All three members of the city’s chief fiscal body, the Board of Estimate & Apportionment, are currently campaigning for public office. Comptroller Darlene Green and Mayor Francis G. Slay are up for re-election, and aldermanic President Lewis Reed has filed against Slay in the mayoral primary. As such, all are competing for attention and, ultimately, votes.
Just as their campaigns were being officially announced, a political football was put in place for any and all candidates – namely, the struggle over minority inclusion in the $158 million tax increment financing (TIF) deal for the CORTEX development. Each of these elected officials has a bully pulpit and substantial power to approve, or obstruct, development in the city. Any one of them could have seized CORTEX as a campaign issue and either pushed for minority inclusion guarantees, or argued for their limited importance relative to pushing for a major development in the city that will make the city more competitive in the life sciences.
Only one of these elected officials seized the political opportunity and showed leadership on this issue: Mayor Slay. And he stood up, not for the developers, but for the minority inclusion advocates.
Last week Slay issued Executive Order No. 46, which expands the city’s workforce diversity program (previously established by a 2009 ordinance) to cover TIF projects in the city valued at $1 million or more. The workforce goals are for 25 percent of labor hours to be performed by minorities, 5 percent of labor hours to be performed by women, 20 percent of labor hours to be performed by city residents, and 15 percent of all hours to be performed by apprentices enrolled in an approved training program.
Slay sent his enforcer, chief of staff Jeff Rainford, to state his position emphatically at the public hearing regarding the CORTEX TIF. Slay himself, in an interview with The American, adopted an aggressive tone that we find familiar, though it is profoundly refreshing to see it adopted in favor of something very important to us and our community. “Up front, this is a condition for us to provide tax increment financing,” Slay said. “If you don’t want to meet these goals, then we don’t have to provide you with the TIF you’re seeking.”
This is a new position for this mayor. Such a move directly addressing African-American concerns is more characteristic of former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley or Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino than Slay during his entire 12-year tenure as mayor of a city that in that time has gone from majority-black to plurality-black.
Goals are only goals, of course, though that is all the mayor is empowered to set forth – and a new disparity study conduced by NERA Economic Consulting for the Missouri Department of Transportation found that diversity goals do in fact produce diversity results. Also, goals are no stronger than compliance efforts to enforce them. This new diversity program will be implemented by the St. Louis Development Corporation and the St. Louis Area Agency on Training, two agencies under mayoral control that have not been known for showing spine toward developers in the past. However, the blunt, non-nonsense tone that Slay has adopted is encouraging for those of us who wish to see these goals monitored and enforced to the full extent of the law.
While we understand why Slay would take this stance in the context of his current re-election campaign, we are at a loss to understand why the African Americans on the Board of E & A – and, especially, Slay’s opponent, Lewis Reed – would stand idly by and yield this opportunity for leadership to the mayor. If Reed wants to compete seriously against Slay in the mayoral primary, he needs to wake up now and show more assertive leadership on issues that impact the African-American community. We also wonder when County Executive Charlie A. Dooley, the African American chief executive of St. Louis County, follows Slay’s leadership and sets similar diversity goals for projects in the county that enjoy any form of public subsidy.
