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Photographs by Matt Marcinkowski
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Some politicians like a good steakhouse, or St. Raymond’s for Lebanese. Some do power lunches at Clayton’s Café Napoli. Charlie Dooley goes to Goody Goody Diner.
He’s been plotting political strategy at the diner’s laminated tables since he was a 31-year-old alderman for Northwoods. As county executive, he takes his new staffers to Goody Goody for their orientation.
The choice would be perfect if it were deliberate: the happy neon, the 64-year traditions, the extra-warm welcome for regulars, the easygoing mix of races and classes… But he’s not being strategic; he just likes the place. And when Charlie Dooley likes someone or something, he’s loyal for life.
He walks under a string of cut-out Valentines and sparkly pink garland (it’s February) and grins at familiar faces—or maybe they’re strangers. He’s never drawn a line.
“You doin’ well?” he asks an older man. “How’s your sister?” he asks another. He talks longest with two police officers. “Originally, I wanted to be a police officer,” he confides after they leave. “At Clark [Elementary School], I was a patrol boy in sixth grade. I loved it.” He describes how he’d fold his badge, just so, and put it on his belt.
The waitress interrupts. “Double cheeseburger, everything, no onions,” Dooley says. “Gotta get the fruit cup. And a cherry Coke.” As a kid, he bought cherry Cokes for a dime at a drugstore on Union. “You’d spend 35 or 40 minutes just sippin’ on it,” he says.
Once he was back home, the leisure ended. As the eldest of seven, he was often put in charge of his younger siblings, and though he’d always play with them, they say he could be seriously bossy. He made friends easily, lots of them. But if honor was in question—his own or someone else’s—he yanked off his spectacles and tensed his string-bean body to fight.
A woman comes up to chat. “It’s all good,” Dooley assures her. It’s a phrase he uses about 30 times a day. He also insists—perhaps a little too strenuously—that he’s grown a thick skin, because “as county executive, you’re always upsetting somebody.”
More so, lately. In the past year, he’s taken flak for giving the wrong budget numbers, trying to raise property taxes, trying to pull funding from parks, playing favorites in hiring, and even wanting to give his staff a raise. Some media reports seemed so harsh, his wife stopped reading or watching the news.
I ask what his boldest moves have been as county executive. “Well, the boldest was the trash,” he says dryly. “Good Lord. And I-64, we had a lot of opposition with that. There was a lot of opposition with MetroLink. What am I proudest of? Same list.”
“Charlie, just a time check,” murmurs his special assistant, Julie Leicht, and when I glance in alarm at his still-untouched meal, she shrugs. “Oh, he’ll take it with him.”
As he rises, somebody else stops by the table to ask how he is.
“I’m good,” he says for the nth time, so enthusiastic there’s a little squeak in his voice. It’s not smug or self-centered, this enthusiasm. It spills over, bathing the other person. Whatever you think of the man’s policies, it’s hard not to like Charlie Dooley.
Dooley’s father, the Rev. Charlie Dooley, was the beloved pastor of Revelation Missionary Baptist Church. He lived long enough to see his firstborn son elected county executive—with a flock of nearly 1 million, a budget of roughly $500 million, and 48 percent of the jobs in the region.
The county executive sets the agenda for St. Louis County; oversees its health, roads, safety, and judicial proceedings; and determines how it interacts with the rest of the region and state. It’s a powerful position—except when it’s not. The 90 municipalities make their own decisions; Dooley is, in essence, the mayor of the 322,000 scattered residents of unincorporated St. Louis County. He controls the St. Louis County Police Department, but there are 57 smaller police departments out there (and 23 school districts, and 24 fire districts). One of Dooley’s biggest worries is the declining quality of many county schools—and he has absolutely no control over them. Another worry is revenue, because for the first time in 80 years, assessed values of county real estate have dropped. But his council thinks he’s overreacting.
I ask whether county business ever makes him glaze over, its weekly meetings a drone of zoning, budgets, contracts, and grievances. Dooley looks surprised. He loves his job. He doesn’t sink into the details; like many gregarious political leaders, he’s big-picture and relationships, not detailed analysis. He trusts his staff, gives them plenty of latitude, stays loyal to them.
