City Democrats Website Greatly Improved, But Still Lacking
The St. Louis Board of Aldermen are still on their winter break so this week I want to talk about the St. Louis Democratic Central Committee:
The St. Louis City Democratic Central Committee is the elected body consisting of one Committeewoman and one Committeeman from each of the 28 wards in St. Louis City.
We are tasked with building a strong party organization within the city of St. Louis and working to get Democrats elected up and down the party ticket in every election.
Every party has a central committee, but, to my knowledge, the Republicans and Greens don’t have two members for every ward — as provided by state law. Not surprising since St. Louis is a reliable “blue city”. They’re elected every 4 years in the August primary before the presidential election.
The city Democrats website used to be awful, not even listing who the committee consisted of. Thankfully it is substantially better than in the past.
But it’s far from perfect. Each of the 28 wards is independent from each other so the amount of information you get varies greatly from ward to ward. All list the committeewoman & committeeman, with contact info (phone, Twitter) for some of the 56 members.
Of the 28 ward organizations:
- 18 (64%) have NO website, Facebook page, etc
- 5 (18%) do have a website & Facebook page
- 4 (14%) have a Facebook page, but no website
- 1 (4%) has a website, but no Facebook page
Each ward page includes a PDF of the boundaries, however, nowhere online have I been able to find ward maps with precinct boundaries.
Below is a list of all 28 wards and additional sites listed on the city Democrats page, again, 64% have nothing:
- website
- website, Facebook
- website, Facebook
- website, Facebook
- website, Facebook
- website, Facebook
It’s important to remember the committeeman, committeewoman, and alderman may not get along with each other. They may all work against each other. or two may work together against the third. If you have an interest in St. Louis politics the ward-level is a good place to get involved– especially with the Spring 2017 primary election just around the corner.
— Steve Patterson