When Mayor Francis G. Slay delivers his State of the City address on Friday, we will likely hear a “renewed commitment” to developing Downtown and other neighborhoods, including North St. Louis, where recent investment is sure to bear fruit in new development plans that will need support in the African-American community.
We also expect to hear the mayor repeat and perhaps expand upon hints he made in his inaugural speech, when Slay voiced support for charter reform, local control of the police department and the City joining the County as its 92nd municipality.
These efforts have been fruitless in the past and will require a style and caliber of leadership that Slay has not shown in his first two terms, but we share the mayor’s stated opinion that there are needed changes in how the City and its police department are administered and organized.
We also sense a needed change in our leadership that has nothing to do with the mayor.
As advocates of charter reform recognize, St. Louis has a weak mayoral system. Not only is power dispersed across an unwieldy number of 28 aldermen, but the mayor also is only one of three equal votes on the Board of Estimate & Apportionment, the City’s chief fiscal body.
Irene J. Smith and others have charged that Slay manipulates this weak system to exaggerate the amount of power he wields, but he does this only to the extent that other elected officials allow him to do so. It is time for the other two votes on the Board of E&A – Aldermanic President Lewis Reed and Comptroller Darlene Green – to tell the citizens of St. Louis and the business community the plans they have for leading this city.
Irene J. Smith has called for Reed to announce the citywide legislative agenda he promised when he worked for her support in North City, but Reed remains an untested leader who has not established the requisite support he needs on the Board of Aldermen to counter Slay, even if he had the will to do so.
It is becoming increasingly clear that if St. Louis has any hope for a political force to balance and influence Slay, that hope lies in Darlene Green.
After being handed a decisive defeat in every majority-black ward, Slay was reelected to a third term with a mandate anchored in the South Side of the city. Green, however, was elected to an historic fourth term with no opponent, and as such she received more votes than Slay. She knows best whether her lack of a South Side challenger was related to the fact that she never endorsed any of the mayor’s opponents. She also knows how much her quiet, but unsuccessful, pursuit of a prominent federal appointment explains her relative silence about Slay’s leadership throughout the presidential and mayoral campaigns.
It is clear, however, that Green is here to stay. She has repeatedly been handed a mandate to lead the city. She enjoys overwhelming support in the African-American community, and her prudent fiscal policies and avoidance of scandal or impropriety have garnered her a degree of citywide support that is rare for a black elected official in St. Louis.
On Friday, Mayor Slay will deliver his State of the City address, but very few people north of Delmar Boulevard will listen with any degree of hope or trust. Those of us who have found the mayor’s door closed and his leadership divisive yearn for a well-seasoned Comptroller Green – acting in the tradition of previous activist comptrollers – to formulate her vision of where this city is and where it needs to go.
Green has fought hard to preserve the current form of City government, with the strong powers it accords to her office. It is time she made more of those charter-granted powers in service to her community.