The League of Women Voters of St. Louis will be moderating a candidate forum for those who seek to be elected Mayor of the City of St. Louis in the April 7, 2009 election. And for the first time, all four candidates — Francis Slay, Robb Cunningham, Elston McCowan and Maida Coleman — have confirmed they will attend.
The forum will be held on Monday, March 30th from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. at Central Library, the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library, located at 1301 Olive Street . This forum is co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters and the Downtown St. Louis Residents Association.
is there any possibility that some of that money could possibly go to Metro (you know, the bus service) since it’s about to put a lot of people out of work by cutting off quite a lot of service to the far reaches of West county?
I don’t work out that way, but I still think it’s a shame that this is happening!
and what’s up with no more buses going into downtown?
Posted by Diane L. | 23. Mar, 2009, 7:51 PMGo Senator Coleman! I’ll be there with bells on.
http://www.maida4mayor.com
Posted by STL Listener | 24. Mar, 2009, 12:20 AMPeter Downs—as usual—a good source for penetrating questions—maybe too difficult to use in a debate setting.
a sample, before I post his entire piece:
Slay
has shown nothing but incompetence in implementing what he calls ³good²
charter schools. The CAN! Academy, one of his pet projects, is an example.
Ignoring the many existing programs for high school dropouts in St. Louis,
Slay posted the following on his web site on August 22, 2007:
³A whole lot of people give up on low-income kids who drop out of high
schoolŠ
³I disagree. That¹s why my office worked so hard to convince the Can!
Academy people to open their first Missouri charter school in St. Louis.
³Four hundred City kids are now getting a second chance to achieve economic
independence ‹ and hope ‹ through education. Many of these kids have been
told they are failures. This school teaches them they “can” succeed.²
Less than nine months later the state education department shut the school
down because it was so bad, and begged the public schools to come in and
rescue the children who were left high-and-dry by CAN¹s failure.
Posted by kjoe | 24. Mar, 2009, 9:46 AMAs election day April 7 approaches in St. Louis, it is important to
take stock of our city¹s health and the quality of our leadership. The next
couple of years will be a tough time for cities and their mayors. It will
take creativity and a dedication to the people of St. Louis to safely
navigate the difficult challenges ahead.
Unfortunately, St. Louis has been weakened by eight years of rule by Francis
Slay, whose policies have corroded the very structures that support a
healthy city. Slay has undermined both neighborhoods and the city
government¹s ability to provided necessary public services, leaving us more
vulnerable to the economic crisis.
As a member of the elected public school board, I must address first his
continuing attack on neighborhoods via his attacks on public education. The
destructive effects of his intervention into the public school system in
2003 are now well documented: the fiscal damage caused by the creation of an
$80+ million debt to the operating budget of the schools; the academic
damage caused by the destruction of the district¹s curriculum department and
professional development that supported teaching; the exodus of families
with school-aged children from St. Louis as they fled the destruction of
public education; and the ongoing roll of school closings, which destabilize
neighborhoods and give the families that remain less reason to stay in St.
Louis. Most of the debt, which his interference created, is still with us,
acting like a ball and chain restraining any effort to improve schools. The
damage to teaching and curriculum will take years to repair. As for
stabilizing neighborhoods and attracting families back to St. Louis, only
time will tell how long that will take.
And how did Slay react to the destruction he had unleashed? His policy was
to leave it in place and send a message to parents that it is their fault if
they ³choose² to send their children to a ruined school, much like
homeowners are to blame if they didn¹t notice the way interest rates would
balloon on the home equity loans they took out. After all, they had
³choice.²
Slay¹s sole policy for public education after his disastrous intervention in
the public school board in 2003 was the policy of fostering charter schools.
Of course, charter schools as the sole policy for improving public
education, never made any sense, not even from a business sense. Charter
school policy in Missouri is based on the mythology of the free lunch. Any
competent business manager will tell you that to improve a business you have
to invest in improvement. Missouri¹s charter school policy is based on
taking money away from public schools so they can¹t invest in improvements.
It is as if legislators thought that public schools had squirreled away a
bunch of free money and charters were the key to unlocking that money for
school improvement. It is a policy based on mythology.
Another mistake in the state¹s charter school policy was in thinking that
exempting charter schools from regulation would make schools better. It was
like responding to salmonella poisonings and food safety scares by
eliminating food safety regulations and telling consumers that it is up to
them to pick safe food. Individual consumers can no more tell what really
goes on in a school than they can tell what really goes into the food they
eat or how safely it was prepared. We rely on government regulation to
guarantee a minimum level of quality and safety. And we have seen in food,
in banking and insurance, in investing, and in education, that when
regulation is lax, frauds, lies, and unsafe practices abound. While not
everyone is dishonest, some people are and they inevitably flock to areas
where oversight is lax and they can most easily perpetrate their frauds.
