CLAYTON • The official in the administration of St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger who negotiated the county’s long-term commitment to rent office space at the former Northwest Plaza in St. Ann testified on Tuesday that it was a great boon for the county and he wouldn’t do anything differently if he had the chance.
Anthony Badino told the County Council that in the several months leading up to the Council’s signing the lease in July 2016, he worked under Stenger’s direction without any other project in mind for relocating county offices, serving as the intermediary as the mall’s owners, Robert and P. David Glarner, proposed lease terms and Stenger pushed back for lower costs.
Stenger has also previously said he intervened in the negotiations with the Glarners to get a better deal for the county, and that donations they made to his campaign did not influence his decision.
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Badino testified the administration was convinced “this was the place†if the mall’s owners agreed to customize the space to the county’s specifications.
The testimony Tuesday came in a hearing that is part of a series directed by Councilman Ernie Trakas, R-south St. Louis County. The hearings are focused on the tightly held property selection and negotiations, run by Badino, which resulted in an unprecedented 20-year lease of 150,000 square feet at the site, now known as the Crossings at Northwest.
The deal will cost county taxpayers between $69 million and $77 million. The owners of the site have donated $365,000 to Stenger’s campaign.
The Stenger administration initially touted the deal as saving taxpayers $10 million, but a Post-Dispatch investigation revealed that wasn’t true. County Council members have said that members of Stenger’s staff misled them by failing to provide a true picture of the project’s cost.
Trakas obtained hundreds of pages of internal emails between county employees who would have normally been involved with a major office relocation, and who expressed alarm about the secretive process kept out of their hands and controlled by Badino.
On Tuesday, Badino said those employees did provide valuable input before the decision to go to the Crossings and in the aftermath of the council signing the lease.
He said he was sorry if feelings were hurt, but said those employees were upset because they didn’t think the owners could make good on the customizations to the space before the county occupied them. And, he said, they were wrong.
Badino did admit one miscalculation on the deal. He said he was unaware at the time that the county would be on the hook for such a high tax bill — a cost factor that has made the project much more costly — although he turned the blame back on his critics in what he called the county bureaucracy.
Badino said there had been an opportunity to pay a flat $1 per square foot for taxes, but county employees were concerned that would be overpaying, and that the true liability was less than half of that. But it ended up being more than $2 per square foot and could grow much higher, the newspaper found.
“That was an instance where I regret, unfortunately, taking the advice of the public works staff,†he said. “You’ll have to ask the assessor’s office why they decided†the tax assessment would be much higher.
Badino managed Stenger’s 2014 campaign prior to taking a job in his administration as special projects director. Trakas pointed to $43,000 that Stenger’s campaign paid Badino during the first seven months of 2015 while Badino was involved in the effort to search for properties for the office relocation. About half of that money came on the day after the mall owners created a limited liability company that would make donations to Stenger.
Badino testified on Tuesday that he had no idea the payments had been recorded in 2015, and said that they consisted for the most part of a $15,000 bonus for winning the primary and $20,000 for winning the election. Stenger has also previously said the payments were among several his campaign made months after his victory when the campaign was better funded, and had nothing to do with the lease negotiations.