Lately, that hasn’t been working so well.
In the early ’60s, shortly after the Dooleys moved to Wellston—which was nearly all white at the time—12-year-old Charlie climbed into a neighbor’s apple tree and stole an apple. Police officers showed up at his house that night and said they were taking him to the station, and his father couldn’t come along. Rev. Dooley quietly informed the officer that he had a right to be present, and after several tense hours, he prevailed.
His firm dignity made an impression on his son. Young Charlie’s first full-time job would have been at Chrysler, but after he was hired, as he reached for the doorknob to leave, the manager said casually, “By the way, when you come back, shave your goatee off.” It was the presumption that enraged him: Why not bring this up during the interview? He took a job at General Electric instead.
But his father, who’d worked 30 years at McDonnell Douglas and supervised the housekeeping department, didn’t rest until Charlie, too, went to work at McDonnell Douglas—where he stayed 30 years and supervised the micrographics department. Evenings, Charlie tried the patience of his shy wife, Sandra, and their only child, Stephanie, by taking on any civic responsibility he was asked to fulfill. He craved people—meeting them, joking with them, working on their behalf. He used to startle crowds by saying, pastor-like, “I love you, and you can’t do anything about it.”
People unimpressed by Dooley’s leadership have called him “the accidental county executive,” and he’s the first to admit that the role was thrust upon him. He’d been on the council for almost 10 years, he’d just retired from McDonnell Douglas (by then Boeing), and he wanted to do this kind of political work for the rest of his life. Then, County Executive George “Buzz” Westfall died unexpectedly of a staph meningitis infection.
“At the time Buzz passed, the council was controlled by Republicans,” Dooley says. “I was the senior Democrat. During the two weeks that Buzz was in the hospital, I signed things very ceremoniously, knowing it didn’t mean anything; we all knew Buzz was coming back.”
He didn’t. The Republicans on the council could choose any Democrat to fill his position for the year until the election. They chose Dooley.
His heart sank. He would have to give up his beloved seat on the council, and his odds of winning the permanent position were slim. He was the only African-American on the council, elected at a time when the county was 81 percent white (today, it’s 70 percent).
On the other hand, the Republicans were offering him the top job in the county, a chance to make history as the first African-American county executive, and even if it was just for a year, he couldn’t turn that down.
Two people believed, without reservation, that Dooley could win that fall election. One was Dorothy Moore, mayor of Hillsdale, who ran a little neighborhood store and wielded immense political power in North County. Candidates sought her approval the way spiritual aspirants climb mountains to see their guru—yet it was Moore who’d sought Dooley out, years earlier. “People like you,” she said, urging him forward.
The other person was John Temporiti.
Temporiti introduces himself with a sentence he uses often: “Charlie and I are best friends.”
They’ve known each other since 1999, when Dooley dared his heretical run against William “Lacy” Clay Jr. for William Clay Sr.’s congressional seat. Temporiti, a lawyer who’s always had a foot in politics, was president of UniGroup’s Mayflower Transit at the time. He agreed to help Dooley, but warned him that he’d likely lose anyway. “[He] said, ‘Winning isn’t everything all the time,’” Temporiti recalls. “And I thought, ‘Wow.’ Because to me, it is!
“I reconnected with him in January ’04, when the whole issue of him running for county executive was going to be decided,” continues Temporiti—whose own name was bandied about as a possible candidate. He remembers reading the St. Louis County Charter and realizing any Democrat could be appointed. “Holy criminy,” he thought, “this is going to be interesting.” If Dooley were appointed, he’d have to run in the November 2004 race. “You don’t want to have a Democratic incumbent who isn’t using the powers of incumbency to win election. That would be really dumb.” He told Dooley, “Anything I can bring to this, you’ve got, including I will come into your administration if we win.
“It worked very well for me,” Temporiti admits now, “because I was leaving UniGroup. But I would have done it anyway.”
