Unity is hard.
Those three words appeared in the first of that ran on this page starting a little more than a year ago under the banner of building “A Greater St. Louis.†In that series we called for a new unity movement in this, one of the most divided metropolitan regions in the country, if not the world.
That movement has begun to move.
The seeds of division were planted in 1876, when St. Louis City split from St. Louis County. Since then the county has been subdivided into 90 municipalities. The city and county now have 82 municipal courts and 58 police departments. We are defined by division — between black and white, between haves and have nots, between those who could put gates around their communities and those who lived on dead-end roads.
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On Aug. 9, when Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, when young African-Americans took to the streets to protest police brutality and conditions of poverty, the movement began to stir.
It’s not what we expected. It’s not what anybody expected.
But it’s real.
Look at what’s happening in St. Louis, regardless of how you feel about either Mr. Wilson or Mr. Brown. The Missouri Supreme Court, the Missouri Legislature and the Department of Justice scofflaw municipal courts and rent-a-cop police departments that have trampled on the civil rights of citizens for decades.
Professional police officers are pushing back against that this corrupt system has forced them to meet. Those lawyers and municipal politicians who have benefited or profited from the system are agreeing to previously unimaginable changes because they see the writing on the wall, and they want to hold on to their piece of the pie.
But at what cost?
According to a study published last month by the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the economic cost of division in St. Louis, or any metropolitan area, is massive. In the OECD affirms what experience has taught us: Fragmented government in metropolitan areas is harmful to healthy economic growth.
Governments work against each other instead of with each other, as we have seen in municipal tax incentive battles over Wal-Marts and other big-box stores. Long before the nonprofit organization started looking at the costs of St. Louis’ division, the East-West Council of Governments had produced on how divided government was hurting St. Louis in land-use, transportation and economic opportunity.
The OECD puts meat on those bones. It found that if you double the number of municipalities per 100,000 people in a metropolitan area, regional labor productivity falls by up to 6 percent. The report found also what has become well documented in St. Louis: Fractured government aggravates income inequality and racial division, it increases the percentage of sprawl, it reduces the gross domestic product of a region.
Even those who are part of the municipal system in St. Louis know it’s broken.
The attorneys who are part of the corrupt court cabal outlined in the Department of Justice report are now agreeing to changes that have been advocated by legal scholars since the 1960s. They’re just hoping the multi-court municipal system survives. Mayors of some small St. Louis County municipalities recognize that the numbers — 90, 82 and 58 — are too high. They all think the cities that must dissolve are next door, or over there, or someone else’s problem.
In fact, the division of St. Louis is everybody’s problem. It’s costing us money. It’s costing us dignity. It’s costing us lives.
It is time to change. The movement lives.
Every 10 years in this country, including right here in St. Louis, our elected officials change boundaries for legislative districts, for boards of aldermen, for congressmen and state senators because people move. Cities change. Population patterns shift. And yet, in St. Louis, too many of our leaders refuse to apply the same concepts to city boundaries, school district boundaries and other arbitrary lines that divide us. In some cases, they were drawn in part to keep out people who didn’t look like the people who drew the lines.
“Often, administrative boundaries within metropolitan areas are based on centuries-old borders that do not correspond to today’s patterns of human activity,†the OECD report notes.
The lines that divide St. Louis must be erased.
About a year before Michael Brown was killed, this page advocated for a , one that cancelled the “Great Divorce of 1876.†Potentially all the existing municipal boundaries could be erased, creating a unified government that could make a great city work again. No more Fergusons. No more Jennings. No more Wildwood or Chesterfield or Fenton. No more city within a county next to a county that should be part of the same city.
One St. Louis. One people. One future.
Here is what St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay said about the city-county unification idea at the time:
“The more people hear about the idea, the more likely it becomes,†he said. “There isn’t an issue facing the city or St. Louis County that we couldn’t address sooner, more effectively, and at a greater savings to taxpayers if we weren’t two different county governments.â€
Nobody — absolutely nobody — would design St. Louis today with 90 cities, two counties, 82 municipal courts, and 58 police departments. It simply wouldn’t happen. So why do we put up with it when all the evidence says it is costing us in so many ways?
Erase the lines. End the division. Design something that works.
Design a greater St. Louis.
