Once upon a time, talk about ordinances and zoning codes might turn to a humorous anecdote about how a town capped the height of grass at 6 inches. That was before the fallout from Ferguson put a new filter on any analysis of public policy, however slight.
Today, minor municipal ordinances, archaic zoning codes, and seemingly benign rules have citizens, lawyers, and the media looking at possible penurious effects of the county’s municipal court system, which has been charged with inequitably enforcing ordinances depending on citizens’ ability to pay. With 90 municipalities and swaths of unincorporated areas in the county, ordinances and zoning codes greatly vary.
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For instance, former Charlack city attorney Elkin Kistner had to put the kibosh on requiring that the owners of cars towed in that North County burg pay what amounted to a cover charge for retrieving their vehicles. In the past, when a car was towed for a violation, the owner paid about $75 for an authorization permit before being allowed to pay towing and impound fees. After one resident complained, Kistner discovered that Charlack had no ordinance allowing such a charge. The practice was stopped.
Les Sterman, retired executive director of the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, says the patchwork quilt of ordinances and zoning codes is problematic. “It’s not the plumbing, electrical, or building inspections,” he says. “Zoning has a more far-reaching effect. It inhibits a business’s ability to locate where it wants. Cities can put them through a wringer.”
“For a lot of municipal codes, the issue is enforcement rather than the letter of the law,” says Colin Gordon, author of Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City. “I think of the Black Jack zoning case in the early 1970s, in which the law intended to block new multifamily development actually zoned much of the city into nonconformance.”
In 1974, the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ban was discriminatory. It had virtually put into noncompliance existing smaller-lot and duplex tracts. “Zoning does a pretty effective job of sorting the population by income,” Gordon says, “especially beyond the inner suburbs, where zoning tends to pursue uniform large-lot single-family patterns of development and use.” Sterman sees “nuisance” ordinances and discriminatory zoning codes as one piece of a larger problem.
“It’s all part of the same syndrome,” he says. “People want the people living next door to look and behave exactly like they do.”
