Poll: Should Zoo-Museum Institutions Offer Discounts to City & County Residents?

Interesting story in the paper last week:

Property owners in St. Louis and St. Louis County paid more than $70 million last year for the region’s premier arts and culture attractions. But when it comes time to visit institutions funded through the zoo-museum tax district, they’re often treated the same as people who didn’t pay a dime.

Now, a member of the public board that supervises the 40-year-old tax district is asking whether that’s fair.

Gloria Wessels recently suggested that four of the five institutions funded by the zoo-museum district offer discounts on parking, concessions and special exhibits to visitors who live in the taxing district. If necessary, those discounts could be funded through price increases for visitors who live outside the district, she said. (STLToday)

Gloria Wessels is the wife of long 26-year alderman Fred Wessels (D-13). Should those of us who pay taxes to fund these attractions get a little something others don’t? The Missouri Botanical Garden already allows city & county resident in for free on Wednesday & Saturday mornings.  The article points out the logistical nightmare of trying to verify who would qualify for free parking.  Besides the last thing we need is to encourage is more cars trying to get to the zoo & museum.

During its thirty-seven years of operation the District’s annual tax revenue has increased from $3.9 million dollars in 1972 to more than $72 million dollars in 2009. In recent years, approximately 85% of the tax revenues come from the County taxpayers while City residents provide 15% of the District’s tax revenues.

The expansion of the number of Subdistricts from three to five is indicative of the success and vitality of the original concept of a tax supported cultural district. Today, the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District is, perhaps, the largest tax supported cultural district in this country. It is a model that other cities have often attempted to emulate. (mzdstl.org)

The five subdistricts are the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis Zoological Park, Missouri Botanical Garden, Saint Louis Science Center and Missouri History Museum.

The poll this week asks you to weigh in on this issue. The poll is in the upper right of the blog.

– Steve Patterson

Guest Opinion: The Free State of St. Louis

Guest opinion by Chris Andoe

In the event you’re not familiar with the allegory of the frog in boiling water I’ll share it with you. Drop a frog in a pot of boiling water and it’ll immediately jump out. Drop it in a pot of cool water, slowly heat until boiling, and it will just sit there and die.

The St. Louis region is the frog and the pot of boiling water is Missouri.

St. Louis has always had an uncomfortable relationship with outstate Missouri, leading to byzantine arrangements like the state controlling our police department. There’s a general understanding that nobody from St. Louis could go on to be governor, and we can’t even agree with our rural neighbors on how to pronounce the state name.

The temperature has been turned up a degree or two at a time for well over a hundred years and with recent events we find it at a rolling boil. Still, many don’t see a need to jump.

The perverse new congressional map guts representation in the St. Louis region, the economic engine of the state, shifting even more power to the rural areas.  Outrageously some of our region’s own “leaders” collaborated with the GOP to allow this to happen, including Rep. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, who said she was not concerned about the Democratic Party’s objections to the eliminating of one of the region’s congressional seats, or that 75% of Missourians now find themselves in gerrymandered districts that are solidly Republican. No, as long as the new map preserved Congressman Clay’s seat she’d back it. “I’m black before I’m a Democrat” Nasheed infamously said.

Can you imagine the delight of Republican strategists upon hearing her divisive, inflammatory, racially charged statement? Not only did she give them what they wanted with the new map, she gave them an outstanding tool in their efforts to get the votes of white Independents and Democrats. As the television infomercials say, “But wait! There’s more!” The self-serving Nasheed also helped Republicans to gut Prop B, the Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act which passed by large margins in her St. Louis district.

State leaders were more concerned about upsetting the puppy mill lobby than the people of St. Louis and Kansas City. Because of pitiful leadership St. Louis gets one less congressional seat, puppy mill dogs get less humane conditions, and Nasheed gets a coveted third floor office in Jefferson City.

Time and again the St. Louis region winds up infighting over the crumbs after the bloated Jefferson City eats its fill. St. Louis pays the bills in the state with only meager representation, and some of the region’s own representatives are merely the lapdogs of outstate Republicans.

If there were ever a time for radical thinking, this is it. In a world economy built on innovation, the Missouri state motto “Show Me” doesn’t cut it. It’s time for the St. Louis region to lead. I also think it’s time for the region to secede from Missouri.

There’s legal precedent for the separation of a portion of an existing state from the original state in order to form a new one. In 1820, Maine split off from Massachusetts and was admitted to the Union as the 23rd state. At this moment there’s an aggressive movement in Pima County, Arizona to form a new state. Hugh Holub, the founder of this movement, explains “If the original American Revolution was triggered by the colonial people feeling they didn’t have a say in the government from London….the movement to create Baja Arizona is another in a long history of people wanting not to have their lives run by people with very different values and agendas who live somewhere else.”

A similar movement has begun in South Florida.

Think of all we’re giving to a state that values backwoods puppy mill operators more than the citizens of their mightiest city. Everything from tax dollars to electoral votes. It doesn’t make sense.

