Former Civic Progress Leader Makes Case for St. Louis City-County Merger

Date Posted: February 10, 2026

Posted In: Discussion,

From St. Louis Business Journal: Editor’s note: The debate over whether the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County should combine continues to flood into my inbox. It started with a proposal by St. Louis attorney and developer Jarrad Holst to put the city-county merger to a vote to combine the governments in name only, while enabling the creation of a board that would approach the actual consolidation methodically rather than all at once. Shortly after, former Frontenac Mayor Kate Hatfield penned a rebuttal critical of a merger while offering her own ideas. This week, we’re sharing a response by Tom Santel, the former president of now-defunct regional business group Civic Progress. –Erik Siemers, editor

I’d like to respond to former Frontenac Mayor Kate Hatfield’s Jan. 21 letter which criticized the idea of a City-County merger in St. Louis. In her letter, Ms. Hatfield made three arguments: 1) The St. Louis region contains many unique civic and cultural institutions and resources that other metros do not possess; 2) Other regions which have consolidated face significant health and education disparities; 3) Collaboration is preferable to consolidation.

There is one issue that Ms. Hatfield did not address and it is the main reason many of us support a City-County merger: Unlike the other metros she cites, our region’s population growth is stagnant while theirs is strong. The chart on this page illustrates how the populations of those metro areas grew substantially more than St. Louis over a recent 10-year period.

I agree with Ms. Hatfield that St. Louis has many unique attributes like Forest Park, the Arch, major research universities and health care systems, just to name a few. With assets like these we should be attracting many more people to our metro region, but we are not and this is very troubling.

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