At its final meeting for 2025, the St. Louis County Council approved a budget for next year, one that includes $48 million in cuts from the budget proposed by County Executive Sam Page. Much of the money pulled from the budget is salary lines for currently vacant positions, including jobs in the county police department.
The move is a rebuke of Page, who wanted to patch the budget in the short term using Rams settlement funds and then raise revenue in the long term via a new internet sales tax. In a sit-down interview with SLM earlier this month, Page said, “Yes, we could use another 100 police officers in St Louis County. Absolutely.”
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That looks unlikely now.
The cuts mean that 300 to 400 vacant positions in the county government will be removed. It’s unknown right now how many of those will be police officers.
The County Council pushed the decision until virtually the last minute. Today was the council’s final planned meeting of the year, meaning this was the last opportunity to pass the budget barring a special meeting. The bills outlining the specific cuts were not made available to all the council members voting on them until 9:30 a.m.; the meeting started at 1 p.m.
In brief remarks Page made prior to the council’s vote, he said, “Neither the press nor the public is exactly sure what you all are voting on, but my hope is all of you understand them.”
Another dissenting vote was Councilwoman Lisa Clancy, who said, “Negotiations have happened behind closed doors.” She added that cutting essential services without a plan to build revenue was “short-sighted.”
Vacant positions weren’t the only things that got chopped. The council also cut the county animal shelter’s dog food budget by 70 percent. Members also nixed $1.7 million Page had asked for to fund the Save Lives Now violence reduction program. Page’s office itself took an $800,000 haircut. Other cuts include funds covering CPR training for jail staff as well as for Transportation and Public Works supplies, which includes asphalt to fill potholes and salt to melt snow.
The County Health Department alone took a $10 million cut, which numerous citizens spoke up against at the council meeting yesterday. Some commenters argued that county health services will only be more crucial amid cuts at the federal level to healthcare insurance subsidies.
All these cuts do come with a rather large asterisk. Throughout 2025, the council added $120 million to the budget in ad hoc supplemental appropriations. The planned budget for this year had been $609 million. However, when all was said and done, the county spent around $728 million.
The county was facing a $81 million budget shortfall, and even with the cuts that passed yesterday, the budget still fell around $30 million short. To plug that hole, the council approved spending $15 million in Rams settlement funds, with the remainder coming from county reserves.
During public comment, government watchdog Tom Sullivan took the council to task for budget woes, noting that councilmembers Shaolonda Webb and Rita Heard Days have been in leadership positions for multiple years. But, he said, “You act as if you were just bystanders while the budget ran off the tracks.” He added, “You have both been part of the problem.”
Sullivan noted that it had been “several years” since the county had what he called a competent auditor to scrutinize the budgets of departments that councilmembers have themselves blasted as “bloated.” The auditor position reports directly to the council, Sullivan noted.