I’m asking the people of this region to shake the “show me” mentality and participate in innovative discussions about the future. Research what’s going on in Pima County, brainstorm about what’s possible. Even if secession doesn’t happen maybe the discussions will serve to wake the sleeping giant that is St. Louis, leading to a revolt against the tyranny of Jefferson City.

– Chris Andoe

Chris Andoe is a writer and community organizer who has divided his time between St. Louis and San Francisco for the past decade. He earned the moniker “The Emperor of St. Louis” as the crown wearing Master of Ceremonies for the zany Metrolink Prom, where hundreds of transit supporters pack the train for the city’s biggest mobile party. Andoe writes for St. Louis’ Vital Voice.

Poll: Gov. Nixon signed ‘compromise’ bills on puppy mills & vetoed workplace discrimination bill, thoughts?

In a poll prior to the November 2010 elections 67% of readers approved of the proposition to regulate puppy mills in Missouri (see Majority of Readers Support Proposition B).  In the election the measure passed with 51.6% of the statewide vote.  As you can see from the graphic above it was the St. Louis and Kansas City regions plus two counties in the far southern part of the state that voted yes, enough votes to pass the measure. Here in the City of St. Louis 78.4% of voters approved Proposition B. Six months later things have changed:

Gov. Jay Nixon on Wednesday signed into law his “Missouri solution,” which blends a bill that weakens regulations for dog breeders in Missouri with some language from voter-approved Proposition B aimed at cracking down on puppy mills.

Nixon signed Senate Bill 161, hours after he signed Senate Bill 113. Both measures remove a cap of 50 breeding dogs, but Senate Bill 161 keeps other Proposition B requirements in place regarding cages and vet exams as part of his compromise with farmers and animal welfare groups. (Nixon signs puppy mill compromise)

Many of my friends were angered by Nixon signing these.  But Friday Gov. Nixon made some of the same friends happy:

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon on Friday vetoed an employment relations bill passed by the Missouri Senate, saying it would strike down central tenets of the Missouri Human Rights Act.

Nixon struck down Senate Bill 188, which caps punitive and compensatory damages in workplace discrimination cases and requires plaintiffs to prove that discrimination was an employer’s “motivating” factor in a discrimination claim, rather than the current “contributing” factor standard. (Nixon vetoes bill increasing burden of proof in workplace discrimination cases)

The veto took place at the Old Courthouse in St. Louis. This brings us to the poll question for this week, what are your thoughts on the signing of the puppy mill bills but vetoing the other? Did he make the right decisions, in your opinion?

– Steve Patterson

Three Years at Home Post-Stroke

Today is a special day for me so this post is very personal in nature.  It was three years ago today I returned to my loft where I’d had a massive hemorrhagic stroke three months earlier. Except for 12 weeks of outpatient therapy in the Fall of 2008, I’ve had no additional therapy outside of the therapy in two hospitals. Yet, my physical condition has improved.

When I came home I still couldn’t hold anything in my left hand, now I can hold non-breakable items, switch on lights, etc. Not much for someone who used to be left-handed but I’m thrilled I’ve improved as much as I have.  I now feel right-handed.

I’ve fallen four times in the last three years — three out in public and then two weeks ago at home alone. I can’t just stand up after falling, but I knew how to push myself up onto my bed and then stand.  I just had to scoot myself on the concrete floor to get there. The second time I fell I fractured my left wrist so I’m happy with just a sprained wrist.

Tonight I will go out to dinner to the same restaurant where I’ve gone on April 30th for the last three years – Meskerem Ethiopian on South Grand. After months of hospital food I wanted something different.  Now it is an annual event for me.

Not a week goes by that I’m not reminded how fortunate I am to have survived and recovered as much as I have, for example, earlier this week singer Phoebe Snow died:

Ms. Snow died Tuesday in Edison, N.J., from complications of a brain hemorrhage she suffered in January 2010. She was 58. (Source)

There are differences between a brain hemorrhage and  hemorrhagic stroke, but they are related.  Here is Phoebe Snow performing her signature song “Poetry Man” in 1989:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OxTVxGhHFM

Thank you for allowing me to ramble on about my anniversary.

– Steve Patterson

Poll: Have you read ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ by Jane Jacobs?

Fifty years ago Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a harsh criticism of the state of urban planning at the time.  Jacobs was 45 when Death and Life was first published. Tomorrow marks five years since her death at age 89.

A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs’s monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities. (description via Left Bank Books)

I can think of no other book on urban planning and cities that continues to be debated decades later or have their own Facebook page.

The mistake made by Jacobs’s detractors and acolytes alike is to regard her as a champion of stasis—to believe she was advocating the world’s cities be built as simulacra of the West Village circa 1960. Admirers and opponents have routinely taken her arguments for complexity and turned them into formulas. But the book I just read was an inspiration to move forward without losing sight that cities are powerful, dynamic, ever-changing entities made up of myriad gestures big and small. The real notion is to build in a way that honors and nurtures complexity. And that’s an idea impossible to outgrow. (Metropolis)

The poll this week asks if you have read this book and your thoughts on it.  The poll is in the upper right corner of the site.

– Steve Patterson