Politics was not part of 8th Ward Alderwoman Cara Spencer’s plan in school.
She majored in math at Truman State University and got a job working for big businesses doing mathematical modeling.
“I've never taken a political science class in my life, not in high school, not in college, and it really wasn't on my radar, “ she said of running for office.
That changed in 2015. Spencer had purchased a home in southeast St. Louis, an area of the city that she said was “up-and-coming but really had a lot of challenges. And so I decided to get involved in driving the solutions.”
Spencer beat a longtime city politician in her first race. She’s now got her sights on unseating another incumbent – Mayor Tishaura Jones.
“Our citizens have lost faith in the government, in the system,” she said on the Politically Speaking podcast. “What I keep hearing from people as to why they are leaving [the city,] city services is at the top of their list. You can see that disregard for the importance of just doing basic city services.”
Snow and trash issues
The January storm that left side streets and alleys covered in ice more than three weeks after the snow stopped falling is top of mind for Spencer, as it is for many city residents after road conditions led to delayed garbage pickups.
Her 13-year-old son cleaned out the family refrigerator to earn something he wanted and filled trash bags with expired food.
“He brings it out to the alley, and of course our dumpsters are overflowing,” Spencer said. “So we bring it back inside, doing our part by keeping garbage in our house. The failure to have any sense of urgency on these issues that make our city livable I think is clear to anyone and everyone,” she said.
After initially giving the city a grade of B- during an appearance on Politically Speaking, Jones later admitted the city had failed to adjust its response to the storm and hired two local contractors to plow and salt side streets and alleys. Between Jan. 24 and Jan. 26, refuse crews collected nearly 350 tons of trash from dumpsters, according to a post on the city’s Facebook page.
But Spencer’s concerns go beyond trash pickup and a failure to pivot and plow side streets.
Some people don’t believe the city’s crime statistics, she said, a point that Chief Robert Tracy has sharply rebutted. There is a perception of corruption in the city’s building division and at its economic development arm, the St. Louis Development Corporation, she said.
Spencer was on the SLDC’s board in her role as chair of the aldermanic budget committee when reporting by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch revealed that some of the north St. Louis businesses that had been selected to receive grants through the American Rescue Plan Act either did not exist or were not located in the city. She stepped down in response to the revelations.
“There was absolutely no path to oversight under the current structure of SLDC,” she said.
The organization’s current chief executive officer, Neil Richardson, is also the president of the SLDC board, which Spencer said is supposed to be the oversight mechanism.
“I’d show up to vote without having adequate information that I had requested,” she said. “It felt like this was really a sham of oversight.”
It’s for that reason that Spencer wants SLDC in its current form to have nothing to do with oversight of the $290 million legal settlement over the departure of the Rams to Los Angeles.
“But [with] restructuring, it could be a viable and maybe a more flexible path for distributing some of these funds,” she said.
Spencer was a co-sponsor of one of two bills that laid out different plans for spending the cash. Her proposal focused on development in economically distressed areas, including $98 million for downtown, which is in her ward.
“Fundamentally, we were awarded these funds because of the loss of the revenue from the Rams leaving St Louis,” she said. “And importantly, the revenue source was downtown.”
The central business district, Spencer said, remains extremely challenged. Vacancy rates are high, and rental prices have not gone up in 10 years.
A second proposal set aside less for downtown and included spending on day care and workforce development for city employees.
Spencer said she understood the importance of lower-cost child care as a single working mother.
“Day care is very expensive, but I just don't know about expanding city services at this time when we're unable to adequately scrape the ice off the streets,” she said.
Chaos at the Board of Aldermen, however, scuttled both of those proposals. Aldermen on Tuesday initially appeared poised to allocate $40 million to the city’s water department and leave the rest in the bank, but eventually moved on without taking any action on the Rams funding.
That likely means legislators will have to start the process over when the new session of the Board of Aldermen begins in April.
A split with the mayor
In 2021, the first year of approval voting, which allows residents to vote for multiple candidates, Spencer endorsed Jones as a second choice for her supporters in the primary. This year, while Spencer and the mayor remain ideologically aligned on many issues, she is not encouraging people to also support Jones.
“To see a stated set of values versus an enacted set of policies and procedures and service to the community has played out very differently than I think we all anticipated,” Spencer said. “And therein lies a big difference between the two of us.”
The mayor, Spencer said, has not kept her promise on government transparency. Too many people have died at the City Justice Center, and Jones was too slow to fire Jennifer Clemens-Abdullah as corrections commissioner.
And the city’s failure to address homelessness and to respond by fencing off City Hall to stop encampments, was “reprehensible,” Spencer said.
Jones beat Spencer by 4 percentage points in April 2021, due in part to wide margins of victory in north St. Louis wards. Spencer said she’s making inroads there with meet-and-greets and door-knocking.
“Not surprisingly, the issues are the same across the board – the potholes, the trash, deep, deep, deep disappointment in the failures of city government on those issues,” she said.
Editor’s note: Mayor Tishaura Jones appeared on Politically Speaking in January. The episode with Andrew Jones was posted on Monday. An episode with Butler will air this month.
