City aldermen need to be held accountable

There is a collection of over 30,000 signatures of persons who are tired of business as usual with the St. Louis Board of Alderman.

I am speaking from my own experience and other members of North City. What do they do besides run for office? Most of them are not accessible to their constituents. How can they get dressed to go to work and ride past all the vacant uncut lots? Where do they list their accomplishments? What are they doing? Our neighborhoods reflect poor leadership.  I am from the era of Paula Carter and Fred Weathers who were respected and feared.  

We can’t get our trash emptied and abandoned cars moved.  We are unaware of programs to improve our neighborhood. Our aldermen need report cards and if you can’t see any improvement in where you live then they need to be held accountable and replaced.  Our decay can be traced to poor leadership and self-serving individuals who bring nothing to our community. 

My hope is that we will take time to investigate the effort of accountability of the persons we have elected to represent us.  There are good people who want to walk to the grocery store but are afraid because our community looks like war zones so they infiltrate and we are behind the steel bars.  This is no longer acceptable and we will die from lack of leadership.   We need leadership to make a commitment not at election time but always have our interest at heart.  We did not elect them to give them jobs but rather to represent our interests. We don’t need to see them fighting each other, and we have no new business in our area and our children are not safe walking past so many vacant buildings. We need to demand more to improve our neighborhoods.

Patricia Miller

18th ward