Alderman Jack Coatar (Ward 7) has landed himself in yet another cauldron of hot water, after the St. Louis Business Journal identified the name of the corporation overseeing the redevelopment of Downtown’s Railway Exchange Building. Despite secret deals behind closed doors and going out of his way to conceal the identities of the developer and local general contractor, Coatar’s actions have once again been exposed. The alderman has sought to portray himself as a reformer since announcing his candidacy to replace disgraced former board president Lewis Reed, who resigned earlier this summer following a federal grand jury’s indictment.
Coatar is the sponsor of Board Bill 53, introduced on September 22, and his bill would award a 95% abatement of real estate property taxes for 20 years to the out-of-state multi-million dollar real estate developer. The cost to St. Louis City Public Schools has not yet been publicly disclosed, although all signs point to millions of tax dollars potentially being traded away for yet another “luxury” apartment building that likely will remain unfilled as similar developments have. If there are any community-focused developers out there who want to build in neighborhoods, consider this our call for more affordable housing across all of St. Louis!
Coatar’s proposed tax abatement bill failed to identify the New York-based developer, Carnegie Management, Inc., or the local contractor, PARIC Construction, Co., before the Business Journal released that information, but as with everything else in St. Louis politics (especially when it comes to Coatar): follow the money.
A Missouri Ethics Committee report – where all campaign finance-related spending must be disclosed – reveals that on September 21, the day before Coatar introduced the tax abatement bill for Railway Exchange, a $35,000 donation was made by PARIC Construction Co. to a political action committee called the Nexus PAC. PARIC has been tapped as local general contractor for the Railway Exchange Building project.
The Nexus PAC, on the other hand, has strong ties to the Nexus Group, a Jefferson City lobbying firm that also promotes the political agenda of Missouri billionaire Rex Sinquefield. Nexus Group itself has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Nexus PAC, but its donations pale in comparison to PARIC’s nearly $200,000 in contributions since the PAC launched in 2018. Coatar has been directly linked to other Sinquefield projects, like the failed privatization of Lambert International Airport and the unsuccessful attempt to merge St. Louis City and County.
While the alderman hasn’t yet filed his upcoming MEC campaign finance disclosures (due later this month), the alderman previously has been a direct recipient of the Nexus PAC, netting a $1,000 donation from the committee in June 2021. Coatar has also received financial contributions from some of Nexus PAC’s funding corporations.
As the November 8 Election Day gets closer, more and more of Coatar’s connections to dark money surface and raise the question, “how would Coatar’s leadership as president of the Board of Aldermen differ from the man he wants to replace?” By all accounts, Coatar has the same campaign team, the same set of campaign donors, and the same developers that supported Reed and lobbied for his favor. His political positions – a toothless stance on “women’s rights,” a patronizing perspective toward the City’s unhoused, a blind loyalty to the police – are in complete alignment with Reed’s values and actions.
The days are ticking for Coatar to show voters how he would be different in the future.
County Council devolves into chaos over hurt feelings
Other things that are ticking? Several “bombs” inside the St. Louis County Council. As some members face the potential end of their political careers, and the fear of irrelevancy, this anxiety has reportedly manifested itself as “a hard time communicating.” Councilman Mark Harder (R-District 7), who faces a tough Democratic challenger Kristine Callis, has spent much of his free time harassing his colleague, Councilwoman Lisa Clancy (D-District 5), and loudly complaining about being left out of a project no one knew he was involved with. Councilwoman Shalonda Webb (D-District 4) and Councilman Ernie Trakas (R-District 6) aren’t running this cycle, but they’re still keeping themselves occupied by fighting amongst themselves over nothing that actually serves their constituents.
And who even knows where Councilman Tim Fitch has been since he won his police pension lawsuit against St. Louis County at the end of June, enabling him to draw from those funds and netting nearly a $250,000 judgment. Of course, by winning that lawsuit, Fitch indirectly hurt Council Chairwoman Rita Heard Days, who has expected her time in elected office to accrue toward her own county pension, but that anticipated benefit was cut short when former county executive Steve Stenger fired her from the County’s Board of Elections. Fitch’s lawsuit defined which county employees could earn county pensions: full-time, merit positions, and not part-time, elected offices. Despite winning her hotly-contested August primary, Days has seemingly fallen into her own spiral – perhaps reacting to the consequences of Fitch’s suit – by picking her own silly fights with St. Louis County Executive Sam Page over some road construction, and with St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones over federal transportation funding. Without her reliable group of Republican council members (Fitch and Harder), Days may be a wolf without a pack in the upcoming council session.
“County lawmakers may say this internal conflict is about communication, but that has been part of the story,” a source close to the County Council told the EYE. “Their petty gripes have only to do with their own self-serving interests and elections. St Louisans are the ones who lose out.”
Downtown start-up funds local racist website
A downtown tech start-up has made national headlines for its longtime enablement of a far-right fake news website. LockerDome, which is headquartered in a converted Washington Avenue garment factory, was the subject of a recent investigation by Gateway Journalism Review reporter Paul Wagman, who researched and analyzed the advertising platform’s multi-million dollar relationship with The Gateway Pundit, a website that promotes racist propaganda and conspiracy theories. In 2021, another GJR exposé found that LockerDome (rebranded as “Decide Technologies”) had financed at least several other far-right websites. By creating a revenue stream for hate speech, LockerDome has both enabled and profited from deadly conspiracy theories such as the “Great Replacement theory” (the false belief that white Anglo-Saxon persons are being replaced with a racially- and ethnically-mixed society) and that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
Only a few miles away, Central West End resident Jim Hoft runs the disinformation website, rising to prominence during the Trump presidency by amassing millions of webpage views and generating revenue for its advertisers. The website operates through Hoft’s LLC, TGP Communications, which was registered with the Missouri Secretary of State at Hoft’s former Southwest Gardens home. With massive amounts of funding and assistance from hate speech enablers LockerDome, Hoft has leveraged his national platform to unfairly target St. Louis’ Black elected leaders, like Mayor Jones and U.S. Rep. Cori Bush. In its earlier days, The Gateway Pundit falsely claimed that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and Hoft himself has been involved with promoting the “Big Lie” – that Trump won the 2020 election. Hoft was banned from Twitter as a result. He’s also written several articles for The Gateway Pundit promoting outright falsehoods related to the “Big Lie,” from voting software “glitches” to accusing Georgia Secretary of State of having a fake brother who worked for a “Chinese tech firm.” Most recently, Hoft has attempted to sue Mayor Jones and civil rights activist Umar Lee for rightfully calling Hoft’s June 2020 rally a meeting of “the local St. Louis KKK chapter” and referring to Hoft’s supporters as “white Christian nationalists.”
If you haven’t picked up on this yet: these are not good people.
Without platforms like LockerDome, disinformation sites like Hoft’s would go out of business. After all, the company has carved out for itself a hefty $32 million share in the digital publishing market. The Gateway Pundit and Hoft have been de-platformed from most of their revenue-generating websites, but until platforms like LockerDome sever ties completely, hate groups will continue to profit from racism and promoting white supremacy. While some believe that LockerDome ended its business relationship with the Gateway Pundit earlier this year, there are suspicions the two businesses now use an intermediary to further cloud their connection.