Temporiti helped Dooley “coalesce the Democratic Party leadership around his incumbency.” The task proved easier than either man expected, because so many people already knew and liked Dooley. He won by a safe margin, and Temporiti went on to run Dooley’s 2006 campaign—raising far more money than Dooley needed for his landslide win—and his very different 2010 campaign, which even with the money was a tight squeak.
Temporiti has been Dooley’s staunchest ally—and his greatest liability. Because where Dooley makes people feel all warm inside, Temporiti makes them wary. He’s quick to mention his years in the seminary, but he’s Jesuitical by the word’s second definition: “practicing casuistry or equivocation; using subtle or over-subtle reasoning; crafty; sly; intriguing.” He tends to layer his many connections, pressing them against each other. People bristled when first his daughter-in-law, then his son wound up working for the county. (He says he didn’t know Dooley was going to hire them.) Reporters have questioned remarks that could have been coercive, deals that seemed a little too finely calibrated.
Temporiti is a…purposeful communicator. He numbers his points, which gives them a certain gravitas; it’s like medieval monks counting off proofs of God, or Aristotle listing species. He talks so often about Triple-A Charlie, I ask if the county’s AAA bond rating was Dooley’s doing. “It was continued under his reign, in the worst economic cycle of our lifetimes,” Temporiti announces. He describes micrographics, Dooley’s specialty at McDonnell Douglas, as “a technological process that somehow in a very minute way demonstrates the inner workings of planes” and apologizes that he doesn’t grasp all the details. Dooley says, “We filmed all the engineering drawings.”
I ask Temporiti if Dooley is really his best friend. “I have four best friends, not counting my wife,” Temporiti says. “We’ll go and get a drink: He loves apple martinis with real Pucker. I’m a Scotch guy. Or we’ll go to Goody Goody and have breakfast.” Temporiti still speaks of Dooley’s
tenure in the plural: “How did he manage that? We did several tough things in ’08, ’09, ’10, and ’11…”
“Temporiti likes to take credit for things,” notes one of the many political insiders who refused to be named in this story, “but in this case, it was deserved.” As Dooley’s chief of governmental affairs and executive vice president for development, he was, another observer says, “the guy who didn’t sleep, who knew the details, who punished the disloyal, and who caught the spears aimed at his boss.”
He also did a lot of the smoothing and strategizing that’s been missing of late.
The top job might have dropped, with a thunk, into Dooley’s lap, but there wasn’t anything accidental about the trajectory of his political career. Elected to Democratic office, Dooley was soon a delegate to the Democratic National Convention; as mayor of Northwoods, he became president of the Missouri Conference of Black Mayors, then president of the St. Louis County Municipal League.
In 1983, he became the first African-American mayor of Northwoods. In 1994, he was elected as the first African-American member of the St. Louis County Council. In 2003, he became the first African-American county executive. I ask whether he’s weary of the labeling.
“What it does is, it puts more responsibility on you,” he says. “Everything you do is measured for those who come after.” What he’s learned? “You have to be relaxed, take your time, and collaborate with people. I may be the first, but the idea is still the same: representation. So don’t take it out of perspective.” He looks up. “And understand that why you’re there—it wasn’t a mistake.”
Joe Cavato was the planning director in Westfall’s administration. “There were a lot of fairly well-connected folks saying, ‘Gee, is Charlie ready to be county executive?’” he recalls. “But through hard work and the force of his engaging personality, this guy really changed a lot of people’s minds. People who thought he didn’t have the right gravitas, he didn’t have the right manner of speaking, and by the way, he’s African-American—well, he managed to overcome all that.”
Now he’s hit a rough patch: in the media, with constituents who feel betrayed by his willingness to defund parks, with a few vocal critics on the council, and with political insiders who like him too much to let their names be used.
“I think the weakness has been that the strategy changes from time to time, in terms of how he’s going to deal with something, and it gets played out in public,” says one insider. The consensus, says another, is that he needs a core staff that doesn’t “get into a pattern of putting the boss out first. You fall on your sword for him; you don’t make him fall on his sword for you.”
