City services are a huge frustration for many St. Louis voters—but what will it take to fix them?

Last July, a city trash truck was careless in emptying a big metal refuse bin in the alley behind Jennifer Shenberger’s North Hampton home.

After emptying the bin, the truck’s metallic arms set it back down in the alley in a way that caused it to tip over onto Shenberger’s chainlink fence, which gave a little bit but held, tipping the bin back to where it was supposed to be. The fence was damaged but not destroyed—an accident akin to a fender bender. But, as many people know, fender benders can be a major headache if the wrong bureaucrat gets involved. 

After noticing the damage, Shenberger called the number on the side of all city refuse bins, the one written next to the Problems, Call... 

The call led to a city building inspector coming out to look at her fence. He wondered aloud as to why he’d been sent, Shenberger says, and said next time she should just call the number on the side of the bin. “I showed him on my phone that that was who I called,” she said. The inspector added that he couldn’t help with the refuse bin issue, but since he was there, he had to cite her for the damaged fence. Later that month, she got a notice from the Building Division saying she needed to fix the fence or face a fine. She could appeal, but only if she paid a fee. The dollar amounts were rather trivial, but, Shenberger says, it was the principle of the thing. The garbage bin had damaged her neighbor’s fence, too, and the same inspector cited them while he was in the neighborhood. “Great, I got my neighbor in trouble, too,” Shenberger recalls thinking.

The incident is, on the one hand, small potatoes—a peccadillo costing Shenberger a few hundred bucks at most. But it illustrates a worrying trend in St. Louis: The services we rely on to make the city liveable sometimes actively harm the people they purport to serve. 

The past few years alone have seen the city’s tow lot selling residents’ cars out from under them, a building inspector funneling work under programs he supervised to construction companies associated with his wife and ex-wife, another building inspector shaking down daycares, a fireman relieving an injured citizen of his wallet, police crashing an SUV into a business and then arresting the owner for his angry reaction. Each bad actor is allegedly an outlier in their respective department. Nonetheless, it adds up. Combine it with the Streets Department’s failure to prepare for the January snowstorm, leaving roads icy for weeks in the front of houses as trash piled up in back, and many residents are vocally fed up.

It’s no surprise then that when SLM and Nine PBS gathered focus groups of city voters and gathered input online, city services came in as a top concern and a key item on the Citizens’ Agenda.

In interviews responding to the agenda, both Mayor Tishaura Jones and her two main challengers, Alderwoman Cara Spencer and Recorder of Deeds Michael Butler, say that the ur-problem behind these myriad city services shortcomings can be explained by the $42 million St. Louis didn’t spend on payroll last year because of the vast number of vacancies in departments such as the Building Division, Neighborhood Stabilization, and Refuse. “We have 55 routes for refuse, but we have 39 or 40 drivers on a good day,” said Jones. 

“Paying people what they deserve and what they, frankly, need to feel compensated and to really want to work for the city is not something the city has taken seriously,” said Spencer. 

Said Butler, “What we can do, number one, is to hire enough people to fulfill those jobs. I haven’t had a vacancy in my office in over four years in the Recorder of Deeds because I believe in one thing, quality over quantity. I want to pay people what they’re worth and give them the technology they need to succeed.”

The mayor was quick to allege that Spencer, a 10-year veteran of the Board of Aldermen, bears some responsibility for the problems she is keen to highlight during election season. Spencer said it’s “ridiculous” to say aldermen need to pass legislation for the city to provide basic services. 

Working with aldermen, Jones recently secured city employees a three percent raise. But Spencer pointed to the city’s infusion of federal COVID-19 relief funds as a missed opportunity, with high-minded pilot projects diverting money from basic services. Properly maintaining the streets, she says, would cost between $12 and $13 million a year; instead the city budgets $2 to $3 million annually for street maintenance. 

“That’s a deficit of $10 million a year,” she said. “Under the proposal to invest the ARPA funds, as was presented and worked through by the administration, we put $40 million into streets. It sounds like a lot, but it really is just that $10 million deficit over four years. So what that did was just get us at a baseline through these four years. It didn’t do anything to address the years of inadequate funding for streets, and it certainly didn’t put us ahead of where we need to be going in the future.” 

Butler, too, would like to see the city be more proactive. He criticized the city’s response to the Jan. 5 snowstorm, saying it failed to properly treat streets ahead of time or show enough urgency after the fact. “We should not be a city that shuts down when it snows more than two to three inches,” he said. “And what we did wrong as a city government in the past is we decided we’re going to be that kind of city, rather than deciding we’re going to be a better city when we’re delivering that service.” 

One bigger-picture proposal recently put forth by Alderwoman Daniela Velazquez would have a non-elected city manager oversee the daily operation of city government, including appointing people to run Streets, Public Safety, and other departments, in theory taking the politics out of their operations. Her fellow alderwoman Spencer is full-throated in her support of the plan, though she said city government would need to be restructured for it to work. 

Butler, for his part, expressed mixed feelings, saying that the more he hears about this idea the more he likes it, however, he added it would likely “cost us quite a bit of money, about twice the amount as we pay the current mayor, to do half the job of the current mayor.”

The new position would erode some of the power of the mayor, no matter who it is. Jones previously called it a “slap in the face.” To Nine PBS and SLM, she said, “I don’t think a city manager would even make a difference.”

Some residents, like Shenberger, are eager for something to change. She says that her complaints—made to Neighborhood Stabilization, Alderman Joe Vollmer, the person who answered the phone when she called for a second time the number on the side of the bin a second time—all fell on deaf ears. In fact, the only person to respond was former alderman Joe Vaccaro. Like the building inspector who cited her, he told her that if she had video evidence showing the garbage truck at fault, it would be a different story. Without it, she was likely out of luck.  

One day in January, Shenberger happened to be looking out her back window when she saw a trash truck coming down her alley. She started filming it on her phone. It picked up her bin and dropped it back down hard, tilting it into her fence, damaging it further. “Got it,” she said. 

Except, she didn’t have it. The video evidence hasn’t changed a thing, she says. “Even now that I have the video, I can’t even get an out-of-office business reply.”

Courtesy of Nine PBS and SLM

Courtesy of Nine PBS and SLM