Can We Please Ban Smoking in the St. Louis Region? Missouri?

I really hate cigarette smoke.  Nothing ruins a good meal like someone puffing away at the next table or even the next room.  But it is not just restaurants  I recently went to a local locksmith to have a key made.  I left smelling like an ashtray.  I can’t meet clients smelling like a smoker.

Illinois has had a smoking ban for a year.  I recently had lunch at a sports bar in Granite City, IL — I was able to breath and enjoy my salad.    Oklahoma requires completely separate closed rooms with different HVAC systems in order to have smoking areas.  Would you like that key made in the smoking or non-smoking section?  Both states as well as others with bans still have open businesses.  Despite what you hear, places do remain open.  Some even thrive.

Of course smoking is addictive.  Just like coffee is.  I don’t like either. But I can have a meal with the person next to me getting their morning coffee fix.  People with destructive addictions need help.

Short of a statewide ban we need a more local ban.  But at what level?  St. Louis City is small relative to the Missouri  side of the region.  St. Louis County has 90+ municipalities and quite a bit of area not in an incorporated municipality.  The City of St. Louis or anyone of the 90+ munis in the county could ban smoking but would that just drive business to a neighboring municipality?  I guess those people who must have a Marlboro with their wings just might change where they will eat.

You may have seen the article, “Smoking ban issue resurfaces in St. Louis County”in the Post-Dispatch on the 26th which talked about a letter from five out of the 90+ mayors in St. Louis County urging the St. Louis County Council to ban smoking county-wide. From the article:

The mayors of five adjacent cities in St. Louis County have reignited the smoking ban issue, asking the County Council to ban smoking in public places. Signing the document were Mayors Joseph L. Adams of University City, Jean Antoine of Olivette, Harold Dielmann of Creve Coeur, Linda Goldstein of Clayton and Mike Schneider of Overland.

Thanks to reader “Jason”, I have the letter for you to read for yourself.  Click here to view the 2-page PDF.

As a patron I have the right to avoid businesses that permit smoking, and I do.  However, employees don’t have that luxury.  To keep their job they are often subjected to second-hand smoke.  When they have lung cancer 20 years later we all pay the price as medical costs are boerne by all either through increased insurance premiums or taxes.

I find visiting regions & states with bans more pleasant.  No need to pop into places to ask if they prohibit smoking.  We are competing with many regions & states for jobs and for population.  Banning smoking in public places is a good way to be able to remove an objection for relocating to the Missouri side of the region.

Kudos to these five mayors.  I have sent an email to several members of the Board of Aldermen and Mayor Slay’s staff asking them to pass a smoking ban in the City of St. Louis that would take affect upon approval of a similar measure in St. Louis County.  If St. Louis County did the same we might actually get somewhere in our fragmented region. I suggest you contact your elected official in the city/county where you live to try to get this done.

History Of Urban Renewal in St. Louis

I’m not writing the history, just passing it along.  As I come across interesting documents in my files I’m scanning them for safe keeping as sharing the info with you, the reader.

One such document is the history of Urban Renewal in St. Louis.  It was published by the City Plan Commission in the early 1970s.

The document gives a detailed look at Urban Renewal projects in St. Louis like Plaza Square, Mill Creek Valley and Desoto-Carr (these last two have been razed & replaced).

Enjoy this valuable resource.

Letters to Candidates in the Mail

I had a productive weekend and got 25 letters ready to candidates for Mayor & Alderman who face a challenger in the March 3, 2009 primary. The letters were mailed yesterday.   After the primary I’ll do the same for candidates in contested races in the April 7, 2009 general election.

The letters request candidates to complete an online questionnaire.  I’ve assigned a random ID code to each candidate to ensure no other candidate pretends to be another.  The questionnaires will be accessible from this page.  Each questionnaire (Mayor & Alderman) has a password so only candidates have access.

