Better Together Debate Tackles Local Vote, City ‘Bailout’ and Police Assignments
Date Posted: February 28, 2019
Posted In: Discussion, Regionalism,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Representatives from the pro-merger advocacy group Better Together and the Municipal League of Metro St. Louis, two groups with strikingly disparate views regarding regional government consolidation, traded barbs on Thursday in their first head-to-head debate on a subject that could shape the future of St. Louis.
Pat Kelly, executive director of the Municipal League, and Dave Leipholtz, research director at Better Together, met on the Inside the Post-Dispatch podcast. It was the first time since the release of the Better Together report in January that the two groups have debated the proposal in public.
Over the hour-long conversation, the two exposed key parts of each other’s plans, some of which have not been discussed publicly.
Leipholtz acknowledged that Better Together could have added a requirement for a local vote, even to a state constitutional amendment. He rejected the idea of a city “bailout,” but agreed that the new government was aiming to pay down city debt within the first 10 years, something it couldn’t do without saving and tax-sharing from the merger. And he agreed that the Better Together plan would indeed shift resources — police officers, for instance — from the wealthy to the needy.
“To most places, that’s a good thing,” Leipholtz said. “You put police officers where you want to address crime the most. And as novel as that is in St. Louis, that’s how most regions just operate.”
At the same time, Leipholtz painted municipal officials as leaders who have repeatedly failed to act.