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After a year and a half of gathering public feedback and debating amongst themselves about the best way to spend the city’s hundreds of millions of dollars in Rams settlement money, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen yesterday hit a brick wall, seemingly sending it back to the drawing board. The past few weeks have featured contentious committee hearings, even more contentious full board meetings, surprise amendments, an allegation of public drunkenness, and a swift mea culpa.
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To help get some perspective of what’s all gone down, we reached out to a handful of close observers and insiders of City Hall to get their takes, given in anonymity to ensure greater honesty.
Is no bill really that bad?
Many outside observers saw Tuesday’s failure to allocate the funds as a sign of chaos and dysfunction at the Board, but that’s not a uniform take. A close observer of City Hall put it this way: “I’d argue that the narrative ‘the board is dysfunctional’ was definitely disproved. They successfully killed several different proposals to hijack the settlement money.”
One City Hall insider agreed, saying that it’s prudent to let the money continue to accrue interest until after new aldermen (and potentially a new mayor) are elected in April. “When the board returns to discuss it after the break they’ll have a greater chunk of change to work with and a lack of election-related motivations potentially affecting the outcome,” they said. “That’s a win-win.”
Who’s to blame for the failure to move a plan forward?
Multiple people indicated Aldermanic President Megan Green may take the biggest reputational hit from all this, as—depending on who you ask—she’s either guilty of poor leadership, hijacking a promising compromise or both. “There’s no leader. There’s just warring factions,” one insider said, as evidenced by a group of roughly eight members seemingly poised last week to usurp Green and pass a stripped down $40 million water infrastructure-only bill. “This became a referendum on her.”
On Tuesday, Alderwoman Sharon Tyus, not for the first time, compared Green to a dictator and said that younger alders aren’t looking to her for leadership. Another close watcher of City Hall didn’t dispute that, saying, “Megan has always been more popular with voters than with aldermen.”
That’s in addition to Green accusing a colleague without evidence of drinking on the job, which as a news story only bolsters the city’s loudest naysayers. As one City Hall observer put it: “Accusing a fellow alderman of drinking? Like, is she OK?”
Is anyone at City Hall looking good coming out of this?
The same insider who said Green showed no leadership noted two others stepping into the vacuum in two different ways: Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier and Alderman Shane Cohn.
Sonnier sponsored a spending bill that was combined with another proposal by Alderwoman Pam Boyd after Sonnier extended an olive branch to her. “Sonnier, in the midst of the tension and warring parties, may well be the only alder who emerged from this with more, not less, respect and trust from some or all their colleagues,” this insider says.
Cohn, for his part, an insider says, stepped into a leadership vacuum with procedural savvy on Tuesday, tacking money for Southeast City onto the proposed water-only bill, forcing the water-only crowd to stand down in a way that Green couldn’t.
Though the $40 million water-only proposal died on Tuesday, Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer, one of the effort’s leaders, showed that she could effectively build a coalition. At least one observer suggested she might want to challenge Green in two years for the aldermanic presidency. Like Green, Schweitzer was elected as part of the fragile coalition of progressives that aimed to change ways of doing things at the Board of Aldermen, but thanks in part to the very different perspectives of the South City wards they represent, have found their paths in conflict.
It is difficult to say how this augurs for the mayoral election. Mayor Tishaura Jones seems to have played a significant role in bringing Boyd, Sonnier and Greater St. Louis, Inc. to the table to hammer out a compromise, though whether voters will appreciate that when the whole thing soon fell apart is a different story. Challenger Cara Spencer was notably quiet over the past weeks as the board on which she serves became increasingly rancorous. At City Hall, one Jones-backer begrudgingly admired the tack, saying, “That’s what I’d do, too.”
What about all that community feedback?
“Most alders hated the public engagement process,” said one insider, not mincing words. “Which makes sense; no one ward looks like the whole city.”
They added: “Ironically, the Board ended up with the position that it held before the months of public engagement: leave the money in a trust fund.”
Why was Hal Goldsmith at the aldermanic meeting on Tuesday?
Whether or not he intended to, federal prosecutor Hal Goldsmith, who handled the prosecutions of three now-former aldermen back in 2022, got everyone’s attention simply by watching the first part of Tuesday’s meeting from the gallery. He told KSDK’s Mark Maxwell he was there only because he was bored, likely an honest response that did little to quell a torrent of speculation on X and even media coverage.
Cohn, with seeming sincerity, said about Goldsmith, “Always good to have him down at City Hall.” The over-the-top attention from the peanut gallery, however, all but ensures it’ll never happen again—after all, federal prosecutors can follow along on YouTube like the rest of us.
