Greendale is home to about 700 people in north St. Louis County. The primarily residential community features stately brick houses along seven well-maintained streets. It contracts with nearby Normandy for police service. Its big-ticket expenditures include cleaning streets and trimming trees.
It is one of the tiny St. Louis County municipalities that have been subjects of conversation – and contention – regarding regional governance. With 90 municipalities, St. Louis County has the most incorporated cities, towns and villages in the state.
Some see this as a positive, giving residents more access and clout to change things in their communities. But others recommend consolidation, contending that the current state of affairs is inefficient and fragmented.
Better Together, an organization studying the possibility of ending the “Great Divorce” between St. Louis County and St. Louis, recently observed that some St. Louis County municipalities haven’t issued bonds to undertake critical public works projects.
“Fragmentation really is a problem in terms of governance,” said Jim Buford, the former head of St. Louis’ Urban League and a board member of Better Together.
But efforts to merge municipalities have failed dramatically in the past. And similar efforts are likely to run into opposition today – including from officials like Greendale Mayor Monica Huddleston.
“Why should we change just because someone outside of here thinks that there are too many municipalities? What’s the benefit to our quality of life to merge with some larger entity?” Huddleston said.
During a St. Louis University symposium on the city-county merger, Buford detailed a Better Together report showing that 49 cities in St. Louis County had no debt. While he says that might seem like a good thing, Buford says smaller cities aren’t issuing bonds to provide critical public services like police protection or street repair.
Emphasizing that that people within the towns would make the decision themselves, Buford said, “If these municipalities were to come together, they could create the size, the ability to create the debt, the ability to service their people better, better governance, better security, the whole bit.”
Huddleston said that Greendale hadn’t issued any bonds until after she became mayor in 2003. The city eventually passed a capital improvement tax to pay off the debt, but she emphasized that bonding is “not a concept that is comfortable with everyone or well-known enough by some of the smaller municipalities.”
“Unfortunately in the St. Louis area, with our history here, it is racial to a great extent and it is class to a certain extent. There’s always been this battle of perceptions with regard to ‘if it’s black and if it’s north, it’s got to be worse.’ And it’s not just not true,” Huddleston said.
“You can drive around any of our municipalities. You can hang out in any of our municipalities and see that it’s not true. The problems are just not magnified like that. They’re magnified in the eyes of those who have preconceived notions with regard to race and with regard to class in a lot of cases.”
Since Beyond Housing formed 24:1 to tackle problems within the Normandy School District, cooperation has increased among the 24 municipalities that make up that school district.
“We support each other. We share services. We contract with each other for services. We bid on contracts together so we can save money for our taxpayers,” said Huddleston. “We’re not merging. But we’re doing wonderful things together.”
Reprinted with permission from news.stlpublicradio.org.
