I fail to see why the state would even have any jurisdiction over it--it should be up to only the residents/taxpayers in the city and county; those outside have no skin in the game and should have no voice in it.

flashguy

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:
I fail to see why the state would even have any jurisdiction over it--it should be up to only the residents/taxpayers in the city and county; those outside have no skin in the game and should have no voice in it.

flashguy

They are trying to do it like the Soros sponsored "Clean Missouri" did via an amendment change. An amendment change requires a state wide vote which is what they want, because very few people in St. Louis County will vote for it. Dilute the county votes with a state wide vote (they claim to have 25 million in their war chest for advertising) is the only way they can get it to pass.

Oh, I understand very well WHY they want to do it with a statewide vote, just don't see HOW they have the right to do it.

flashguy

I'm way out of this, but have a question/suggestion. Could groups in the county who don't want the city to take over the county split the county in two before the merger could happen, essentially isolating the city of St Louis in it's own county, not giving it anything to merge with?

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I'm way out of this, but have a question/suggestion. Could groups in the county who don't want the city to take over the county split the county in two before the merger could happen, essentially isolating the city of St Louis in it's own county, not giving it anything to merge with?

The city of ST. Louis is ALREADY not within the limits of St. Louis County. The city does not sit within the boundary of ANY county.

quote:

Originally posted by h2oys:
Hmm, outside of the other issues all of you have identified, I wonder where the majority of the murders have taken place? city or County?

Heh.... That looks like a map of work.... oh... wait.

quote:

Originally posted by KevinCW:

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I'm way out of this, but have a question/suggestion. Could groups in the county who don't want the city to take over the county split the county in two before the merger could happen, essentially isolating the city of St Louis in it's own county, not giving it anything to merge with?

The city of ST. Louis is ALREADY not within the limits of St. Louis County. The city does not sit within the boundary of ANY county.

It's been that way since The Great Divorce, in 1876-1877:

The mechanism by which separation took place began in 1875 at the state constitutional convention.[17] At the convention, a committee examined the issues of St. Louis government, and it summarized the two options facing the region as consolidation and separation.[17] The full convention voted to include a provision in the constitution allowing for separation; the vote was 53 in favor, 4 opposed, 11 absent.[17] Only one member of the St. Louis delegation opposed separation:

I am in favor of total consolidation of St. Louis County, but I am not in favor of dividing it, splitting and hacking it in this manner...I vote no.
— Nicolas A. Mortell, Cohn, 29.

In 1877, the City of St. Louis separated from the county, creating an independent city. The city in August 1876 narrowly approved the separation while county residents overwhelmingly opposed the separation. City residents had argued they wanted to be "rid of county taxes and state influence over county government." At the time the city had 350,000 residents while the rural county had 30,000. The rural county also had only 150 miles of gravel roads. Although the results were challenged in the courts, the two jurisdictions were formally separated in March 1877.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...uis_County,_Missouri

^
Okay. That being the case, would it not, at the very least require a majority of the county residents alone (not including the city) to vote to merge with the city? And if that's the case, is there any likelihood that such a vote would approve a merger?

It's a good fight worth watching. Not to overinflate this, an expanding geographic area controlled by one political entity, not that different from one-party California, new wave Democrat socialists dream of an all-powerful, uniparty Federal government or George Soros and a new and improved world order. Whatever the case the left are patient and have a goal.

Let's not forget the BS redistricting rules that were snuck in during the last election with the "clean up Missouri" ballot item. The dems are making a real play to centralize power and control the state.

I'm gonna be here for at least another decade so I plan on fighting this as best I can.

Ken

On January 28 Mark Reardon had Nancy Rice and David Bright, the proponents of Better Together on his radio show.

The Better Together guest said that the plan would phase out the City earnings tax (over 10 years) while using the proceeds from this tax to completely pay off the City's debt during that 10 year period.

They make it sound too good to be true. That sounds great. They really do need to get rid of the City earnings tax. The City has atrophied since 1950 when they started it.

