The St. Louis mayor’s race isn’t the only citywide election on tomorrow’s ballot. Former state representative Donna Baringer has been mounting a high-energy challenge to Comptroller Darlene Green, raising more than $111,000, according to her most recent campaign finance report. That’s more than Green has raised this cycle—though Green had a formidable war chest coming into the race and still has more cash on hand.
Baringer is joined by Celeste Metcalf, an accountant making her first run for public office. (She’s raised $17,855.) The two candidates receiving the most votes advance to the general election April 8.
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While Green has been a fixture at City Hall for 30 years, Baringer believes she’s been too slow to dig into concerns about the city’s spending of American Rescue Plan Act dollars and tardy in processing payments. “We cannot be a reactive government,” she says. “We have to have leadership that’s proactive.”
Prior to serving eight years in the legislature, Baringer represented her St. Louis Hills neighborhood as an alderwoman for 10 years. She couldn’t run for her seat in Jefferson City again because of term limits. She insists she had no interest in returning to City Hall until she grew alarmed about what she was reading about the city’s spending.
“I was looking at ARPA funds,” she recalls. “I was looking at contracts. I was looking at funds in, funds out. I was going through the comptroller’s audit, and I was starting to see things that just didn’t make sense to me.” When she read the Post-Dispatch’s coverage of questionable entities being given preliminary awards in a city program for North City businesses, something clicked into place for her.
“I’m one of those people, I figure out what the true problem is,” she says. “I don’t just say, ‘Oh, let’s fix it with a Band-Aid. I dig down, I dig deep, and I find out what the issue is. And that’s the need for a proactive comptroller.” She adds, “It was time for a change.”
On The 314 Podcast, Green defended her record as comptroller, saying she has to find the balance between getting payments out in a timely way and slowing things down to do due diligence when appropriate. (As one example, she was able to freeze $387,525 in payments to entities tied to a city building inspector, saving the city money. She’s also called for “a do-over” of the North City grants.)
Baringer, however, says that a stronger comptroller should have known there were problems before journalists revealed them. “The comptroller has the ability to lead, and they have the ability to ask and audit it in time,” she says.
Baringer also faults Green for processing payments too slowly, citing a Post-Dispatch story about the janitorial company who quit after it took the city two months to pay their invoices. (The airport’s director said the airport had some issues with their work, and suggested they’d struggled with staffing post-pandemic.) Says Baringer, “When you have a contract, you should pay people on time. People cannot go without their paychecks. And so my fear is that those contractors who did a good job, who the airport liked, may not come back, and you can’t have a state of the art airport if your comptroller is the reason people will not bid on work for the airport.”
While Baringer is known for her strong South City political base, she insists she is ready to represent the whole city. While campaigning, she says she’s visited every neighborhood association in the city (other than ones where meetings were canceled over winter weather).
Across the city, she says concerns are the same: public safety, schools, and ARPA spending. “It was interesting that it’s not a whole lot different where you go about people being concerned about what’s going on in the city,” she says.
For all her experience, Baringer notes she’s the youngest person in the comptroller’s race, at age 61. And she stresses that she’s not afraid to mix things up at City Hall. Green has criticized Baringer for supporting a change to the city’s charter that would have allowed aldermen more power over budgeting (it failed to receive the necessary supermajority last fall).
She says, “What I tell people is, you can’t be afraid of change. You have to understand, we have to grow. Our charter was written in 1914 and I think in 1914 we may have still had some elected officials that showed up for work in a carriage pulled by horses.”
She adds, “There’s so many things that need to be looked at, and I’m not afraid of change. I think if we don’t change, then we will become the second largest area in the state, because Kansas City will just pass us by. They’re already passing us by.”
Hear more from Baringer on the Fast Forward STL podcast.
