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St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones might have avoided the current controversy her administration is embroiled in had she followed that lesson. Jones has been taking heat over the sloppy and not-very-transparent rollout of a program to distribute about $37 million in federal pandemic money to North Side businesses and nonprofits.

As outlined in stories by my Post-Dispatch colleagues Jacob Barker and Austin Huguelet, the program has been fraught with problems. It’s run by the city’s economic development agency, the St. Louis Development Corporation (SLDC). Some businesses slated to receive money have a questionable existence, while others claimed addresses of vacant lots and buildings. The SLDC, meanwhile, has refused to provide the applications of the winning businesses.

This was all avoidable if Jones had followed her first instinct. She was initially against the program. Former Board of Alderman President Lewis Reed proposed the spending plan in 2021. The city was flush with federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act, and Jones and Reed had different ideas about how to spend the money.

Jones preferred a pilot project to give $500 in income checks to city residents. She also said Reed’s proposal would run afoul of federal rules. “We’re just trying to do it the right way,” Jones said then. To make her point, she pointed to an opinion issued by then-City Counselor Matt Moak suggesting Reed’s proposal could run into problems with the federal government.

That letter, which didn’t have the words “confidential” or “attorney-client privilege” typed on it anywhere, is still posted on the Post-Dispatch website. It’s a monument to what could have been. That’s because not long after the letter was written, Jones appointed a new city counselor, Sheena Hamilton, who instituted a new policy: city counselor opinions would no longer be public.

It was a bad idea. The letters, very similar to attorney general opinions, which on the state’s website, are intended to guide lawmakers and bureaucrats when they make decisions. For instance, after the Post-Dispatch pointed out that some of the grant recipients were related to Alderman Shameem Clark Hubbard, who sits on the SLDC board, Neal Richardson, the organization’s president and CEO, sought an opinion from Hamilton about potential conflicts of interest.

What was the opinion? We don’t know because we can’t see it.

That’s bad public policy. Missouri has a Sunshine Law because government is supposed to be run like an open-book test, and elected officials are supposed to show their work. A dark cloud will hover over the SLDC program until it crawls into the sunlight.

Jones ends up owning these problems because after she vetoed Reed’s spending plan, the federal government changed its guidance. So Jones signed a revised version of the plan, and then promoted it as a potential lift for the North Side, with Reed fading into the background after he went to federal prison on fraud charges.

The SLDC controversy is a story we’ve seen before — a story that’s been repeated over time, with community development block grants or tax credits. The agency was set up by former Mayor Vincent Schoemehl in 1988 so the mayor could have more control with myriad economic development groups in the city. Over the years, much of its work has been hidden from public view. That’s the way mayors like it, and the Board of Aldermen generally turns a blind eye, except when controversy arises.

But there’s a better way, and Jones should be familiar with it. When she was in the Missouri Legislature, one of Gov. Jay Nixon’s first initiatives in 2009 was to reform the state’s fee offices. Those are the privately run facilities where we get our driver’s licenses and license plates. For decades, they were patronage plums, handed out by governors — Democrats and Republicans — to their donors and friends, changing hands every few years.

Nixon altered that, announcing a plan to bid out the offices. Lawmakers followed his lead. Now there’s a published grading system. The bids are public. There are no secrets.

SLDC could — and should — do things that way when it comes to public money. And the Board of Aldermen could pass a bill to make it happen. Somebody should ask Hamilton for a legal opinion on how to do it.

Just make sure it’s public.