But, as a skeptical person, here's my question:
If they can do that, without burdening the County with the debt, why don't they do it first and then talk merger?

In other words, come back to me in 10 years, when you have your fiscal house in order, and ask me about a merger.

Well, it's because it's magical thinking. They can't pay off the debt with the City Earnings tax revenue, unless the County is paying all of the other bills. It's a shell game.

In fact, I just heard Lewis Reed, on today's program, asked if the City would go bankrupt if this proposal failed.
He said: "That would only happen if we lost the revenue from the City Earnings tax"

I was a kid in Lexington when they merged it into the Metro Fayette/Lex Government.

Never a good thing...

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
On January 28 Mark Reardon had Nancy Rice and David Bright, the proponents of Better Together on his radio show.

The Better Together guest said that the plan would phase out the City earnings tax (over 10 years) while using the proceeds from this tax to completely pay off the City's debt during that 10 year period.

They make it sound too good to be true. That sounds great. They really do need to get rid of the City earnings tax. The City has atrophied since 1950 when they started it.

But, as a skeptical person, here's my question:
If they can do that, without burdening the County with the debt, why don't they do it first and then talk merger?

In other words, come back to me in 10 years, when you have your fiscal house in order, and ask me about a merger.

Well, it's because it's magical thinking. They can't pay off the debt with the City Earnings tax revenue, unless the County is paying all of the other bills. It's a shell game.

In fact, I just heard Lewis Reed, on today's program, asked if the City would go bankrupt if this proposal failed.
He said: "That would only happen if we lost the revenue from the City Earnings tax"

The claimed savings is in not having so much redundancy. The proponents claim just in efficiency alone they can save 700 million.

It will be one of those things where all this savings is talked about but the taxpayers somehow never get spared from them constantly digging into their pocket.

City, Meet County: St. Louis Weighs Historic Merger

A measure to consolidate St. Louis City and County could go before Missouri voters as soon as 2020. But St. Louisans are mixed on what that means.

Jan 30, 2019

On Monday, the St. Louis think tank Better Together unveiled a formal proposal to combine the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County in a new type of local government for Missouri: a metropolitan city. Governed by an elected “Metro Mayor” and a 33‑member council, the new Metro City of St. Louis would have sweeping powers to enact new laws, tax residents, and oversee law enforcement, justice, planning, zoning, and economic development. This proposal, which would be decided by voters across Missouri, would essentially do away with the present government of the City of St. Louis, including the city’s 29-member Board of Aldermen and the office of Mayor Lyda Krewson.

Such a consolidation would overnight transform St. Louis into the 10th largest city in the U.S., with 1.3 million people—larger than San Jose and right behind Dallas.

The idea is rekindling a longstanding debate in several cities that are pondering the virtues and potential pitfalls of joining up with their surrounding counties. There have been about 40 city-county mergers in the U.S.; in recent decades, major examples include Nashville (1962), Indianapolis (1970), and Louisville (2003). They’re rare because they’re difficult to pull off: Voters may be skeptical of the money-saving arguments for consolidation and susceptible to fears over changing borders between segregated communities. Louisville only got their union done on the fourth try.

Battle lines are already being drawn in St. Louis. Some foes of the idea are concerned that a merger would dilute local African American political power. Others fret that the planned statewide vote will have the fates of urban and suburban residents dictated by rural voters. But proponents insist that consolidation would extend the reach of economic development to North County, expanding the areas where opportunity is currently concentrated. And while Better Together’s research started before the climactic protests in Ferguson, soul-searching in St. Louis since then only lends credence to the arguments for a city-county merger, supporters say.

“Why does a region with world-class resources struggle to thrive and compete in a global economy?” Better Together’s researchers asked in a 2017 report. “The answer lies in St. Louis’ outdated and obsolete fragmented structure. If St. Louis is to grow and prosper, this structure must be addressed.”
The roots of the region’s fragmentation go back to 1876, when St. Louis City and County separated in what is known locally as the Great Divorce.

