What’s on the Ballots in St. Louis County

The City of St. Louis is not the only area having elections on Tuesday. Municipalities throughout St. Louis County are also holding elections. Here are some highlights:
The Big Picture:

• Elections are for municipal offices, school boards, special (fire) districts, and propositions.
• All are non-partisan. This is worth repeating, all are non-partisan.
• Huge majority of aldermanic/council/board terms are for two years with some being four and a few being three. Mayorial positions are all four year.
• Only 90 out of 259 seats are challenged, a rate of 35%. Thus, the other 65% will be elected simply by filing for office.
• 86 municipalities in St. Louis County have elections on Tuesday.
• The City of Ferguson didn’t even get a single candidate for their council in ward 3.
• The Village of Sycamore Hills is to elect three trustees but only two candidates filed.

Recall Question – City of Overland:

• A simple majority of voters in Overland is all that is needed to remove controversial Mayor Ann Purzner from office.
• Purzner won the election a year ago by a mere four votes over Ward 2 Councilwoman Mary Beth Conlon.
• This is likely the main election result you will see on the evening news.

Propositions – all are simple majority votes:

• Lateral Sewer: Four cities are considering a fee up to $50 annually per sewer line; Bella Villa, Crystal Lake Park, Edmundson, and Greendale.
• Sales Tax Increase for General Revenue: Village of Bellerive
• Sales Tax increase for Parks & Storm Water Control: Beverly Hills, Charlack, Country Club Hills, Sunset Hills, Velda Village Hills
• License Tax on Outdoor Advertising: Charlack
• Sales Tax increase for Economic Development: Charlack, Normandy
• Business License Fee Increase: Glendale ($15 to $100 annually)
• Sales Tax increase for Capital Improvements: Lakeshire, Woodson Terrace (may include debt service)
• Property Tax increase for police & fire Pension fund: Maplewood
• Local Use Tax on purchases: Normandy
• Motel Tax for Tourism: Pacific
• Operating Tax Levy: Shrewsbury
• Tax on Public Utilities: Velda Village Hills

Charter Changes:

• Clayton is looking to bring their charter in line with state law regarding elections. Simple majority.
• Creve Coeur has six amendments which appear to be housekeeping items (they reference ordinance numbers. The sixth item requires a 2/3 vote of the city council to exercise the power of eminent domain. All are simple majority.
• Kinloch is considering changing the terms for their aldermen from two years to four years and making the mayor a full-time position. Simple Majority.
• Moline Acres is also considering increasing aldermanic positions from two to four years. Simple majority.

Municipal Bond Issues – City of Shrewsbury:

• Shrewsbury is trying to pass three bond issues totaling just over $2 million.
• $785K for public safety, including a new fire engine and ambulance.
• $615K for park & recreation improvements, includes Aquatic Center bath house and backup generator for city center.
• $660K for street and street-related improvements including replacement and reconstruction of city streets.
• These require a four-seventh majority to pass.

School & Fire Protection Districts:

• Nothing really stood out on these with the exception of a few proposed bond issues.
• Ritenour School District is seeking $32 million in bonds for an Arts Education Center, an Early Childhood Center, and renovating existing facilities. 4/7th majority.
• The Ladue School District is seeking just shy of $30 million to do a bunch of things such as repairs, furnishings, renovation and upgrading facilities. Includes additional security equipment. 4/7th majority.
• The Maplewood Richmond Heights School district is seeking $9 million for improvements and such to the High School, Middle School, Early Childhood Center and the central office. They also seek to do an addition to the Earlly Childhood Center. This requires a 4/7th majority. They also seek to increase the property tax levy by $0.3067 per $100 of valuation.
• It should be noted that 12 Fire districts have elections for director(s).

For more information see the St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners.

New Sidewalks in the Suburbs: A Good Thing or a Waste of Money?

Regular readers of Urban Review know I am a huge fan of sidewalks and accessibility. However, my focus is mostly around areas where we have a more urban form such as in the city and older suburban downtowns like Maplewood, Ferguson, Webster Groves or Edwardsville IL.

