Louis municipalities would have continued to exist as “municipal districts” but would lose authority over police, courts, roads, and economic development, as well as chunks of their revenue streams. Louis city and county and merged their governments. Urban planners have long viewed regionalized government, including city-county mergers, as a holy grail of good governance.īetter Together, a plan created by local leaders and heavily funded by local billionaire Rex Sinquefield, would have recombined St. Others argue for a full consolidation of government between the city and county, pointing to merged city-county governments like Nashville and Indianapolis as positive examples. Louis rejoin the county and become an ordinary city again. Many observers believe that reorganizing local government is necessary. While state and federal investigations found the shooting justified, the resulting attention revealed many serious problems with how St. The county’s problems blew up in Ferguson in 2014, where the police shooting of Michael Brown led to weeks of unrest. A number have turned to abusive ticketing practices to raise funds. Louis County is dotted with 91 municipalities, most very small, and many fiscally distressed. Regional stagnation has exposed many other civic issues, such as heavy segregation and jurisdictional fragmentation. Nonetheless, the city is clearly much less prominent than during its postwar heyday. Louis Blues hockey team just won the Stanley Cup for the first time. Louis retains several Fortune 500 companies and a large financial-services industry base, boasts an elite private school in Washington University, and remains a center of plant sciences, as well as being part of a major region of almost 3 million people, with significant economic activity and serious cultural assets-and the St. Louis once had a thriving professional-services industry in sectors such as advertising that served national clients today, its services firms mostly have local clients. As Brian Feldman documented in Washington Monthly, St. Southwestern Bell (now part of a reassembled AT&T) moved to Texas. TWA was acquired by American Airlines, which eliminated its hub in St. Local giants like Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, and Ralston Purina were bought out and reduced their local presence. Louis has seen a dramatic erosion of civic standing. Once a major regional business center, St. The region has stagnated, too the population of the larger metro area fell slightly last year. Its population has shrunk to 302,838, a drop of 65 percent-worse than Detroit’s population loss. Louis thrived, and separation from the county looked like a smart move.īut after 1950, St. Its land area of 62 square miles exceeds those of San Francisco and the District of Columbia. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796, which even today would make it our 18th-largest municipality-bigger than Seattle, Denver, or Boston. Louis was equivalent to a combined city-county government. Practically speaking, the independent city of St. In 1876, however, city officials, unhappy with the county government, managed to push through a secession in which a newly enlarged city was carved away from the county. Baltimore and some cities in Virginia are also organized this way, but few others. Louis is a rare “independent city”-not located within a county, that is, but existing as its own separate entity. Attempts to shake up the region’s governance are likely to continue. But the problems that prompted it-regional demographic and economic malaise, fiscal distress, and segregation-aren’t going away. Louis County executive who would have run the merged government, backers withdrew the proposal. Following political blowback and the indictment of the St. Louis, was over almost before it started. Louis County and its towns with the city of St. Better Together, a drive to consolidate the governments of St.
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