One of the most significant structural changes would involve the region’s criminal justice system—a target for reformers since protests erupted in Ferguson in 2014. A single police force and court system would form the backbone of the Metro City’s justice system. St. Louis County’s 88 municipalities, from wealthy Ladue to resource-deprived Normandy, would continue to exist, but they would be reclassified as “municipal districts,” forfeiting significant taxing powers and losing most of their influence over economic development. School districts across the region would be untouched.

The proposed changes would require amending Missouri’s constitution, so Better Together—which is backed by Mayor Krewson and St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger, plus an array of deep-pocketed business executives—plans an initiative petition to put its proposal on a statewide ballot in November 2020. If voters approve the plan, a two-year transition period would begin in 2021, with the new Metro City government fully in place by 2023.

The effort may have been inspired by recent events and concerns, but it’s hardly the first time consolidation has been attempted: The most recent public vote over merging St. Louis City and County happened all the way back in 1962. Should such a merger succeed, it would be among the most ambitious in modern U.S. history, due the size of the populations involved—about 300,000 residents in the city and 1 million in the county—and because it would attempt to correct the region’s extreme fragmentation (some would call it tribalism), which can befuddle visitors and transplants.

Apart from the puzzle of its municipal boundaries, which range from villages with a few dozen people to full-service cities with 40,000 or more residents, St. Louis County comprises more than 50 police departments, about 80 municipal courts, and 52,000 pages of local government ordinances. Better Together blames this state of affairs for a host of regional problems, including excessive public spending, poor municipal credit ratings, fierce competition for sales tax dollars, and a patchwork of local courts in St. Louis County that are primarily used not to render justice, but to generate revenue from things like traffic stops and fines for overgrown grass. This last charge is particularly stinging in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests, since those arrested by police and trapped in the court system are often poor and African American.

The roots of this fragmentation go back to 1876, when St. Louis City and County separated in what is known locally as the Great Divorce. Since 1950, St. Louis City has lost thousands of jobs and more than 60 percent of its population. The drop has plateaued in recent years, and the population now stands at about 308,000 people. Today, tax revenue is flat, race relations remain fraught, and thousands of vacant buildings litter the city, especially on the impoverished north side. Treasurer Tishaura Jones said recently on Twitter that St. Louis is “a recession away from bankruptcy.”

Yet there are signs that the city, not the county, is on the cusp of an upturn. Downtown’s Gateway Arch National Park sparkles after a $380 million makeover. City building permits had a record year in 2018, and the area surrounding Cortex (an urban tech and bioscience hub) is studded with construction cranes while commanding some of the region’s highest office rents. The local restaurant scene is winning national praise. The challenge for Krewson and other city leaders is to turn these individual milestones and data points into a sustained and inclusive growth trajectory for the city. A merger with the county, which is in better financial shape, could help speed the city’s progress.

But consolidation faces steep obstacles. For starters, African-American leaders are already expressing concern that merger would dilute their political influence. Black residents comprise about 47 percent of the city’s current population, but unification with the larger, whiter St. Louis County would reduce that figure to 30 percent. Missouri State Senator Jamilah Nasheed, a candidate in the March Democratic primary for president of the Board of Aldermen, says any unification plan “will have to reduce crime, ensure minority representation is protected, and generate cost savings to pay for necessary city services” in order to win her support. (Better Together hopes its projections of substantial cost savings will play well with voters of all races across the region.)

Another source of friction is the planned statewide vote. One widespread local view is that citizens of St. Louis City and County should be the ones who decide what kind of government they have, not voters who live hundreds of miles away. Some have called for a clause in the statewide ballot petition specifying that the measure cannot pass unless it wins in both the city and the county. Better Together, however, says all that is needed is statewide yea, plain and simple. Privately, insiders at the organization say that they believe the measure has a decent chance of passing both the city and county, but they also acknowledge they’re more assured of victory at the state level. A statewide campaign will be more expensive for Better Together’s opponents to contest, and conservative-leaning voters in outstate Missouri could be more receptive to the idea that a city-county merger would save tax dollars.