Topics covered include:

• Basic info like email/phone/website.
• Top five issues facing your ward (Aldermanic candidates only).
• Top five issues facing the city.
• Top five issues facing the greater St. Louis region.
• Charter Reform – term limits
• Charter Reform – partisan vs. non-partisan local elections
• Charter Reform – reduction of the number of Aldermen
• Charter Reform – consolidation of city/county positions
• Ban on Smoking in public places.
• Local control of the St. Louis Police.
• Adoption of form-based zoning
• Funding of public transit in the region.
• Expansion of MetroLink light rail.
• Thoughts on streetcars.
• Earnings tax
• Replacement/upgrading the Edward Jones Dome in the future
• Redistricting following 2010 Census.
• ADA/Pedestrian-friendly development
• Historic Preservation/demolition
• Bicycle advocacy
• Bicycle parking
• Parking for scooters/motorcycles
• Big box & strip center development vs. urban development.
• Tax incentives for affluent firms
• Ideal role of the Alderman (Aldermanic candidates only).
• Ballpark Village
• St. Louis Centre
• Homeless (Mayoral candidates only)
• Arch-Downtown Connection
• City reentering STL County
• Valet parking
• Communications (blog if elected?)
• Public schools
• Rental vs. owner-occupant development

I’m still finishing up the questionnaires.  I indicated to the candidates the questionnaires will be open as of 5pm Friday January 30, 2009 and they will close a week later at 5pm 2/6/09.  This means I still have a chance to include questions on additional topics not listed above so use the comments to suggest more for either aldermanic or mayorial candidates (or both).

Old School Vs. New School

I’m beginning to get a greater understanding about why planners from the past did what they did.  The problem is a solution to a 1920s problem was not only the solution at the time but for decades to follow — passed down from one generation to the next without anyone questioning why or if the problem being solved still existed.

The original problem has long since decanted to the suburbs yet the solution remains and itself becomes the new problem to be addressed.  An example is removing on-street parking from the CBD due to the morning & evening rush hours.  In 1950 when St. Louis had half a million more residents, tens/hundreds of thousands  more jobs were in the cbd rather than the burbs, and downtown was the region’s retail center removing on-street parking had some logic.  But now, to insist on the same old policy even though the conditions 50+ years later are vastly different is just not logical.  Each time period warrants evaluation of current problems and brainstorming on current solutions, not just adaption of half century old solutions just because that was how someone was taught by someone else (who was born in the 19th Century).

Sometimes the past solution will still be applicable, most often it will not.  Frequently the best solution for today is to do the opposite of the past solution.  To that end I’ve compiled a chart with some examples:

The above is in no way all encompassing.  It just represents a few issues that come up in cities and how perspectives can be vastly different depending upon your school of thought.  Sadly too many at city hall, from bureaucrats to aldermen, hold the “prior” school of thought.

Is it easier to get them all to understand a new approach or simply replace them?  Neither seems an easy task.

Otherwise intelligent people argue for the status quo (old school thought) not because they examined the issues and possible solutions but because that is how they were taught and that is what they have advocated for the last 20-50 years.  To do a 180 would be to acknowledge that what they had been doing was wrong.

This is only partially correct.  I think that many things done to save cities in the past were destructive and we’d be better off today had solutions not been attempted.  That is the beauty of hindsight.  The past solutions were the best they had at the time.  People were doing what was considered the best solution at the time.

But must we stick with these decisions half a century later?  When does it become OK to take a fresh look at our urban policies?  Just because a zoning regulation is still on the books doesn’t mean it is permanently etched in stone.  Granted, most of the old school of thought now exceeds 50 years so it qualifies as historic.   But like the Century Building, just because something is historic doesn’t make it safe from from destruction.

An Early Look at Site Stats

A couple of days ago my programmer got the Google Analytics code installed on this site which will enable me to obtain excellent statistics on not just the number of page views but how many “absolute unique visitors” I have.

As an example, over these first 2+ days the site has had 1,404 visits generating 2,221 page views.  Of the 1,404 visits, 952 were unique visitors so the remaining visits were return visitors.

Firefox is the top browser of choice overall and among Windows users.  For those of you using IE.  Stop.  It is a horrible browser.  This site and others looks & functions better from Firefox, Safari, Chrome or any other browser.

Sixty-percent of the traffic came direct with twenty-two percent from search engines and the balance as referrals from other sites.  I’ve been noticing from my old stats tracking system that nearly every day someone searches for my site by typing in ‘urban review stl.’  I guess I fail to understand why you’d do a search engine search when you know the name?

Speaking of search engines, 80% of the search traffic is from Google, 15% from Yahoo and the remaining 5% divided up among others like AOL and MSN.

Again, this is only after a couple of days.  After a few weeks, months and years I’ll have a much better set of data on the readership.  After the March primary election I’ll do a new post on this topic.