As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Gateway Arch, St. Louis should recognize a paradox that can be rather frustrating:
It is ours, but we don’t own it.
The Arch is as much a part of St. Louis as the Cardinals, toasted ravioli, and asking where someone attended high school. This magnificent icon honors our city and defines it. It’s our coat of arms, our top tourist attraction, and the star of our skyline. It’s our pride and joy.
But the Gateway Arch doesn’t legally belong to us. It is part of a national park, known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, 100 percent owned and operated by the federal government. The U.S. Congress controls its purse strings. The Department of the Interior controls its operations.
Legally speaking, St. Louis is the Department of the Exterior. The Arch is not the property of the city of St. Louis; it never has been and never will be. We might love it and feel quite possessive of it. But we don’t own it, and we don’t control it.
Funny thing about that. Two years ago, St. Louis gained the distinction of becoming the first community to offer up local taxpayer dollars to support a national park when we (city and county) passed Proposition P, a three-sixteenths–cent sales tax with three beneficiaries: the city and county parks (40 percent); a system of trailways and green space running through the region (30 percent); and the Arch grounds and surrounding space (30 percent). The money for the Arch was advertised as supporting a needed makeover of its grounds and the area surrounding it.
On the face of it, this should have represented nirvana for a local cynic like me. Talk about fitting a narrative: Ours is a community with a downright embarrassing history of boondoggles. We’ve wasted millions on worthless studies and stupid deals in which out-of-town hucksters prey upon us, buy our civic assets, and sell them back to us at exorbitant profit. We’ve been taken to the cleaners more than any garment you own. And now we’re the only city in history to offer handouts to Uncle Sam?
This is the stuff of a columnist’s dream. There’s no research needed—just bring on the reverse-bailout jokes and metaphors.
Sadly for me, on a professional level, cynicism had to give way to realism. The Gateway Arch is a treasure, but it hasn’t been working for St. Louis—economically or aesthetically—to the degree we need. The Arch has always been physically disconnected from the heart of downtown by a highway, and as time has passed, that disconnect has proved more costly. For all of the local hype, downtown is broken.
And there’s this: The owner of the property is broke. That would be your Department of the Interior, which has been facing declining budgets from Congress that exacerbate some declining attendance numbers (also the result of a challenged economy) at attractions like the Gateway Arch.
So it came down to this: If we in St. Louis wanted an overhaul of the Arch, we were the ones who were going to have buck up for it, whether we owned it or not. That’s why I ended up supporting Proposition P, which passed despite my support in 2013, with a 67 percent margin in the city and 53 percent in the county.
That success yielded a $380 million park renovation project, which would be funded by $250 million in private donations through a group called CityArchRiver, $85 million in Proposition P money administered by Great Rivers Greenway, and (as a result of the local effort) $45 million from the federal government.
The private support is part of a national trend wherein private donors are stepping up to save, preserve, or upgrade such treasures as the Statue of Liberty. To their credit, the local corporate and philanthropic communities have come forward for the Arch.
Obviously, the public piece is the controversial one, even after passage of Proposition P, and recently there was a spate of outrage when it became known that part of the Great Rivers Greenway money would fund the costs of three National Park Service rangers.
Wait a minute here: Now we’re not only upgrading the grounds of a park that we don’t own but also actually funding the operations of the Department of Interior?
Worse yet, Great Rivers Greenway executive director Susan Trautman apparently pledged the funds without specific authorization from her governing board. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch properly reported this news, exposing the not-so-shocking revelation that yet another executive director has confused stewardship with ownership of an agency.
That’s all great stuff, I suppose, but it’s boring me to tears. So are some of the spats about whether the National Park Service should be contributing more money to the Arch project. It’s all noise. It’s all inside baseball.
It turns out that the cost of the three rangers was never in the National Park Service’s budget, but instead had been paid out of revenues from an underground parking garage operated by the Bi-State Development Agency (your local public transit company). But now that the garage has been obliterated as part of the renovation project—yes, we’ve actually reversed the process of “paving paradise and putting up a parking lot”—Bi-State doesn’t have the funds any more, so it’s passed the plate to Great Rivers Greenway.
Who cares whether the money comes from Bi-State or Great Rivers Greenway? I suppose it’s a terrible precedent to use local funds for national-park operations, but it’s apparently one that was established years ago. Bi-State has operated the Arch trams since the monument opened (it actually funded them), and it appears to have a fine relationship with Jefferson National Expansion Memorial superintendent Tom Bradley and his staff. This arrangement of paying park rangers from parking garage proceeds was part of it. Wonderful. But this is all too wonkish for me, and that’s saying something.
From all appearances, Bradley has done a fine job for a long time at the Arch. He’s accessible, friendly, and not at all controversial. But he doesn’t appropriate his budget; he administers it. And he doesn’t seem to have all that much power to change much of anything. If you’re upset about this state of affairs, call Congress. Good luck.
So my thought is that we all ought to calm down about the great outrage of some public money going to pay for some of the Arch costs. My understanding is that it’s less than $2 million per year. Tight as it is, the Department of the Interior does allocate about $10 million per year for the operation of the park, which is certainly better than nothing.
Local taxpayers contribute $20 million apiece to the Saint Louis Zoo and Saint Louis Art Museum and $10 million each to the Saint Louis Science Center, Missouri History Museum, and Missouri Botanical Garden. They’re worth every penny. But their ownership is irrelevant unless they turn into private for-profit corporations.
Now, for those seeking outrage, be sure to check out the Regional Sports Authority, where an orgy of wasteful public spending has lavished nearly $10 million so far upon a host of well-connected professionals, consultants, and assorted companies for a stadium that almost certainly will never be built.
As for the Arch project, I have no prediction as to how it will turn out or when. Whatever happens, I am confident that it wouldn’t have moved forward without local philanthropists’ and taxpayers’ having stepped up to the plate. The status quo was unacceptable, so I’m fine with taking our shot.
And I think St. Louis should pretend that it is the de facto owner of the Arch, whether it holds the title or not. Consider this: The late Harry Ornest bought our hockey team and beloved St. Louis Arena, then sold it back to us for millions in profit. The late John Connelly did the same thing—two or three times, I believe—with our equally beloved SS Admiral.
Whatever improvements are made to the Arch will be the result of found money, and the last thing we should fuss about is the fact that we’re the only city doing something like this. We’re also the only city with the Gateway Arch.
Just be glad no one’s selling it to us.
