On my birthday, the Wednesday before Christmas, my wife and I dined at Kemoll’s. With crystal clear skies the windows on the 40th floor of Met Square offered great views of downtown.
Alas, by 6:00 p.m. tumbleweeds ought to have been blowing across the streets. If not for lights from a few ground floor restaurants, the scene could pass for 3:00 a.m.
To my great surprise (since Kemoll’s soon leaves downtown for Maryland Heights), most of the tables in our section were empty.
When I attended St. Catherine of Sienna grade school, better than 50 years ago, around my birthday the family headed downtown for shopping and dinner at the big Famous Barr store. The street side windows deserved a long look and crowds surrounded every register – in part because we always went to Famous on double Eagle Stamp day!
Of course, back then the city held better than 600,000 residents. The first generation of suburban malls – River Roads, Town & Country Mall, Northland and such – never offered the selection or grand experience of shopping downtown.
Today, well, as Bill McClellan quotes his father, “If you can’t kick a man when he’s down, when can you kick him?”, long lines of Republicans in power aim their boot at the City of St. Louis.
The basic theme of the kickers: they city can’t be trusted to run itself. It must be restricted by state legislative fiat, strict law enforcement and tough love.
At the same time, “saving” the city by making it again a part of St. Louis County is a dangerous and wrong plan.
I’ve been criticized for making the point (here and in an October letter to the Oakville Call ) that much primal Republican opposition to the impossible “city – county merger” gets traced to good ole fashioned racist fear mongering. Basically, GOP leadership whispers, white county residents stand to get taxed to hell to bail out fiscal irresponsibility city. And, “those people” will be more likely to rob and kill “us” after a merger.
That strikes me as doubly ironic.
First, the group leading the ‘merger’ movement, Better Together, most always is described as “the Rex Sinquefield-funded civic organization that’s been studying the issue since 2013.” . Now, Rex deserves great credit for his Horatio Alger-style life, rising from humble beginnings to, repeatedly, denying he’s a billionaire. He’s many things – among them a staunch conservative Republican. He feels strongly that the city and county must re-unite. That position has come out in several Better Together studies, and, now gets pushed hard by McPherson Publications!
Again, this is the dream of a very conservative Republican, a major power behind the throne in the Missouri GOP. Yet, Rex’s own party damns his dream.
Second, it’s hard to find stories where St. Louis City residents – the people most impacted by a merger or similar drastic change – get asked their opinions about giving away their sovereignty!
Remember, to start any reunification with the county, two-thirds of city voters must vote to dissolve the county status of the city. That’s in the Missouri Constitution. My guess is that most city voters don’t want to give-up that level of local control. The “merger,” therefore, seems about as likely as an asteroid made of gold plopping down in the Mississippi River in front of the Arch tonight.
Yes, the City of St. Louis needs life support. (Boy could they use that gold asteroid.) Generations of tax deals to the well-connected (many of them Republicans, like the baseball Cardinals’ ownership), problems with city schools, neglect by Jefferson City and a host of other problems are very real.
And, I’ll bet lunch money that several bills proposed in the new session in Jeff City will seek to further emasculate the city by limiting its ability to collect taxes or make its own decisions. That’s what Missouri Republicans try every session.
The view from the Top of the Met is sad, beautiful and empty. I miss downtown nights with crowded sidewalks. I’ll miss my rare dinners at Kemoll’s. I hope things change but I know they may not.
Still, I’m not ready to deny city folks the right to decide their own future.
Glenn Koenen