“Unbelievable.”
That single word is how one business leader reacted after Tuesday’s Board of Aldermen meeting wrapped up without any deal to spend even a part of the $294 million St. Louis has available from its settlement with the Rams football team.
“Unbelievable” feels like a remarkably apt way to describe the entire saga, especially its chaotic ending in recent days.
It’s unbelievable that the board couldn’t reach any deal after gathering input from the public for more than a year, after multiple marathon committee hearings, after reaching a compromise to bridge the gap between two competing visions.
The road to an agreement on how to spend the Rams money was always likely to be contentious. Nearly $300 million is a huge sum of money no matter how you slice it, but it pales in comparison to the magnitude of St. Louis’ challenges.
“Our city has great needs. We have billions and billions of dollars of need. And this is a few hundred million. This is not even a year’s worth of our annual revenue,” said Ward 3 Alderman Shane Cohn during Tuesday’s full board discussion of the legislation.
The failure to reach an agreement is not all in vain, though.
The money doesn’t disappear, and board members get another bite at the proverbial apple after they return from their break for spring elections in April or even sooner. Board of Aldermen President Megan Green has indicated in a newsletter she pens as a candidate that she could call special meetings during the break.
The situation after elections could be quite different based on whom residents choose to represent them in voting for mayor, city comptroller and odd-numbered wards.
Here are some of the winners and losers from this most recent episode.
Loser: Communication and collaboration
The legislative process got off to a particularly rocky start when members Pamela Boyd, Laura Keys, Cara Spencer and Tom Oldenberg announced a bill that would dedicate the majority of Rams money to downtown, north and southeast St. Louis neighborhoods. The legislation had the backing of the booster group Greater St. Louis Inc., which had lobbied for money to go downtown.
The issue wasn’t so much with the presence of this proposal but how it was introduced: an impromptu press conference in the board of aldermen chambers that caught many in city hall by surprise, including those in the mayor's office.
It also drew a pointed rebuke from Green, who accused GSL of attempting to circumvent the public input process by having a piece of legislation that included many of their priorities filed before the last committee of the whole hearing was held.
The trend of communication breakdowns continued throughout the rest of the process. Ward 7 Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier punctuated this on Tuesday when sharing her reaction to members pushing language for the bill she sponsored that stripped out everything except $40 million for water infrastructure.
“I was blindsided by the floor substitute on Friday,” Sonnier said. “I was not a part of those conversations, but there were colleagues from across the city that were and seemed to have that consensus around that item.”
Loser: Consensus and compromise
This was trending toward being a win, especially after Sonnier and Boyd agreed to merge their priorities into a single piece of legislation.
“The best part of this entire process was actually working with Alderwoman Boyd. It really was,” Sonnier said. “It was so refreshing to be able to have genuine conversations with her and put a lot of things aside and figure out a pathway forward based off a genuine love and connection for our city.”
And Boyd commended Sonnier for extending an “olive branch” and working to honor her priorities.
“[Sonnier] has shown that it can work in government for us to collaborate together. To look at how we can come to a compromise and how we can make sure both sides win,” Boyd said.
So what happened? The consolidated bill went before the Housing, Urban Development and Zoning Committee, where the board passed multiple amendments. Those changes included ones pushed by Green that reallocated money earmarked for downtown to affordable housing development, neighborhood development and the endowment fund to pilot child care subsidies for city workers.
That crossed a line for Boyd.
“We should have stayed with the [original] compromise,” she said before the full board. “Being a senior legislator and the chair of the Black Caucus, that was disrespectful to me.”
When it became clear a full spending bill didn’t have enough support to pass, some members of the board sought to salvage a semblance of consensus and compromise by focusing on something that appeared to have board support: $40 million for water infrastructure.
Ward 1 Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer said she was reacting to a common theme.
“When I started to ask [my colleagues], ‘What are the parts of this bill that you like?’ they would say, ‘Water and downtown,’ ‘Water and north side,’ ‘Water and mobility,’ ‘Water and housing,’” she said.
However, Ward 12 Alderwoman Sharon Tyus said the only reason for the agreement on funding water infrastructure was because it came coupled with support for other priorities, like disinvested neighborhoods in north and southeast St. Louis.
“The reason why we agreed on it was not because water was the most important it was because it was going to be a package,” she said. “When you start taking stuff out [of] the package, I no longer agree with it.”
