Urban Go-Team Daily Round Up Day 3

On Thursday, Go-Teamers began downtown at the St. Louis City Board of Election Commissioners, and finished with a presentation and Q&A session with Alderpeople Megan Green and Scott Ogilvie as well as Deputy Chief of Staff Leonard Johnson of the City of St. Louis Treasurer’s Office.

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“Our mission is to run fair and honest elections.”

So explained Betty Williams, an official at the Board of Election Commissioners. This is ensured by an agency-wide policy of partisan equilibrium, requiring one Republican and one Democrat to co-hold each major or hands-on position, and prohibiting any agency policy decisions or handling of equipment and ballots without a one-to-one ratio.

Go-Teamers pushed Williams to describe the policy addressing every possible dilemma, including voting from space (absentee voting by email) and the fate of an early absentee vote whose voter dies in between casting the vote and election day (by Missouri law, the vote must be recalled).

Speaking of hypotheticals, Williams asserted that she could only remember one case of voter fraud within St. Louis City in the past decade. Yet, prevention of voter fraud is the declared intention of voter ID laws popping up around the country, just recently in Missouri.

So what is the intention? Speculating, Williams believes it is “just a partisan issue, Republicans vs. Democrats.” Both popular opinion and some evidence show that those currently lacking photo IDs — ethnic minorities and students, among others — tend to vote Democratic.^[1] Thus, it is little surprise that Republicans across the country have led this movement.

Lastly, as a strategy for increasing voter turnout — especially among young voters — Williams pointed to work that the Board of Election Commissioners carries out regularly, from presenting to citizens on the importance of voting and how to vote, to buying out ads in city movie theaters. Regardless of the preparations, she did admit that turnout is far lower than would be prefered in every election, pushing the Board to hold meetings strategizing to increase voter numbers. However, she and the Board have excitedly predicted a very high 70-80% turnout among registered St. Louis voters this November.

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St. Louis City credit recently took a hit, and investment hopes with it, as Fitch chose to downgrade it due to “negative credit trends” and “persistently narrow reserves.”^[2] The change is indicative of a half-century long period of contraction in St. Louis. However, understanding requires much more than the numbers.

Beyond St. Louis’ place as one of the only cities in the nation with a separate city and county — through urban sprawl draining revenue and population from the City and keeping it the same size since 1876 — it is also one of the very few with a mayor unable to dictate more than just a small area of policy. There are twelve independent elected offices in St. Louis, one being the mayor. Each has its own, off-the-grid database. That often leaves the offices to coordinate their own policy in isolation, imaginably leading to misunderstanding and less-than-ideal outcomes.

To further complicate matters, there are currently twenty-eight alderpeople serving an area of roughly sixty-six square miles. Each alderperson is allotted about $300,000 to provide his or her ward with the services he or she prioritizes. They also individually make decisions on infrastructure and development within their wards, and with a common lack of communication, traffic planning can and has made for much inconvenience. In the words of alderwoman Megan Green, each alderperson is “a little mayor,” and the variety shows from ward to ward.

In addition, St. Louis houses several tax districts, incentivising development in the Central Corridor (Central West End and Downtown), for instance, but not in North or South City. While the Corridor becomes more and more “chic,” the peripherals of the City experience high crime rates, high unemployment, and loss of business instead of gains. St. Louis’ reputation is hardly helped by the recent developments as those areas most in need of general investment continue out of mind.

All of this “makes us very inefficient,” says Green, “forcing us to work on a very micro level.” She desires citywide organization in most if not all areas of policy, a move she believes would enable the City to make decisions not only making life easier for residents but healing the national perception of St. Louis.

Politically, St. Louis should be particularly coherent at a first glance. Every current elected official is a Democrat, and there is much less diversity among wards than among state districts or states themselves. Nevertheless, both Green and fellow alderman Scott Ogilvie have stories of gridlock and bitterness. They cite the ideological diversity and “factions” within the party at the city level as one cause, but primarily account it to a practice very influential but little known on the city scale: lobbying.

Lobbying in St. Louis City government usually takes an overt form. “At least in Jeff City lobbyists can’t sit on the floor and advise the aldermen. Here they can,” explained Green. In 2015, more than $214,000 was spent lobbying City aldermen.^[3] As of April 2016, $72,000 had already been spent for the same purpose.^[4] Many powerful groups want continued investment around their recent developments in the Central Corridor, and hire lobbyists to sway officials to their support. Though every part of St. Louis needs renovation to rival New York City or even Chicago, much of the Corridor’s investment comes from the resources and attention needed desperately by the people of South and especially North City. Green worries “Are we going to add more jobs paying minimum wage or a living wage?”

As for a plan to counter suburbanization, Ogilvie suggested, “forget about attracting more people. Let’s make everyone here’s lives better.” He contended that the main turnoff to St. Louis is its racial and regional inequity, the direct result of poorly distributed development and services. Intuitive to most who grew up with toasted ravioli and Ted Drewes, native St. Louisans are even more susceptible to a negative perception of their city, having developed often at the brunt of a failure to adequately govern. By improving their experience from childhood to maturity, the stop of rapid emigration may be an achievable first step.

Leonard Johnson of the Treasury added a special emphasis on the city’s education system. Expressing his own fear to send his children to one of the city’s failing public schools, he described an “obligation as a father” to send them to a private or charter school. That even a high-ranking public servant admits the quality of city schools is unacceptable for his loved-ones speaks sad and frustrating volumes, and maybe explains St. Louis’ decline better than anything else.

^[1] https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/fighting-voter-suppression/fighting-voter-id-requirements

^[2]http://www.stltoday.com/business/columns/david-nicklaus/fitch-downgrades-st-louis-credit-to-a-minus/article_57ed60db-4560-5720-a1a8-037f5c6277b8.html

^[3] http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000049173

^[4] Ibid.