But what about the vast majority of highly auto-centric areas? I would certainly advocate as new areas are built they include sidewalks, as unlikely as they are to be used given the context. This leaves one area, retrofitting sidewalks in our older auto-centric sprawl mess.

One such example is along St. Charles Rock Road between roughly I-170 and Lindbergh through municipalities such as St. Ann, Breckenridge Hills and St. John. To be fair I think SCRR always had some sort of left over pavement designated as a token sidewalk but with so many driveway crossings and electrical polls it was pretty useless.

I must be on some turn of the 20th Century street, just look at the retro lamps on the bright pink concrete sidewalks. Inviting huh?

Yes, money well spent. In truth it does help provide accessibility for those who need to but the overall result is almost more ridiculous than it looked before the improvements. Do we think colored concrete and some black lamp posts are going to really make this stretch of road inviting enough to gain more pedestrians?

Over on Lindbergh (speedway) Blvd we’ve got similar attempts going in.

Except on Lindbergh they only get asphalt sidewalks (nice huh?), the pink concrete is reserved for special areas at crossings. Doesn’t this make you feel safer as a pedestrian. So now when the car flying off the exit ramp hits you the news crews will have a nice new sidewalk to stand on as they film your body being taken away. The other side of this crossing, in case you are wondering, is past the street light in the background.

The opposite view. Pedestrian-friendly, suburban-style. To be fair, I took these pictures in June but it did appear as all the work had pretty much wrapped up. The last of the concrete and asphalt was being set — I did not see anymore areas being dug out. In the picture above, I cannot imagine walking on the pavement to get to the next sidewalk area — this is a high-speed exit! My guess is they did not have the right-of-way to place a sidewalk along the area to the right and get closer to the next crossing.

But maybe when this is redone it can be corrected? It is not as far off as you might think. Turns out MoDot screwed up the specifications for these pretty-in-pink ramps and all 300 of them are being removed and redone at taxpayers expense! Don’t believe it? Watch the You Paid For It segment yourself.

Again, I love sidewalks and making areas pedestrian-friendly. But, just putting a sidewalk along a major street does not make things necessarily accessible or friendly. We need street trees or other fixed objects separating the pedestrian from the passing traffic. We need zoning codes that will require adjacent buildings to have sidewalks connecting to the public sidewalk or, even better, constructing the new building adjacent to the sidewalk.

Remember the Days Before Naming Rights?

Maybe I’m more old fashioned than I thought.  I generally like new and progressive thinking but naming rights just has me upset.  Imagine if New York’s Empire State Building had gone through naming rights changes every 5-10 years?  No, I like my buildings to have a name literally etched in stone.  Locally we’ve seen the Kiel Center become the Savvis Center only to become, earlier this year, the Scottrade Center.  Riverport became UMB Bank Pavillion.  I’m sure you can think of others.
Today I read that the Rams’ athletic field in Earth City is being named for Russell Athletics, from the St. Louis Business Journal:

The St. Louis Rams said Friday that the organization signed a deal with Russell Athletic to permanently rename Rams Park, the team’s Earth City, Mo., training ground and media center complex, Russell Athletic Training Center, Home of the St. Louis Rams.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Russell President Doug Kelly said the five-year deal will cost in the seven figures. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

WTF?  In the first paragraph the writer says they are going to “permanently rename” the facility yet in the very next sentence notes it is a “five-year deal.”   Does five years now equal permanent in terms of building names? Given much of the quality of new construction maybe that is about right.
Of course we also have naming issues outside of special deals.  Why someone thought trying to call City Hospital the Georgian is beyond me.  Yes, City Hospital Condos maybe doesn’t look so elegant on the marketing literature but everyone knows the building as City Hospital.  Why mess with something that works?   Developers want to change the name of the Chemical Building downtown.  I’m sure you have more examples.

And finally, why aren’t corporate sponsors lining up to put their names on our increasing number of parking garages?  Maybe the Taylor family would like to have the ‘Enterprise Parking Garage at the Old Post Office’? Then the developers would have some more money so perhaps they could buy a nice bronze plaque commemorating the historic Century Building they razed.