Richard Callow advises Dooley’s counterpart in the city, Mayor Francis Slay, and keeps a close eye on county politics. Years ago, he says, “Charlie’s office politics rested on a three-legged stool: Temporiti, [Mike] Jones, and [Jim] Baker.” They agreed on very little, except on Charlie. That office tension was a low barrier to good ideas, but a major hurdle to bad ones.”
Temporiti still runs Dooley’s campaigns (2014 approaches), but he’s back at his old law firm—Gallop, Johnson & Neuman—so his office is no longer down the hall. Jones is Dooley’s senior policy advisor, but he’s been busy chairing the Midwest China Hub Commission (he stepped down in late March) and serving on the Missouri State Board of Education. Besides, Callow says, Jones and Baker’s replacement, chief operating officer Garry Earls, “have no real appetite to fight each other. Too much balance, not enough check.”
Others say the real problem is that Earls, a retired Air Force colonel from Rogers, Ark., brings a military sense of hierarchy to the job. He’s second in command, so he handles operations, and there’s not a lot of policy brainstorming going on. One county insider calls Earls “a very effective clerk of the works,” the guy everybody seeks out to get things done, but not a collaborator. “He’s often wrong, but never in doubt.” Another maintains that Dooley “is really not the county executive. He has basically delegated the entire role to Garry Earls.”
That’s not Earls’ take. He says Dooley’s “one of the most hands-on, real-time managers I’ve worked with in 40 years,” and department heads have ready access to him. “My job is to keep the trains running on time. Really, since we don’t operate any trains directly, my job is the coordination of the 14 departments of government.” Earls is a professional engineer, his sense of humor so dry, people seldom know if he’s joking. By the time he’s finished dealing with a messy problem, it plots neatly on a grid—and its participants often feel completely misunderstood. He couldn’t be less like Dooley, whose strength is his ability to size up, understand, and communicate with people.
So is Dooley’s rock-solid loyalty working against him? Should Earls’ influence be softened by a little more tact and savvy? “If you try to tell Charlie that,” sighs a concerned longtime ally, “he’ll just look at you and say, ‘Everything’s all right.’ That’s his way of saying, ‘Forget it.’”
After high-school graduation, Dooley announced he was enlisting in the Army. His father frowned. “You going just because Ram is going?” Ronald Samuel (“Ram”) was a tall, smart kid whom Dooley (“Scroobie”) had met right after his family moved to Wellston. Samuel was one of the only other black kids in his class, and they graduated together from Wellston High School. “Whenever he handed me his spectacles,” Samuel says, “I knew we were about to be gallant fools.”
It was about to happen again. By January 1966, Dooley was 60 miles southwest of Saigon in Vietnam, working as a company clerk.
Offended that the Army would deign an 18-year-old African-American private his company clerk, the captain, a West Point grad, greeted him with frozen silence. Dooley was soon transferred to another company, where life alternated between gunfire and heavy boredom.
“You play cards with a guy one day, and the next day he’s not there, and nobody talks about it,” he says. “You come back and feel how blessed you are, and at the same time, you recognize that people just didn’t give a damn. You come off the plane, you’d think there would be people waiting. It leaves a little emptiness in you. Your friends didn’t make it back or got hurt, and nobody says anything about it.”
Dooley came home and went to work, not college. He rose fast in politics, but colleagues say they catch glimpses of a deep insecurity, a buried fear that people don’t think he has what it takes. He doesn’t give in to that fear, though: He doesn’t abandon common sense for bureaucratic jargon or prop himself up with perks of office, and he’s never tried to dress up his past.
He does dress up, though. The day we meet at Goody Goody, a black-and-white silk tie and white silk pocket handkerchief brighten his dark suit, and his cuffs are monogrammed. I ask why he takes such care with his clothes. “Why not?” he says. “They make you feel good.”
At a ceremony honoring veterans, he catches sight of me in the hall and stomps behind me like a little kid. “You’ve got to have fun,” he says. “It’s good for the soul.”
