St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said she started thinking about reelection the day she was sworn into office in April 2021.
“I knew that the problems the city is facing are long term and cannot be fixed in just one term,” Jones said on the latest episode of the Politically Speaking podcast. “We have to make sure that we are enacting long-lasting, sustainable change, and oftentimes that takes more than four years.”
Jones points to a number of successes in her first term. Crime statistics, a key measure of success for many residents in the city, are objectively better than they were when she took over, homicides in 2024 followed a national decline, reaching their lowest level since 2013, and overall crime was down 15% year over year, though Jones acknowledged the difficulty in communicating that data to the public.
“They’ll just have to trust us,” she said. “We realize that we have a long way to go, but we are putting the things in place to make sure it's sustainable.”
The city appropriated its $500 million share of the American Rescue Plan Act funds by the deadline, though not without some last-minute maneuvering, making what Jones called historic investments in “communities that haven't been invested in in decades.”
Some of the most important accomplishments, Jones said, are those that happened behind the scenes. She oversaw an upgrade of the city’s accounting system from a mainframe that was first produced in 1988 and moved the personnel department away from entering information using typewriters and physical cards.
“These are the things that we need to do in order to make sure we can hire more drivers in an efficient manner, in a faster manner, so we can pick up your trash, so we can fill the potholes,” she said. “A lot of these things are things that we have to do right in order to do the small things correctly.”
But like former mayors John Lindsay in New York and Michael Bilandic in Chicago, winter weather may spell trouble for Jones.
More than 10 inches of snow and ice fell in St. Louis on Jan. 5 and 6, followed by a second round of snow on Jan. 10.
“If I had to give our city a grade, it would be a B-,” Jones said during the episode’s recording on Jan. 13. “We still don’t have enough drivers, and we are constantly working to hire more drivers. The other thing is, we don’t yet have smaller trucks to go down some of our smaller side streets, but once you hit the main thoroughfares, it’s smooth sailing.”
Warmer weather helped melt some of the snow on those side streets and alleys. But when bitter cold came back in, the piles of slush turned to sheets of ice that remained more than two weeks later, delaying deliveries and trash pickup across the city.
“This was an atypical storm, and we know it took us too long to move away from the typical response,” the mayor’s director of communications, Conner Kerrigan, said in a statement on Jan. 17. “While historically the City of St. Louis has not treated residential streets, I want to acknowledge that we have heard residents loud and clear that they would like to see the policy changed on how we handle this type of precipitation on residential streets going forward.”
The city later signed contracts with two local contractors to plow and salt side streets. In some cases, removing the ice required the use of front loaders. Jones’ office said it was working to change city ordinances to respond better to future storms.
Jones’ office has also come under scrutiny for the way it awarded grants to small businesses on the north side. Reporting by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found some of the businesses did not exist or were located outside of the grants’ target area. Others were owned by relatives of an alderwoman.
“These were conditional awards. No business that wasn’t in business received any money,” Jones said.
She said problems administering the north side grants should not cause people to worry about oversight of the Rams settlement money. A compromise bill that Jones endorsed sets up funds for downtown, north side neighborhoods, child care and workforce development.
Jones also defended her trips outside the city, noting that “sometimes it requires us to physically be at the table in order to be considered” for major sporting events or conventions.
The next mayor, whether Jones or her three opponents — Alderwoman Cara Spencer of the 8th Ward, Recorder of Deeds Michael Butler and utility executive Andrew Jones — are facing an uncertain financial future. The city settled a lawsuit last year over its refusal to issue refunds for remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. It set aside about $21 million to cover the cost of the refunds plus interest for the 2020, 2021 and 2022 tax years, but had to pay out more than $40 million. Numbers are not yet available for the 2023 tax year.
Jones admitted that her office had underestimated the interest in the refunds, though she did not explain what went wrong.
“We are still trying to determine” the impact on city services,” she said. “We’re going to have to take a conservative approach, and that may mean that people won’t get as large of a raise as they have in the past.”
That could complicate the city’s hiring woes, leading to more problems with things like trash pickup or snow removal.
The primary, in which the top two vote-getters will move on to the general election, is March 4. Early voting begins Feb. 18.
Editor’s note: Politically Speaking with each of the mayoral candidates will air in the coming weeks
