A committee giving cyclists and pedestrians a voice at St. Louis City Hall appears to be near collapse after numerous members—including both co-chairs—resigned after orders to be more transparent.
Created by the Board of Aldermen just before the onset of the pandemic in 2020, the St. Louis City Community Mobility Committee was meant to advise city officials on issues surrounding non-vehicular transportation, even as traffic violence increasingly became the subject of local concern. Its meetings routinely drew aldermen, as well as representatives from the mayor’s office and the Streets Department. Aubrey Byron, who was until recently co-chair, says proximity to decision-makers gave members an important voice.
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“Because of that loose affiliation with the city, we did have a commitment from the city to present their plans to the public and get feedback from the public,” she says. “It got the city to listen to people in the city who are cyclists and walkers.”
Yet Byron resigned last week, following a meeting in which the City Counselor’s Office instructed the group about how to function as an official city committee with meetings and records that are open to the public. Two other members gave notice that same day, followed by another half-dozen in the days that followed, multiple members tell SLM. They believe the committee no longer has the 11 members required by city ordinance.
The controversy began as a dispute with a former member. Patrick Van Der Tuin, a cycling enthusiast who serves as executive director of the nonprofit St. Louis BWorks, says he became frustrated by a series of decisions made by the committee—but was thwarted when he asked questions about membership and voting records. When he lashed out online (“Cowards hide behind closed meetings, unrecorded votes and tempered voices,” he wrote on X), the committee voted to ban him from meetings and blocked him from its written materials.
Van Der Tuin objected, noting that under the Sunshine law, city committees can’t just block members of the public. The City Counselor’s Office agreed.
City lawyers then met with the committee in closed session on July 16. The conversation ended in frustration over what members saw as onerous demands for transparency, with no help from the city in achieving them. Says Denis Beganovic, who resigned that day, “This group is just a bunch of transportation nerds who want to do good, and now we’re being asked to be Sunshine law experts with no backing from the city, who’s saying we have to do this? It’s crazy.”
Byron notes that open-meeting rules can interfere with timely action, pointing to the requirement that votes be taken in person instead of over email. “It really changes who gets to participate,” she says. She and Beganovic were also concerned about the city’s instruction that their emails about committee business are public records—and thanks to Van Der Tuin, they knew the question wasn’t just academic. “We’re just regular citizens but now tasked with legal record-keeping,” Byron says. (Byron’s co-chair, Christie Holland, who also resigned, declined to comment, saying she’d share her thoughts directly with the city.)
In a statement, a spokesman for the city said, “Since its inception, the Community Mobility Committee has served in an advisory role, offering input on mobility issues within the City of St. Louis. Conversations with the committee have been productive and helpful during that time. The administration has offered training and answered questions on how they can best be transparent with the residents of St. Louis.”
Reached last Wednesday, Van Der Tuin said he took no joy in the fallout from his quest. He said his goal was to make sure the committee paid attention not just to issues of engineering streets but also education and enforcement around traffic laws. “It’s really dispiriting that they want to dismantle the organization just because they’re afraid of sharing their voting records,” he said. He also disputes that his advocacy attempts ever crossed the line into harassment. “The only reason I went to social media is that they refused to answer questions.”
Van Der Tuin said he’s talking to other local cyclists to strategize ways that the committee could be salvaged. There’s one thing that he and Byron agree on: The proximity to city officials gave cyclists and pedestrians an important seat at the table. Losing that, he said, would be a “huge loss.”