When Charlie Dooley is comfortable, he’s entirely confident. When he’s defensive, he’s at his worst. For years, he took the inevitable complaints and criticism in stride. But this winter, the allegations strung out like flashing lights: Dooley wants to close the parks! He gave out the wrong budget figures! He manufactured a budget crisis! He’s paying his appointees too much, and they’re too incestuous!
“I think Charlie’s acting—and feeling—a little backed into a corner,” says an acquaintance. “He feels like people are ganging up on him, and he’s just trying to do what’s right,” says another. “All the affability can vanish when he feels like he has something to prove, or like he’s cornered. He’ll say something, get agitated, then nervous, then comes the bluster. It doesn’t fit him at all.”
Challenged repeatedly by Elliott Davis of Fox 2 News’ You Paid for It—how dare he eliminate low-paid parks positions, yet pay his senior policy advisor more than $146,000?—Dooley gets flustered, and his grammar slips. Taken to task by Post-Dispatch reporters, he’s so exasperated, he can’t stop talking about it.
Last November, Steve Stenger, then chairman of the County Council, answered a barbed question on the radio by saying, “I don’t think that there’s an educational background. I think Charlie graduated from high school. I don’t think he has any specialized training…” Dooley demanded an apology, saying he was outraged not for himself, but because “Mr. Stenger demeaned and insulted the people of St. Louis County—many of whom do not have a college degree.” It was a neat bit of topspin, but it was also genuine umbrage, a cloak of dignity gathered hurriedly about his neatly tailored suit coat.
Dooley’s never played hooky in his life. “Why should I? My friends were all at school!” he says. He went out for the football team freshman year, “98 pounds soaking wet.” He sang so loudly, his choir teacher once promised him a good grade if he’d just shut up.
He loves to participate. At a union Christmas party, he belted out “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” “If you invite me, I will come,” he promises county residents. His office’s anteroom is stacked with plaques and photographs that his administrative assistant, Gladys Lewis, helps him rotate, “so when somebody comes in, they see theirs.” Temporiti remembers looking madly for Dooley during his first campaign, only to find “he’s meeting with 12 people at someone’s house. I said, ‘You don’t understand: You do what I schedule.’ And he said, ‘No, you don’t understand. They asked me to come.’”
In mid-February, I walk into his office and hear him saying into the phone, “Now when’s your next meeting?” He greets me, but he’s low-key, still preoccupied. Somebody’s event is clashing with the annual prayer breakfast, which he never misses. “I’ve got a window,” he thinks aloud. “I could get there a little early, stay a few minutes, then get downtown…”
A printout of Dooley’s calendar has type the size of phone-book listings: company meetings, precaucus and bill signings, ribbon cuttings, police and fire ceremonies, parades…
Most of his constituents, though, don’t go out as much as he does. “Here’s the problem: We live and breathe this every single day. They don’t. Husbands and wives both working 10 hours a day, they come home tired, or one’s lost their job—how do you communicate to those individuals? The media don’t help you explain, ’cause the issues aren’t gossipy enough.”
When Dooley was mayor of Northwoods, a resident came to complain about the snow that plows had piled in front of his car. He found Dooley shoveling the snow that plows had piled in front of his car. Now Dooley’s gone from 0.67 square miles to 507.8, and he’s governing a regional economic powerhouse with issues far more complex than the everyday worries that consume his constituents. “A lot of times it’s parochial NIMBY,” he says, “and I’m looking for overarching benefit for the entire community.”
When I ask Dooley about the uproar over his proposed 2012 budget, he summons Earls, who stays through lunch and doesn’t budge for the rest of the interview.
“We had an operating budget of $285 million,” Dooley begins. (It’s a number that’s been contested as sleight of hand, but they reached it by subtracting the Health Fund, because the county can neither put money into that fund nor take it out.)
“If we had kept on the path we were, our budget for 2012 would have been $311 million,” Dooley continues. “So what we did was, we cut $10 million off the operating budget, and then we took $16 million from our reserve fund to balance the budget for 2012.”