To that end, trying to measure the impact of city-county mergers on economic health and inclusion in urban areas is difficult, since relatively few such mergers have occurred. Erika Poethig, vice president and chief innovation officer at the Urban Institute and one of the authors of the 2018 report Inclusive Recovery in U.S. Cities, looked at recently consolidated Louisville as a case study. She found that the city’s 2003 merger with surrounding Jefferson County coincided with “significant employment growth and rising median incomes” between 2000 and 2013, even after controlling for changing geographic borders.

In that same study, St. Louis City fared poorly, according to Urban’s assessment of inclusion and economic health. Between 2000 and 2013, the city plunged from 188th to 238th place in a ranking of 274 of the largest U.S. cities. Louisville, on the other hand, jumped 63 rankings.

“We do know that fragmentation contributes to greater inequality, so you could hypothesize that more unification contributes to greater inclusion and equality,” says Poethig, adding that data from school districts offer the best examples to support this. “If there’s anything I’ve learned about St. Louis, it’s that people identify more with their schools than they do their towns.”

The campaign to keep St. Louis separated has already begun. The Municipal League of Metro St. Louis, an advocacy group that counts most area municipalities (including St. Louis City) among its members, is adamantly opposed to a statewide vote. Last week it kicked off its own effort to assemble a local “Board of Freeholders” that could recommend more incremental reforms; those would be subject to a vote only in St. Louis City and County. It’s notable that both Krewson and Stenger, whose offices would be fundamentally reorganized under the proposal, broadly support Better Together’s efforts and stand by the merger initiative in particular.

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

Kelly says that the theory that having fewer local governments removes barriers to economic growth is unproven, and he warns that a first step towards consolidation could have far-reaching consequences. “If this is successful, then what’s going to stop people from doing an initiative petition to consolidate school districts?”

Sentiments like these point to a long road ahead for those who believe that unified government would be a big step in the decades-long effort by St. Louis to regain its luster. School district consolidation could be another project at some point in the distant future, and for merger opponents that’s the inevitable end of a slippery slope. Better Together has pointedly avoided that often-contentious topic, knowing it would be a dealbreaker with a huge number of suburban voters.

Poethig suggests that St. Louisans who urge to merge should look for things that already unify the region, and build from there. “What are the things that bring people together, that they share in common? Any merger effort would need to start there,” she says. “Who goes to the parks? Are they racially inclusive spaces? Are they economically inclusive? Those are the kinds of things that I think are cultural indicators of whether a merger would be able to support any kind of inclusive growth effort. If you’re not already practicing that in some spaces, a merger is not going to help you solve for it.”

https://www.citylab.com/equity...on-vote-2020/579436/

McClellan: I think I can help Better Together — think like a Corleone

Bill McClellan



Memo to Nancy Rice, executive director of Better Together:

Do you remember that scene in “The Godfather” when Michael Corleone was planning to shoot a couple of guys in a restaurant? One of the guys was a rival mobster and the other guy was a crooked cop. There was some concern about shooting the cop. Public reaction and all.

“We’ve got some newspaper guys on the payroll, don’t we, Tom?” Michael asked the family’s consigliere. And yes, of course, the family had some newspaper guys on the payroll. You never know when you might need a favor.

How about you, Nancy? You got some newspaper guys on the payroll?

You’ve got radio guys. Michael Kelley and John Hancock are on board. They’ll be helpful. But newspaper guys? I’ve looked into this. You’ve got nobody. Oh, there are people covering Better Together, but they’re not on your side. They’re neutral. You’ve got the editorial page on your side, but how big is that? Ask Sen. Jason Kander. Ask Gov. Chris Koster.

I mean, God bless the editorial page, but you don’t need an endorsement. You need something more subtle, somebody to push the message a little bit. On the down low, of course.

