ST. LOUIS — When Cincinnati officials heard they would get close to $300 million from Washington to help their city come back from the pandemic, they wasted no time preparing relief.
The mayor sent a plan to the Cincinnati City Council in short order, and after a few weeks of negotiation and compromise, the city had $134 million out the door to revive the arts, rejuvenate local restaurants and fill a big hole in the city budget.
“It all just came together,” said Councilman David Mann, who heads the budget committee. “And thank goodness, because there’s so much need.”
It’s been a different story in St. Louis. While leaders in other heartland cities that have struggled in recent decades have come together to seize a historic chance at reinvigoration, top officials here are locked in a stalemate with no end in sight.
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After months of discussion and debate, a $168 million spending plan won preliminary approval from the Board of Aldermen, on a 27-1 vote on July 13. But it failed to advance at the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, the city’s top fiscal body, three days later. Neither Mayor Tishaura O. Jones nor Comptroller Darlene Green would second Aldermanic President Lewis Reed’s motion to consider the aldermanic plan.
Chris Prener, a sociologist at St. Louis University, said when he joined Jones’ Stimulus Advisory Board, he was hopeful that the opportunity presented by the aid would transcend politics.
“I’ve been disheartened to see the politics are the same even though the opportunity is different,” he said.
Other cities step up
The $350 billion in aid for state, local and tribal governments in the American Rescue Plan is indeed a different kind of opportunity.
It channels more than twice the amount of federal dollars to local communities than last year’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. And it comes with fewer strings attached than the CARES Act, so it can fill holes in city budgets and address economic issues where previous money couldn’t. It also favors cities that need more help than others.
Rather than allocating money by population, the program sends more to cities with higher poverty, older housing stock and lagging population growth, including older industrial cities like Cincinnati, Detroit, Pittsburgh — and St. Louis.
“This is an opportunity for cities to get back on their feet,” said Dan Ponder, a political science professor at Drury University, “especially those that were struggling before the pandemic.”
Many of the cities favored by the formula already have seized that opportunity.
Less than two weeks after President Joe Biden signed the aid package, Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley was appearing in public announcing proposals for his city’s haul, and city council members weren’t far behind debating their own.
There were disagreements, said Mann, the budget chairman. Some on the council wanted more money for small business and nonprofits. Others voiced concern that the process was moving too quickly.
But by the end of May, the nine-member council had passed two wide-ranging packages putting money toward social services, public health, affordable housing and economic development
“We just worked real hard for a few weeks, and we worked to give everyone a little something in the end,” Mann said.
Around the same time, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan introduced a plan for the city’s $830 million haul, with about half the money going toward reversing pandemic losses and the rest going to programs like job training, home repair grants and business support.
The administration spent the next month holding community forums and hearing from a working group of Detroit City Council members. Revisions followed, including a boost to funding for Black-owned businesses, and on June 29, the council passed the plan 6-2.
Leaders in Pittsburgh had unveiled their own plan a day earlier, the product of a task force composed of the mayor’s staff, budget officials and a third of the nine-member Pittsburgh City Council.
The task force was the council’s creation, but mayoral spokesperson Molly Onufer said her boss was happy to take part. “Everything has to go through council anyway, so it was important for us to work with them,” she said.
A month later, the council voted 8-1 to allocate $335 million to do things like save city jobs, bolster a home ownership program and help integrate social services into policing.
Late start here
The process was a little different in St. Louis.
A city election had to be decided before work could begin in earnest on spending the new federal aid. Jones won the general election on April 6 and was sworn in two weeks later. Three days after taking office, she announced a 25-member advisory group, which included local activists, nonprofit leaders, academics and lobbyists. Two spots were given to members of the Board of Aldermen: Jones’ ally Megan Green, 15th Ward, and Reed, who immediately declined to participate.
The advisory board held several public meetings, helping craft a plan that Jones submitted to the Board of Aldermen on June 15, more than 50 days after she announced the formation of the board. She held a City Hall news conference to announce the plan, urging aldermen to pass it by July 1, suggesting any delay would reflect “a desire to score political points.” But Reed dismissed the mayor’s target out of hand, saying aldermen needed time to hold their own hearings and debate.
Part of the urgency driving Jones’ demand for speedy passage seemed to ease when the federal government extended the moratorium on evictions until July 31. On June 30, before the aldermen had taken up the mayor’s proposal, the estimate board voted 2-1 to endorse her plan, over Reed’s strong objection.
Reed said aldermen needed time, pointing out the mayor waited to present her plan until her advisory board had completed its work. “We are moving as swiftly as we can,” he said. After Jones declared that further public hearings on the plan were unnecessary, Reed told her she couldn’t “do the job of the Board of Aldermen.” Jones snapped back, “You can’t do the job of the mayor either, honey.”
Two weeks later, it was a similar story.
On July 13, in a marathon, 12-hour session, aldermen approved their $168 million spending plan, one that included a version of Jones’ $500 cash assistance plan and Reed’s requests to restore funding for police overtime and add an ambitious economic development plan for four blighted corridors in north St. Louis.
It’s that north side plan that’s turned into the latest roadblock. Jones, citing an opinion by the interim city counselor, said it doesn’t comply with U.S. Treasury guidelines because it doesn’t appear to be explicitly tied to providing pandemic aid. She and Green have refused to take up the bill unless it is amended.
The back-and-forth sniping between Jones and Reed — who were both mayoral candidates in 2017 and this year — has continued. The day after Pittsburgh passed its plan, Reed released a letter pointing out that much of the feedback received by Jones’ advisory board came from white people with above-average incomes — the opposite of the long-suffering, largely Black north side. A spokesman for Jones said she has proposed a number of programs that would benefit the north side, where she grew up and still lives.
Terry Jones, a political scientist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said the stalemate is not entirely surprising.
Unlike Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Detroit, St. Louis elected a new mayor who defeated her new governing partner in the process. The city also has in the estimate board a unique check on the power of the mayor and the aldermen that can create challenges not present in a traditional strong-mayor system.
And, Jones said, it’s not uncommon to see a power struggle at the beginning of any administration.
“It’s not necessarily the subject matter, it’s a testing of who’s going to be calling the shots for the next four years,” he said. “It’s kind of a classic separation of powers, check and balances situation.”
But the professor also said that the checks and balances are designed to force collaboration, and there’s been no sign of that yet.
In a letter to the mayor on Wednesday, Reed included a request to call a special estimate board meeting to approve the bill as written. No such meeting has been announced.
Asked about the stalemate late last week, mayoral spokesman Nick Desideri said Reed’s refusal to consider changes “is keeping aid and $500 direct relief payments from St. Louis families.”
Reed, for his part, said Jones had lost perspective on the situation and contrasted her with former Mayor Francis Slay, who he said always managed to put personal disagreements aside when something big needed to be done.
Then Reed made clear he wouldn’t be backing down.
“We’re not changing one period or nothing in the bill.”
Originally posted Sunday at 3:30 p.m.