Why did Dooley change the predicted shortfall from $10 million to $5 million when he talked to the Post? Earls leans forward. “When the numbers for the property taxes came in at the end of August, it was clear that we are going to be short $5 million a year,” he says. “That adds up to $10 million, because we were looking at two years of revenue. We were trying to do a budget for 2012, but we had to revise our estimate for 2011.”
Rather than try to make up the difference by dipping deeper into the reserves or by cutting back even harder across the board, Earls says, they cut from parks. Back in 2004, county residents had narrowly voted down an increased parks tax, and the county closed the funding gap. Today, the parks bring in $18.5 million and cost $26 million. Dooley and Earls decided it was time to wean them off of the additional funding.
“You would think I was going to dig up the parks and move them someplace,” Dooley exclaims. “The people before us accepted all these parks and couldn’t afford them, and now I’m stuck with them! We have 12,000 acres of parkland. Creve Coeur [Lake Memorial] Park is bigger than Forest Park.”
And beloved. They didn’t realize people would scream? “We know people want parks,” Earls says. “The difference between want and need, though, becomes an issue of concern here… Did I expect all the drama? Yes and no. Every service we do has its support structure. But clearly the parks system is not an essential service.”
Dooley looks alarmed. “Well, we’re not going to say they’re not essential.”
“Well, if those other things are essential—roads, health, safety…” Earls counters.
“But you’ve got to be careful with the wording,” Dooley urges, “because if you leave it to their imaginations, they will think the worst. They always do.”
Dooley both is and is not a collaborative leader—it depends on the issue. He’s been surprisingly open to the city joining the county. “It does make sense,” he says. “The world sees us as one.” He’s not counting on accord anytime soon, though: “I have not come up with a plan that can sell it to both as neutral and beneficial.”
He’s troubled that on the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, other counties and the city have fewer residents, yet an equal vote. “If you have X dollars, and everybody gets a portion,
does it really move your area forward? Or would you do better by doing something dramatic?” He hesitates when I ask for an example, maybe thinking of Highway 141, where he caught flak for concentrating economic-stimulus money. But the companies it’s supposed to attract have yet to be announced. “I-64,” Dooley offers instead. “The Mississippi Bridge. Doing those types of things really raises it up for everybody.”
Above all, Dooley’s worried about increasing the revenue stream. Critics on the council think he’s trying to be too conservative with the budget, warning of a crisis that doesn’t exist yet.
At least nobody’s ever accused him of lacking integrity. Chief Judge John Baricevic of the 20th Judicial Circuit worked with Dooley when Baricevic chaired St. Clair County. “Charlie understands the issues,” he says. “He never broke his word. I didn’t always like his responses, but he didn’t duck. He didn’t hide. He was there, and he told you what he thought and why.”
Dooley’s openness affects everybody around him. When I dial county employees at random, they give me information readily—no panic, no press officer. Dooley gives me the number of an old friend who had a rough time with drugs; he doesn’t sever ties just because they don’t “look good.” He doesn’t even prep his wife before I call her, which I find admirable and she finds less so.
Tom Irwin, executive director of Civic Progress, was on the task force Dooley charged with making the Interstate 64 closure as painless as possible. “Everyone went nuts; they thought this would be a disaster,” Irwin says. “The one guy that stood right next to MoDOT at the beginning—not at the end when it was easy and it was all a huge success—was Charlie.”
Dooley’s praised and despised for having guts, just as he’s praised for being prudent and despised for not taking risks. It’s said, softly, that he’s not black enough for some, not white enough for others. He’s accused of having no command of the details—and blamed for failing to have staff that he can rely on for the details.
As County Council chair last year, Stenger was Dooley’s most vocal critic, telling Dooley the council would not go along with a tax increase, pinning a green “I ♥ Parks” button to his lapel, going to the Post to explain why Dooley was wrong about a $10 million budget shortfall, and setting up a special committee to make recommendations that could forestall layoffs.