If I were you, I’d be looking for an old guy. Somebody who made his bones when ethics weren’t such a big deal. Preferably, a part-timer. He might need the dough.

Can you think of anybody like that, Nancy?

Well, HELLO.

You’re not going to need my help out-state. All you have to do is let those people know that St. Louis and St. Louis County don’t want this and those out-staters will get up early to vote for it.

I understand you’re thinking of tossing a little race into it. Always a good idea. You’re going to remind the good people of Missourah that the state of Michigan had to step in and bail Detroit out of bankruptcy. Those “urban” leaders in St. Louis just can’t govern themselves. If the out-staters don’t want to bail out St. Louis, they better vote for the merger.

That will play well, and I’ve got the perfect photo for you to use — the second photo from last summer’s ribbon-cutting at the Arch renovation. After the first “official” photo had 19 whites and no blacks, some black officials had a second ribbon-cutting. Eight people, seven of whom were black. That’s the photo you use outstate.

But like I said, you’ve got that part figured out. You need my help with things around here. I’m well positioned. I’m a county resident, but I’m right on the border. Half of my block is in the city. City workers live on my block. In fact, one of your people, Ed Rhode, used to be a neighbor. My dog bit his. I paid the vet bill. Ask Ed. He’ll vouch for me.

Officially, I live in Centenetown. Sometimes called Pleasantville. Sometimes called Clayton. What if somebody in Clayton were to write a column in favor of the merger? Think about it.

Here’s the problem you’ve got locally. You’re advocating an arranged marriage. The county’s rich. The city’s got the attractions. But they don’t love each other, Nancy.

You might be able to convince some city residents that they need the county’s money. For pensions, if nothing else. When Detroit went bankrupt, the pensioners took it in the wallet — even with the state’s bailout. That issue could get you some votes in the city. Firefighters if nobody else. Their pension system is always in trouble.

You’ve got a much tougher sell in the county. While the city has the attractions, county residents can avail themselves of those attractions without a merger. So exactly what are you offering county residents? The chance to do a good turn? Good luck with that.

Plus, there is the Steve Stenger factor. He’s going to be the unelected czar of this Frankenstein you’re creating. He’s not popular. You know why? Because the newspaper keeps pounding on him. What’s more, it’s as if he’s not even trying. He won’t even attend County Council meetings.

Hey, I’ve got a good friend who works for Stenger. I can talk to my friend. Look. You and I both know you’re not going to win in the county. Heck, they’re talking secession in Chesterfield. I know some of those people. You might have to let them secede. They are not going to go from living in Chesterfield to living in Ward 32 without a fight.

For that matter, the city and the county might secede if outstate voters try to impose their will. We could go to Illinois. I’ve written about that before. West East St. Louis.

You don’t want that kind of column, do you? You need something upbeat. Something about marching into the future arm in arm.

Be bold, Nancy. Think like a Corleone. Call me.

https://www.stltoday.com/news/...dc-b3888454eb9d.html

Wasn't this a tenant of Agenda 21? Merge all the cities and counties where and whenever possible?

quote:

Originally posted by Veeper:
Wasn't this a tenant of Agenda 21? Merge all the cities and counties where and whenever possible?

Sounds familiar. Certainly behind the push to force affluent and rural communities to create Section 8 housing.

If the little fiefdoms in St. Louis County lose their police departments and the associated speed trap fundraisers, I'll vote for it.

Always pissed me off to see half a dozen squad cars from St. Ann conducting a speed trap on I-70 by Lambert Airport.

quote:

Always pissed me off to see half a dozen squad cars from St. Ann conducting a speed trap on I-70 by Lambert Airport.

That does piss me off too...
Not enough to take on all of the City's self-inflicted problems and $800 million of City debt... but it does piss me off.
At least I know those St. Ann cops are going to be there, trying to collect revenue, and I slow down enough to let them collect it from someone else.
If the City/County police departments merge it will be like Chicago.

I'd point St. L to study how the City and County of San Francisco joinder has turned out.