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A physician by trade, Ross is also for Washington University. Now he is one of three St. Louis area residents appointed to a new task force with a daunting charge: Come up with a plan — the plan — to remake government in St. Louis.

Momentum has built toward this day, ever since the nonprofit came on the scene in the fall of 2013 and started studying the inefficiencies of a government apparatus highlighted by its major city being separated from the county that bears the same name. Folks have called this amorphous concept all sorts of things: Merger. Reunification. Combination. Marriage. The time has come to figure out specifically what to call it and ask voters to approve it.

It won’t be easy, Ross said. He has been at the center of such regional discussions before, from the creation of the St. Louis Regional Health Commission to the attempts to keep a regional hospital alive to serve north St. Louis residents. Getting people in St. Louis to think regionally, particularly when the beneficiary of such thought might be somebody other than you, has been a challenge since, well, since the that created a divided St. Louis.

But Ross is optimistic.

“I’ve been talking on the streets for 30 years about finding a solution to our division,� Ross said. “Most of the people I talk to say: ‘Why is it taking so long?’�

In St. Louis County, a government amalgam of 89 municipalities, 54 police departments and 23 fire districts, change is slow. And that’s not even counting the city of St. Louis, which stands alone and apart from the county that shares its name and includes what once was the rest of the outline of one of America’s great cities.

Over the next several months, Ross and his fellow task force members, Spire CEO Suzanne Sitherwood and Bryan Cave attorney and partner Arindam Kar, will meet with residents of the St. Louis region and help craft the Great Reconciliation.

ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ will face many obstacles in a region that does division better than unity.

The biggest might be that even the politicians who on Monday stood in front of the Better Together banner and heaped praise on the new task force can’t yet bring themselves to fully embrace the unity the task force is charged with defining.

Mayor Lyda Krewson comes closest, having endorsed a “combination� or a “remarriage� between the city and the county, which sounds an awful lot like a full city-county merger or unigov or combined metro government. County Executive Steve Stenger is mostly in the same place he has always been, though he says he has come to appreciate Better Together, which is funded primarily by political donor and activist Rex Sinquefield.

“I’m not really here to endorse a particular path forward until we see what options are available,� Stenger said.

The options are obvious to anybody who’s been paying attention. They’re all laid out on another nonprofit website, called , run by Chesterfield native Jake Hollander:

• There’s the borough plan, which unites the city and county, disincorporates the county’s municipalities, and creates one city government fed by nine boroughs, with individual mayors and councils. This is a model similar to New York.

• There’s Metro St. Louis, where the city re-enters the county and most municipalities are kept in place, but key services such as public safety and economic development are controlled at the county level. This model is similar to Nashville, Tenn., and Louisville, Ky.

• And there’s unigov, where the city re-enters the county and one umbrella city-county government is formed, similar to the Indianapolis model.

The challenge for Ross and his colleagues will not be to reinvent the wheel, but to fill in the specifics, and get over the inherent “fear of change� that Ross says is a St. Louis staple. The task force will need to unite those in the city who don’t trust Sinquefield, those in the county who disdain the city, and those who fear that the sudden close relationship between Krewson, Stenger and their mutual advisers is political cover for something yet unseen.

It’s time to do “something different,� said Better Together Executive Director Nancy Rice on Monday.

Indeed it is. Fear and division have failed St. Louis for too long.

Unity awaits.