Underlying both the myth of free lunch and the fantasy of deregulation was a
more fundamental myth: the myth that all competition is magically healthy.
Our own history as a country teaches us again and again that unregulated
competition is a race to the bottom. Whether it is a race to depress living
standards by cutting wages and benefits, a race to eliminate environmental
and safety standards, or a race to cut quality in order to reap windfall
profits, competition can be very unhealthy. From Peanut Corporation of
America to Bernard Madoff to CAN! Academy, it is the public sector that
keeps the private sector honest, except when public sector authorities have
been corrupted by the private interests that they are supposed to oversee.
Even races and sports have rules to ensure fair competition.
None of this is to mean that charter schools could not have a role in
education, nor that some charter schools weren¹t started for good reasons
the Construction Career Center and the Lift for Life Academy come to mind as
two charter schools started by local groups to address needs overlooked by
public school and managed and operated locally but fly-by-night profiteers
and expensive failures have outnumbered the do-gooders.
Putting the strategic shortcomings of charter school policies aside, Slay
has shown nothing but incompetence in implementing what he calls ³good²
charter schools. The CAN! Academy, one of his pet projects, is an example.
Ignoring the many existing programs for high school dropouts in St. Louis,
Slay posted the following on his web site on August 22, 2007:
³A whole lot of people give up on low-income kids who drop out of high
schoolŠ
³I disagree. That¹s why my office worked so hard to convince the Can!
Academy people to open their first Missouri charter school in St. Louis.
³Four hundred City kids are now getting a second chance to achieve economic
independence ‹ and hope ‹ through education. Many of these kids have been
told they are failures. This school teaches them they “can” succeed.²
Less than nine months later the state education department shut the school
down because it was so bad, and begged the public schools to come in and
rescue the children who were left high-and-dry by CAN¹s failure. Regardless
of what one thinks of charter schools as the strategy for improving
education, Slay has shown an uncanny ability to back the worst of the worst.
The destruction he visited on public schools and the championing of bad
charter schools is only part of how Slay weakened the city¹s ability to
respond to the economic downturn. He also undermined the revenues the city
depends on to deliver services to residents.
Since 1986, the municipal government of St. Louis City has committed almost
$600 million to private developers through tax increment financing, better
known by the acronym TIF, according to the East-West Gateway Council of
Governments. The large majority of that has been committed since Slay became
mayor. St. Louis once was a small player in the TIF game in the region.
Under Slay it has become the largest player. St. Louis¹s total is exceeded
in the region only by the sum of the totals from St. Louis County and all of
its municipal governments.
According to the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, 80 percent of TIF
money has been committed to a losing economic development strategy:
promoting retail development. Despite all of the money committed to retail
development, retail sales were falling every year since 2000 even before the
retail crash late last year and retail employment was stagnant.
Slay wasn¹t alone in following that losing strategy area governments spend
some $2.5 billion to help retail developers, or an average of $370,000 for
each $18,000-a-year job they created but the city could not afford to lose
or waste as much money as the county. Instead of committing city resources
wisely, Slay committed them foolishly. The Schnuck¹s Market slated to open
downtown illustrates his waste. In November 2006, the operators of City
Grocers announced plans to move across the street and more than double the
size of their store and staff. In response, Slay engineered a deal to give
over $4 million in taxpayer subsidies to get another grocery company to open
a similarly sized store on the same block. The competing company was one of
his campaign contributors, Schnuck¹s Markets. After Slay announced that
deal, City Grocers cancelled its plans to expand. Instead of getting a
privately financed 16,000-square-foot grocery store on the block, Slay had
St. Louis taxpayers spend $4 million to get a 20,000-square-foot grocery
store. It seems to me that what St. Louis residents really got for their $4
million was nothing.
So far, deals like the one with Schnuck¹s have only cost the city and such
municipal services as schools, libraries, and parks $82 million, according
to East-West Gateway, but that means they will cost us another $400 million
in the years ahead.
The city already suffers in comparison with many suburban communities in the
level of services that city government provides. The commitment of tax
dollars to private developers will make it even harder to maintain even bare
bones services during the economic recession. I don¹t know if the city can
take another four years of that kind of ³leadership.²
The house of cards Slay created for St. Louis already is beginning to
wobble. Last year he had to ask citizens to raise sales taxes to save the
city from the results of his mismanagement of employee pension funds. Voters
raised taxes, but with the fall off in retail sales even that may not be
enough.
It is time for creative, dedicated, and honest leadership. That is why I
urge you to vote for Maida Coleman for mayor. Come see her this Wednesday,
March 25, at Rue 13 (1311 Washington Ave.), between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. Or
call her campaign office at 241.2009.
Sincerely,
Peter Downs
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