St. Louis’ Schools Need Middle-Class Students

A couple of days ago I did a post about government’s role in shaping the suburbs through federal lending policies, including an excerpt from the excellent book, Cities Without Suburbs, by David Rusk. Today I bring you more from Rusk, this time on education:

In 1966, sociologist James Coleman released his path-breaking study, Equality of Educational Opportunity. Sponsored by the then-U.S. Office of Education, the Coleman Report concluded that the socioeconomic characteristics of a child and of the child’s classmates (measured principally by family income and parental education) were the overwhelming factors that accounted for academic success. Nothing else – expenditures per pupil, pupil-teacher ratios, teacher experience, instructional materials, age of school buildings, etc. – came close.

“The educational resources provided by a child’s fellow students,” Coleman summarized, “are more important for his achievement than are the resources provided by the school board.” So important are fellow students, the report found, that “the social composition of the student body is more highly related to achievement, independent of the student’s own social background, than is any school factor.”

In the four decades since, nothing has changed. There has been no more consistent finding of educational researchers – and no research finding more consistently ignored by most politicians and many educators. They will not challenge the underlying racial and class structure of American society.

I have conducted a dozen such studies myself, charting the dominant impact of socioeconomic status on school results. The most recent is my study of all elementary schools in Madison-Dane County, Wisconsin. The study finds that

• Pupil socioeconomic status accounts for 64 percent to 77 percent of the school-by-school variation in standardized test results and that
  
• Poor children’s test results improve dramatically when surrounded by middle-class classmates. Move a poor child from a neighborhood school where 80 percent of classmates are also poor to a neighborhood school where 80 percent of classmates are middle class would raise the chance of that child’s scoring at a proficient or advanced levels by 30 to 48 percentage points – an enormous improvement.

In other words, where a child lives largely shapes the child’s educational opportunities – not in terms of how much money is being spent per pupil but who the child’s classmates are. Housing policy is school policy.

This is not really earth shattering news but among all the discussions about the St. Louis Public Schools — the performance of the long list of recent Superintendents, divisions on the school board, low test scores, and calls by Mayor Fracis Slay and others for state takeover of the system the idea of the home-life envinronment for the bulk of the school kids has been lost. This is not to say the kids have a bad or abusive home life but one in which perhaps their parents are poorly educated themselves and are working many hours to provide for their family.

The basic argument is this — the St. Louis Public Schools will continue to under-perform regardless of who is in charge as long as the social issues of concentrated poverty, lack of nearby jobs and poor housing remain unchanged. Ballpark Village is not going to change this situation in the neighborhoods. In the past I’ve said something to the effect of we don’t need school age kids — they are a financial drain anyway. Well, I was wrong. We do need kids — lots of middle-class kids.

But how is that possible? Parents are not going to move to the city until the schools improve and the schools are not going to improve until we get more kids. A costly busing system is one avenue but I don’t think that is a good long-term solution. The answer? Consolidation! No, not a city-county merger of municipalities but of school districts.

Between the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County we have 25 school districts. In many less fractured regions of the country, that same area would have 1-3 districts. Of course, large districts can have their issues as well but that is more about leadership. So what to do? Well, I’d probably combine all the small districts that are fully within the I-270 loop (see map of districts) — this includes St. Louis, Riverview Gardens, Jennings, Normandy, Ritenour, University City, Clayton, Ladue, Brentwood, Maplewood-Richmond Heights, Webster Groves, Affton, Bayless, and Hancock Place. A number of districts are mostly within the I-270 loop and could be included as well — Ferguson-Florissant, Pattonville, Kirkwood, Lindbergh and perhaps Mehlville.
Could this happen voluntarily? Probably not, state action would be needed. But, I would argue this is necessary to help the region — the St. Louis Public Schools are acting as a drain on the regions growth but the solution, more middle-class students, is outside the grasp of the St. Louis School Board and the administration. And yes, as long as poor folks are concentrated in the city and older inner-ring suburbs like Wellston we will need some busing to move people around. But as a single district this would be easier to accomplish — less of the “us” vs. “them.”