A local political strategist tells me he figures that Stenger is tacitly running against Dooley to get reelected and Dooley’s playing along, and it’s the best piece of political theater he’s seen in years. Dooley assures me that there’s no “wink and a nod” between them.
“I can verify that Mr. Dooley is not winking,” Earls says. What neither man mentions is that Dooley didn’t exactly come out hard for Stenger when he first ran for office, perhaps because Dooley had established a solid relationship with the Republican incumbent. Now, Stenger might be running for Dooley’s job in 2014.
If so, he’ll need a strong agenda, because the most consistent criticism of Dooley is that he’s not taking risks, tackling tough issues, or presenting a single grand, unified vision.
I ask Dooley what his ideal job description would be. “To set a vision for the entire county,” he says instantly. His actual job description? “To foster cooperation throughout the county. The city can actually set a vision, because they control the zoning… But it is hard to set a vision when the county is so diverse.” He rattles off the mix: third-class cities, fourth-class cities, villages, unincorporated areas, point-of-sale cities versus pool cities for sales tax...
The county’s a complicated hodgepodge, and its landscape is changing. “Fifty years ago, you could still hunt and farm,” Jones says. “Now the county’s fairly urban, and it has a lot of the same stresses and issues a built urban environment has: aging housing stock, challenged school districts, the displacement of manufacturing that used to support these communities and is not coming back. You lose Chrysler, you lose Ford, real-estate assessments drop, incomes shrink, taxes are rolled up for school and fire districts…”
Dooley’s had trouble framing that discussion, Jones says. “The issues are strategic, and all the arguments have been tactical; people are arguing about the mechanics instead of saying, ‘What’s the rational tax collection and distribution system for a place like St. Louis County in 2012? What kind of green space do we need, and how do we support it?’”
Jones says Dooley has such strong emotional ties to the county—and tries so hard to reach consensus—that “he’s genuinely disappointed when we do something he feels is correct and people don’t understand or accept it. He’s hurt by that, because he would never do anything to undermine the county he comes from.”
A former deputy mayor for the city, Jones sees his role in the county as raising tough questions—like what to do with municipalities that are no longer viable. And then Dooley’s torn, because as county executive, he sees the big picture, the inefficiencies and financial worries—but he was the mayor of a small municipality, and he still lives there, and he goes to the Velvet Freeze every week for the same rocky road banana split, and he knows what the 90 municipalities mean to the people who live in them.
“His biggest weakness,” Jones says, “is he doesn’t like to disappoint. And part of being in charge is disappointing people.”
Since You Asked…Charlie Dooley sounds off about the issues.
The 2008 trash-pickup scandal
“At the end of the day, it was the best thing that could happen to St. Louis County. Great prices, we got recycling… It was said, ‘You took away my choice.’ When somebody comes to the County Council and says, ‘I moved to unincorporated St. Louis County and built my own home because I wanted to pick my own trash collector’—why would you say that? Do you think anybody in their right mind would believe that?”
The current sales-tax debate
“We have a much harder time getting someone to vote for a sales-tax raise than a municipality would. It’s a 1 percent sales tax, well, let’s keep it county-wide and do it per capita. Why would you tell me that Fenton deserves to get more money and the people in Chesterfield have to do things differently than everybody else?”
A proposed city-county merger
“From the city’s point of view, if they don’t get a solution to their problems, what’s in it for them? From the county’s point of view, if the city only wants help, why do it?” … He sighs. “People on the outside see us as one, but on the inside, we see us as many, and that’s a real problem as you go forward.”
Tax-increment financing
“Every 10 years, we keep moving the shopping centers, and then on top of it, we’re gonna TIF ourselves to death. Once the TIF goes away, the corporations go away. And we’ve got all these new shopping centers, right? There’s nobody new here! It’s the same people shopping in different places.”
St. Louis County’s fatal flaw
“St. Louis County can be very parochial. North, central, south, and west know very little about each other—but it’s the same county. Those are the barriers we have to break down. Everybody’s trying to brand each other, and those brands are barriers… At the end of the day, we’re all in this together.”
