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ST. LOUIS — Top city officials are pushing a plan to put the vast majority of the Rams relocation settlement — about $277 million — into a series of funds dedicated to fixing streets and water pipes, developing affordable housing and small businesses, and trying to reduce the cost of child care and college education for city families.

Officials cast the move as their plan to turn the loss of the city’s NFL team and the windfall it yielded into fuel for solutions to the city’s most pressing problems, with benefits for every resident.

In a draft bill set to be filed later this week, officials talk about the child care and scholarship plans as ways to bring families back to a city that lost a quarter of its school-age population from 2010 to 2020. They’re hoping the money for infrastructure, housing and business grants will bring back residents after decades of flight. And they’re adding money to help pay city workers to get degrees or learn new skills, which would boost recruiting and help with staffing shortages that have hobbled city services in recent years.

“From Delmar to Dutchtown to Downtown, every neighborhood deserves to benefit from this investment,” Mayor Tishaura O. Jones said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Jones declined to comment further Tuesday. Jones and Aldermanic President Megan Green are scheduled to hold a press conference on the bill Wednesday morning.

The plan shrugs off business leaders who pushed hard for more immediate spending focused more tightly on infrastructure and development, with $100 million earmarked for downtown and $130 million for struggling neighborhoods north and south. Jason Hall, the outgoing leader of Greater St. Louis, Inc., the region’s main business lobby, promised the private sector would match the investment downtown. But key officials were skeptical.

Hall did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

But Alderwoman Pam Boyd, who is sponsoring a bill following Greater St. Louis’s proposal, blasted the new plan.

“They’re throwing money everywhere, but they’re not trying to collaborate with anybody,” she said.

Regardless, the proposal from Jones and Green, two of the city’s three most powerful officials, marks a likely turning point in a three-year debate that began almost immediately after the city settled with the NFL for $790 million in late 2021.

In November 2022, St. Louis, St. Louis County and the authority that owns the Dome at America’s Center divvied up the $519 million remaining after the attorneys’ cut. And aldermen have spent much of the interim surveying residents, debating ideas and holding hearings with experts to sound them out.

The plan filed Tuesday borrows liberally from the results of those surveys, which said residents’ top priorities were fixing water mains, making streets safer, increasing pay for city workers and reducing the cost of child care. It also builds on several initiatives officials are paying for with federal pandemic aid, like a long-awaited plan to repave long stretches of main streets, increased appropriations to the city's Affordable Housing Commission, and a troubled program sending grants to small businesses and nonprofits on the city's North Side.

The plan, which Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier will carry at the board, puts the largest chunks of money, $70 million and $60 million, into endowments for building housing and fixing streets and sidewalks, two broadly popular ideas in a city that could use help with both.

Another $40 million would go into a pot for the city’s water system, which is struggling with a maintenance backlog after going more than a decade without a rate increase until last year. About $37 million would be made available to subsidize childcare for city residents, with first priority given to parents who are city workers.

The last $70 million would be split between three other priorities: paying for city workers to go back to school or get additional training, helping city high school graduates pay for college or trade school, and building up struggling neighborhoods, perhaps with grants to businesses or neighborhood organizations.

Officials are hoping to get more bang for their buck by putting the money into investment funds, inviting the private sector to donate to the causes, and protecting the principal of the funds dedicated to housing, neighborhood development and child care.

Any grants from those funds would have to come out of interest gained on the principal. Officials could dig into principal for loans to build housing or to expand a neighborhood business, but those would have to be paid back into the funds over time.