As Rams bill heads to a vote, a new spectre looms—Trump

Despite President Donald Trump rescinding Monday’s order that froze potentially trillions of dollars in federal funds for state and local governments, many local leaders say the writing is on the wall: Money coming from Washington, D.C., to cities like St. Louis is only going to get tighter. And some of those leaders say that should change how the city thinks about spending the almost $300 million earned from its settlement with the Rams. A bill to allocate the money in its entirety will be debated at the St. Louis Board of Aldermen tomorrow. 

“I imagine you’ll hear several of my colleagues bring this up, reminding each other we need to be taking a different look than we would six months or a year ago,” said Alderman Bret Narayan. 

He added that as far as he can tell, federal dollars are drying up or already have dried up. 

“It’s going to get interesting,” he says. “I imagine the gloves will be off on Friday.”

The current bill, a combination of two previous separate proposals put forth by Alderwomen Alisha Sonnier and Pam Boyd, would allocate the money into approximately seven funds, ranging from $10 million to $60 million each, dedicated to housing, development, and various types of infrastructure. Some of the funds target specific areas, with a $60 million fund for downtown and a $40 million one for North City. Others would set up new programs, like the Children and Families Endowment Fund, which would establish pilot programs to defray the cost of child care for city workers as well as increase access for post-secondary education and training for their older children.  

That bill has the backing of both Mayor Tishaura Jones and Aldermanic President Megan Green. 

“We’re still supporting the bill put forward by Sonnier and Boyd,” says Conner Kerrigan, spokesman for Jones, though he added, “We’re in what, week two, of the Trump administration. We’re in an upside down world.”

Green’s spokesman Yusuf Daneshyar said that any discussion about how to respond to federal cuts which have not yet even happened is premature. “Right now our priority is to understand which city departments and programs could be impacted by cuts in federal funding,” he said.

He added, “I think this situation underscores why we need to put the Rams settlement into interest-bearing accounts that generate interest year over year and can be invested directly into our communities.”

At least four aldermen who spoke to SLM yesterday and today are wary of deciding tomorrow where every last penny should go. 

Even Boyd, one the bill’s sponsors, sounded a wary note today.

“I think who is in Washington is going to have a big impact on tomorrow,” said Boyd. “People need to be cautious, be patient and wait and not rush.”

Alderman Michael Browning says he could foresee a scenario where the city may need to tap into those Rams funds “next year or even next month.” He says he doesn’t want to be in a position of having to say, “Sorry, we allocated it in one bill.”

When the bill passed out of the Housing, Urban Development and Zoning Committee last week, Browning was one of two “no” votes alongside Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer.

Schweitzer says she’d like to see some of the money spent on essential services—like water infrastructure, “the one thing the city provides that people can’t live here without”—and let the rest of the hundreds of millions continue to accrue interest. 

To Schweitzer’s point, in 2022, the city put $250 million settlement dollars in a Missouri Securities Investment Program, and the pot of money now sits just a little shy of $300 million. 

Narayan says he expects tomorrow’s debate to revolve around larger questions of what a municipal government’s role should be, saying that fault lines will fall between aldermen who think the city’s job is to provide basic city services and infrastructure—and others who “want the municipal government to engage in college funds and childcare.”

In recent weeks, the $44 million set-aside to defray the costs of childcare and post-secondary education for the children of city workers has emerged as particularly contentious. 

When the bill was voted out of the Housing, Urban Development and Zoning committee, its backers said that about a quarter of city employees have children, but there is no detailed information about their specific age ranges. Schweitzer said at that hearing that while the city has surveyed residents about what they wanted to see done with the Rams money, she had not seen any sort of survey from city workers, who would directly benefit from these two pilot programs. 

At the hearing, Green said that in order to administer the childcare program, the city would have to either set up a new office, an Office of the Child, or outsource its administration to an organization that works with providers to manage fund disbursement.

“I don’t know that we can actually say definitively what’s going to happen here because we can’t even say definitively how many employees actually have kids under three that could benefit from this,” Browning said at the hearing last week. He added later, “We’re not going to give raises to city employees, and yet we are going to create new programs. We’re going to fund pilots. We’re going way out of our way to fund some experimental thing.”

Later at that same hearing, Green offered a series of amendments that funneled $14 million away from the downtown fund and into ones for citywide housing and neighborhood development, as well as into the pot of money for childcare.

Those moves rubbed Boyd the wrong way. “We go to HUDZ and the president comes up with 10 amendments,” she says. “She did what she wanted to do, and now we’ll see.”

The debate over the proposed childcare program is just the latest in a series of such back-and-forths that have played out in the city and county in recent years over the government’s role in funding early childhood education and daycare. 

In 2020, city voters approved Proposition R, raising property taxes by six cents to fund childcare in the city. 

Since then, money raised through that tax has yielded about $2.3 million a year for early childhood education. Those funds are administered through the St. Louis Mental Health Board. Data provided by the MHB to SLM shows that while the money from Prop R does to hiring more staff and increasing programs offered at early childhood care facilities, it hasn’t been used to defray costs of children’s enrollment, as the money in the Rams settlement bill is supposed to do.

MHB’s executive director Cassandra Kaufman says that because the board operates under a specific state statute related to children’s mental health, they are somewhat limited in how they can use the funds. 

The MHB board picks applicants who are funded on a three-year cycle. Some critics, including Pam Mitchell, who worked as a childcare professional for 30 years, complain that the money has disproportionately aided bigger players in the early childcare space.

The same year that Prop R passed in the city, a similar effort in St. Louis County failed to make it on the ballot after critics raised concerns about that proposal’s vague language as to where the money would actually go. One of the people raising that alarm was Saint Louis University political science professor Ken Warren, who said at the time, “With so much flexibility in it you don’t know where the money is going to be spent. They could even spend it outside the county.”

Warren tells SLM he doesn’t have the same level of alarm about the Rams settlement bill. 

“This is a pretty well-written bill,” he says. “The allocations are pretty specific.”

However, Warren balked at the idea that he feels comfortable with the overall bill. 

“Does anyone feel comfortable with the way city money is spent?” he said. “I mean, come on, you’re pulling my leg here.”