Loser: Public input
Had a bill, any bill, actually been passed, the public input collected would have been a big win. Tens of thousands of residents shared their thoughts through the online survey and ideas portal, and many dozens of people made time to share their spoken or written public comments on either spending proposal.
On multiple occasions, board President Green referenced the people who participated in some way in the public input process. She’d say how that feedback highlighted the public’s strong desire for subsidizing child care costs and helped to guide the proposal drafted by Sonnier and backed by Green and Mayor Tishaura Jones.
“Other cities that have tried this kind of public engagement … had 3,000 to 4,000 people that decided to get involved,” Green said during one committee hearing. “The fact that we have had 16,000 and growing … is pretty amazing.”
But it’s hard to chalk it up as a win when nothing material came from it.
Loser: Megan Green
Since Tuesday, Green has cast the failure to reach consensus, as something “that happens sometimes,” in a newsletter she pens as a political candidate. She wrote that progress isn’t always linear “because a healthy democratic process encourages open communication.”
But there have been suggestions that her reputation would suffer from her handling of this saga. After Boyd, Keys, Spencer and Oldenberg filed the bill proposing to allocate nearly $100 million of the Rams money downtown (a priority of Greater St. Louis Inc.), Green penned a pointed letter to Jason Hall, then CEO of the business booster organization.
Its closing line insinuated he had not behaved like a leader, but later in the process, some of the board members questioned Green’s leadership after she abruptly sent a full board meeting into recess.
“Apparently [she] doesn’t feel she can win so she’s closing the meeting,” Ward 5 Alderman Joseph Vollmer said directly afterward. “The president of the board is supposed to be a leader, is supposed to work with us, not treat us like we’re subjects.”
Green said her move was meant to maintain order and decorum in the chamber. She also accused Vollmer of being “visibly drunk” without evidence during one of the full board meetings, which she later apologized for.
Later, after no bill passed, other board members suggested the decision to scuttle debate helped ensure nothing would.
Loser: Funding destinations
These are the real losers. Places like north St. Louis and downtown that have needed some tangible investment and dedicated resources to spark a turnaround. Things like water infrastructure, which has hundreds of millions of dollars of needed improvements. Streets and sidewalks, affordable housing development, the list goes on.
The reality of no action to allocate money means these needs will continue not to be met.
Winner: Alisha Sonnier
It’s hard to say that anyone really won since no agreement was reached, but Sonnier came the closest. The junior legislator chaired the committee of the whole process to gather public input and crafted the Transform STL Act from it.
For all the chaos that surrounded the legislative process, Sonnier remained consistent when talking about her goals and vision for the Rams money.
“This bill is not against anybody. This bill is for the people,” she said when her bill was first introduced. “We do not have to choose between this issue or that issue, and to do so is poor leadership.”
It went beyond talk. Sonnier worked with her senior counterpart, Boyd, to craft a compromise between their two bills.
“We all have much more in common than we have apart; most of our visions are much more aligned,” she said when the consolidated bill was revealed. “We may have disagreements on exactly how to get there, but most of us agree that we want to land at a place where St. Louis can truly thrive.”
Maybe had things played out differently, the board would be sending her legislation to the mayor to be signed into law. At least Sonnier thinks so.
“I know that at one point [it] did have more than the needed votes to pass,” she said after Friday’s board meeting was cut short.
After members didn’t reach an agreement, Sonnier expressed the importance of not pushing something that doesn’t have the support among her colleagues to pass and instead engage in more discussion to reach consensus.
“Do I have to be the one who leads it? No,” she said after Tuesday’s meeting when things fell apart. “I would work to support whoever is best to build the consensus amongst us. I think at one point I had done a good job and built a nice amount of consensus with the votes. But ultimately I’m here for doing what is best for the important needs of our city being met.”
Winner: Interest-bearing accounts
Without any deal to spend the Rams money, the cash stays in the interest-bearing account that Jones first placed it in years ago. Since then, the pot has grown from $250 million to almost $300 million, and it will continue to grow until the board figures out how to allocate it.
Unlike the most recent giant pot of money St. Louis got, the dollars from the Rams settlement don’t have any timeframe for when they need to be entirely spent. By contrast, the $500 million in American Rescue Plan Act money that St. Louis received had to be allocated by the end of last year (which it has been) and must be entirely spent by the end of 2026.
Winner: Lovers of chaos and drama
The board spent over a year trying to craft a bill to spend this money with nothing to show for it now. But, hey, at least St. Louis got some free entertainment.
