The outgoing, 28-member Board of Aldermen will hold its final session on Monday, and the new 14-person Board of Aldermen will be sworn into office the next day. In this moment, our City will witness a shift in the balance of power between the establishment’s so-called “Old Guard,” and a newly-minted people caucus. Tuesday’s inauguration will mark the beginning of a new era in St. Louis, one where Mayor Tishaura Jones, Board President Megan Green, the Board of Aldermen, and Comptroller Darlene Green,the members of the chief fiscal body of the city, are all politically aligned.
St. Louis City voters have spoken. This is their will.
While we await the new Board, here are a few EYE-Drops that you may have missed during last week’s campaign chaos:
We learned last week that the well-seasoned cast of Nine PBS’ Donnybrook apparently lives in a parallel universe, where winning 9 out of 14 aldermanic seats doesn’t translate to the same “progressive wave” that the rest of us saw. Perhaps the episode served more as a reminder of how much some of the long-serving members have been out-of-touch with the political realities in the city. Case-in-point: in the last nine months, Ray Hartmann has backed unpopular candidates, including police lobbyist Jane Dueker and outgoing Alderwoman Tina Pihl, who both lost overwhelmingly and by the same margin (63-36). Wendy Wiese and Bill McClellan are candid enough to acknowledge their conservative leanings, but even they know their political opinions are more reflective of deep South County than the St. Louis City residents who actually voted for the new Board.
Donnybrook lost us last week when the cast suggested that Election Day was everything else but a win for the younger generation of alderpersons. Rather, the EYE sees a group of eight community advocates (nine, including the Board President) who were elected on similarly-aligned campaign platforms and who are poised to pass monumental legislation on tenants’ rights, economic development, policy and public safety. Even the Board’s longest-serving member, cranky, difficult Alderwoman Sharon Tyus (Ward 12), is going to have to reconsider her relationships on the Board if she wants to pass any meaningful bills that benefit her constituents in the next two years. We will see if she’ll start to return anyone’s phone calls.
We also want to give a special thumbs up to our colleague, Alvin Reid, who held the Ethical Society of Police president Donnell Walters accountable for his false claims that ESOP “never” supported the return of local control of police to the city. Walters tried to gaslight Reid, but Reid held his ground to call out the lie. For the record, you were 100% correct, Alvin!
Freshman KSDK political editor Mark Maxwell wasted no time after last week’s election interviewing some of the new alderpersons-elect in what turned out to be a series of uncomfortable, deflated “gotchas” in his weekly segment, “The Record.”
Maxwell started his misreading of the situation on new alderperson Alisha Sonnier (Ward 7), who flawlessly handled the interviewer’s awkward queries. His very first question demanded to know what Sonnier had “exchanged” for the support of Mayor Tishaura Jones and Board President Megan Green, followed by a naive follow-up on whether the police department should get a raise alongside city employees. Of course, SLMPD employees just received a record-high raise through the negotiations of a new collective bargaining agreement, so the question came across as uninformed. The whole interview was one loaded question after another, but Sonnier responded in a calm, confident factual tone.
Maxwell received pushback for the sexist energy of his interview, but predictably doubled down on social media and claimed that words were put into his mouth and twisted. In a textbook demonstration of the metaphor, “throwing a rock then hiding your hand,” Maxwell feigned ignorance and suggested that he had held outgoing Alderman Jack Coatar “accountable” for his relationship with former board president Lewis Reed. We must have missed that one.
Maxwell’s interviews, especially of women political officials, seem to follow an unfortunate pattern that holds them to a different standard than their male counterparts. Unless there’s an attached federal investigation, some of the aldermen of the Board have gotten away with being affiliated with organized crime and mob bosses without any mention in the press. For more than a decade, Reed was closely tied to controversial developer Paul McKee and Rex Sinquefield, but local media barely made a peep. One of Reed’s biggest supporters, the Carpenters Union, has been embattled with its own federal criminal investigation involving significant mishandling of funds. Yet we don’t recall seeing Reed asked about his ties to former union president Al Bond or other Carpenters leadership members as they lined Reed’s campaign coffers.
It appears that mostly women in elected office are criticized for suspect relationships.
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In practicing what we preach, we also recognize incumbent Alderpersons Cara Spencer (Ward 8) and Tom Oldenburg (Ward 2), who will both return to the Board with looming conflicts of interest that likely won’t be ignored this upcoming legislative session.
Both Spencer and Oldenburg currently hold full-time jobs as vice presidents for community development at two local banks: St. Louis Bank and U.S. Bank, respectively. Both banks are heavily involved with local development projects and they make a lot of money through these transactions. There is no way that Spencer and Oldenburg can avoid a glaring conflict of interest between their bank employers and their elected positions as they navigate expected new rules and, likely, a new ethical code of conduct. As we all know, there are a thousand ways banks gain favored treatment.