Another factor is if we had a single school district for the city and most of the county we could eliminate the “I won’t live in the city because of the schools” claims. Of course, some might argue this would drive folks to Illinois, St. Charles County or Jefferson County even faster but I’m not so sure. After the initial shock of it all I think it might go pretty well and then parents would not see the city limits sign as a big barrier. A strong city is good for the region and especially good for St. Louis County, which continues to lose population to surrounding areas. Such a school system consolidation could help both the city and county. Discuss.

Should St. Louis Become a ‘Suburb’ in the Region?

You may have heard about the city’s infamous “Team Four” plan from the mid 1970’s. If not, read Antonio French’s report here. This comprehensive plan was in response to a series of research reports from the Rand Corporation on behalf of the National Science Foundation. I am in the process of reviewing these for a school project but I wanted to share part of it with you now.

From Rand Report #R-1353 St. Louis: A City and its Suburbs published August 1973:

The analysis suggests that, among the alternatives open to the city, promoting a new role for St. Louis as one of many large suburban centers of economic and residential life holds more promise than reviving the traditional central city functions.

This is not necessarily suggesting the city taken on a highly suburban form (streets & buildings) but the role of a supporting player in the region but not the core. The center, presumably, would fall to Clayton and the central corridor. In reality, our region and today’s society functions without a single core. Today many people have suburb to suburb commutes.

So what do you think of this idea of giving up on focusing on St. Louis as the core of the region and instead make it simply one of many economic and residential areas? What is the difference?

The first difference, in my mind, is transit. All the planning being done around future transit is focused on trying to reclaim St. Louis as the core from which everything else radiates. For example, the new North & South mass transit studies for the region are trying to connect via the city’s CBD to the county. It would seem to me that getting folks from the county into mass transit can be accomplished much easier by connecting to the end of the new line at Shrewsbury for south county and off the original line for those in north county. There are also several options for connecting the employment hub of Westport into the system.

People are often critical of my belief that neighborhood scale transit in the form of streetcars or guided trams (similar to a modern streetcar but with rubber tires and a single track to guide it) can help increase development and create dense and thus walkable neighborhoods. Perhaps they are right. But my belief in this idea is nothing compared to the utopian notion that by bringing light rail to a former major core we can somehow undo 50 years of change and sprawling development patterns in our region. I’m not convinced.

Would it be so bad for the city to concede that our downtown will never once again be the hub for commerce that it once was? That doesn’t mean it can’t be a great place. In fact, I’d argue that without the pressure to regain its role as the region’s major employment center and commerce hub that downtown and the city might actually be free to focus on creating great places where people want to live and work. This means enjoying out quick light rail connection to the east side, Clayton and the airport but focusing the balance of our transit attention on the neighborhood scale — not how to get more suburbanites into downtown for their day jobs. If anything is a ‘build it and they will come’ scenario it is the thinking light rail to downtown will return jobs downtown.

When the Rand reports were written in 1973 they looked at the population drops in the city, down to 600,000 in the most recent census. Today we are just under 350,000. All of our attention is focused on reclaiming the former glory of the region’s center but how has that worked for us over the last few decades? Sure, we’ve got more residents and investment in downtown but is that really shifting things? The U.S. population is trending back toward cities which may account for much of downtown’s rejuvenation of late. But what is the likelihood of reshaping our sprawling region back to a core with radial suburbs? Very slim in my eyes. I’d like to see us shift to making downtown not the core of the region but one of a number of business centers in the region — the most dynamic of them all. The city should focus on increasing population not by a thousand here and 500 there, but by tens of thousands.

With office parks spread out all over the region, a convention center in St. Charles and performance venues everywhere I just don’t know that we can successfully reverse the damage that has been done. Other regions, such as Chicago, never lost their place as the core. However, many industrial cities, like Detroit, did lose their place in the core. Does anyone know of an example where a former core city regained its place as the center of commerce in a region?

So what do you think? Should we “stay the course” with attempting to maintain St. Louis as the core or accept that in the auto-centric times a region may no longer have a true core and simply work to make St. Louis a pedestrian-friendly urban “suburb” within the region?