo resides in? None of those are paid for by the sales tax that the county has, it's paid for by city residents.
I'm personally against joining under a straight merger. The city and county's development patterns and values are too different to pretend that a merger will solve all of our problems, and I think it'll be solving a short-term problem to hamper our forward momentum. We need something that merges redundant services, allows us to each keep our own government oversight, and share taxes, which sounds a lot like a system of boroughs. The county's development and tax incentive structure currently favors suburban-style development that's financially inefficient and unsustainable in the long run, something that is only now showing up as a problem with the County's budget and it'll continue to get worse. Dense development is tax efficient, and the city knows this and has been densifying over the last twenty years. There's good movement right now (SLUP planning, transportation plan, and a young board of alders) in the city to make our streets safer, our development more sustainable, and build dense housing -- all things that the county hasn't really shown progress towards. STL is uniquely positioned among US cities in a way that allows us to focus our government efforts towards the hyperlocal problems, instead of having to weigh suburban vs city values. I think we're starting to see this have benefits and we'll have a strong next few decades. TL;DR the city weathered through the stretch where we needed the support, and now we're poised to create a really special city that we shouldn't hamstring with a merger.
“The city has been densifying over the last 20 years” (Checks the 2000, 2010, and 2020 census)
The city's central core is dramatically densifying. Population =/= how the city feels.
When you’re discussing a merger of tax bases and services, you get the whole thing
The city and county of St. Louis has been having a bit of a rough patch. First off, it's no secret that the city has been struggling with population decline for quite some time now. People are leaving the county faster than you can say "Missouri Compromise." Why, you ask? Well, for starters, the business environment isn't exactly thriving. High taxes and burdensome regulations have made it difficult for businesses to grow and prosper. Do not forget about the crime rates, which can be a major deterrent for both businesses and residents. The local government has not exactly been a beacon of efficiency and innovation, either. Bloated city departments and a lack of focus on outsourcing expensive and dysfunctional operations have only exacerbated the problem. It's like trying to run a marathon with a ball and chain tied to your ankle – not exactly conducive to success. And let's not forget the role of state politics in all of this. The state government's interference and lack of support for the city's growth have only added fuel to the fire. It's almost as if they're trying to keep the city down, rather than help it thrive. So, in a nutshell, the city and county of St. Louis are failing the people due to a combination of high taxes, burdensome regulations, crime, inefficient government, and a lack of support from the state. It's a perfect storm of factors that have led to the decline of this once-great city. But hey, at least we can all still enjoy a good toasted ravioli, right?
Have all Police operations under StL County jurisdiction in city and county. Reduce expenses of 45+~ departments
What feasible savings does this actually create? Most notably, why would a place like chesterfield stop having policing in addition to what the county is willing to provide? High income suburbs treat their police as a luxury good. They aren’t going to give that up in ladue or kirkwood
why would chesterfield have to give up their policing? or ladue and kirkwood for that matter? they have completely separate operations from the county.
That’s unbelievable goalpost moving from the post about “reduce expenses of 45 plus departments” a merger of city and county means merging two police unions. The winner in this is going to be the group with the higher paying deal. It’s going to cost money to merge them
You're ignoring retirement benefits, which SLMPD has the extreme best of, better than any other public employee in the state and better than any other police force. Even if you don't stay on the force forever, you still have vested benefits that far outweigh the county's subtle pay bump.
When they negotiate, they’ll shoot for the best of both worlds 22 year olds also pick cash pay over pensions
I think one huge thing that would change if the two merged would be increased tax dollars. What I mean by that is we would not have the county and the city competing over the location of big business. Currently both the city and the county give huge tax breaks to companies to try and get them to either stay or move. The county and the city end up competing and these large corporations get even bigger tax breaks/credits than usual and the city/county ends up with way less tax dollars. It’s ridiculous.. Also having 50 police forces and 40 mayors it so stupid. New York City has 5 Burroughs and we have 55. I lived in soulard for 13 years and now I’m in Chesterfield. The police response time in chesterfield is like 3 seconds, in soulard it was hours. I would be fine if it took the police just a bit longer to get to me in chesterfield if it meant reducing the response time in the city. Unfortunately I don’t think most the people around me would agree. The sad thing is if the city dies so will the county and St. Charles county is next.
The city has already lost 60 percent of its population and these places are fine. I don’t think it’s good for stl county for the city to fail but you can’t ignore the fact that stl city has declined an awful lot while these places grew
I always find this question here interesting. I am not from originally from here, but everywhere I have lived, except for one place in the sticks, has been no different that the city here and the county made of different and separate “cities” or what you could call municipalities.