So long as Spencer and Oldenburg hold their banking jobs, they will have to walk a tightrope that their voters did not elect them to have. Voters across the city overwhelmingly support alderpersons dedicating themselves full-time to their elected position, and Spencer and Oldenburg as employees of banks that do business with the city are out of alignment with voters’ expectations of them.
We would love to see the new Board pass a rule requiring full-time service of the alderpersons. Part-time jobs and owning a business are okay, but working for banks that receive massive development deals influenced by the Board of Aldermen should be an uncrossable line.
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Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner must be feeling the pressure as her next court appearance gets closer and she’s seeing some competition start to step forward into the race for circuit attorney. Last month, part-time Attorney General and full-time attention-chaser Andrew Bailey filed a lawsuit in St. Louis City seeking to remove Gardner from office.
Criminal defense attorney David Mueller announced via the Riverfront Times on Monday that he is throwing his metaphorical hat into the ring to challenge Gardner. The St. Louis native leaned into some of the right-wing, inaccurate talking points that we’ve heard from some of the Donnybrook cast. Yet we can’t ignore his position on the death penalty: abolish it. Contrasted to Gardner’s reckless approach to capital punishment, including pushing off some of those cases to the feds, Mueller seems to present a platform that is left of some of Gardner’s. Mueller told the Post-Dispatch that he also supports ending cash bail, a practice that we’ve seen Gardner’s office abuse over and over.
On the subject of circuit attorney candidates, Gardner’s most recent opponent, Mary Pat Carl, is now a candidate for a judgeship in the Twenty-Second Judicial Circuit. Alongside several sitting associate circuit judges and former state legislator Mike Colona, Carl is seeking a lifetime appointment that will be decided by a panel that includes Dr. Eva Fraser (mother of State Senator Steve Roberts, Jr.) and Husch Blackwell attorney J. Brent Dulle (formerly of the City Counselor’s Office). Pursuant to the Missouri Plan – which disenfranchises city voters – the judicial selection committee interviews candidates wanting to become judges and this committee then undemocratically recommends three candidates to the Governor’s office. Ultimately, Republican Gov. Mike Parson will make a selection, and city residents will be stuck with the lifetime appointment of a judge that most other Missouri counties otherwise get to elect.
Several seats on the judicial selection commission will expire this year and will be up for reappointment. And when the person, who ultimately decides who in St. Louis City gets incredible amounts of power, again is Mike Parson, every commission seat, every board seat, and every elected office matters.
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Finally, we can’t leave you without an update on Post-Dispatch editorial page editor Todd Robberson. Where we last left things, we had demanded an answer for Robberson’s personal involvement in the racist targeting and harassment of the first Black superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. Robberson, who doesn’t live in either St. Louis nor Lexington, directs a “student newspaper” that is alumni-funded and unaffiliated with VMI. Under Robberson’s leadership, the newspaper has spread misinformation, purportedly on behalf of the student body, about diversity programs on campus that support Black and Brown students and women students. Nothing seems to have changed since our January column.
A few Sundays ago, the Robberson-led Post editorial board published an editorial in the Post-Dispatch, that sniffed around “culture war” issues and “cancel culture” on college campuses. The entire column reeked of MAGA dog whistles and further underscored how disconnected from St. Louis Robberson actually is. The survey that Robberson cites in his opinion piece sampled only 1,500 college students (out of about 7.6 million, or about 0.002%), and the overwhelming majority were white, private school enrollees. The column suggested that nearly 60% of students on college campuses feel “reluctant to offer their own perspectives on issues such as sexual orientation, race and gender identity.”
Context missing from the editorials lamentations: more than 50% of college students have reported feeling unsafe or uncomfortable due to a person exercising their “free speech” to comment on their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Tangentially, 51% of Black college students felt like the First Amendment actually protected them. The majority of Black students favor campus policies that prohibit racial slurs on campus.
See – we can cite statistics, too, Todd.
For years, right-wingers like Robberson would demean folks that they called “liberal snowflakes,” or social justice advocates who simply demanded equal treatment of persons of all backgrounds, demographics, and life experiences. Now, this same faction without irony bemoans what they see as “oppression” of their college-aged children, who they claim cannot comfortably share their hate-filled viewpoints on race, gender, or sexual orientation without being mocked. In a world where everyone has a camera and a social media account, conservative and Republican students are afraid to publicly eschew their unpopular political platforms and stand on their values.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from the harmful consequences of that free speech.