At the Friday, October 30th meeting of the Board of Aldermen, mine and Alderman Terry Kennedy’s (D-18th Ward) were the only NO votes on the massive 1,500-acre redevelopment deal known in the media as “NorthSide” and spearheaded by developer Paul McKee.

I took the opportunity Friday to explain why I could not support Mr. McKee’s proposal. Watch that video here:

In addition, I submitted the following statement for the official record of the Board of Aldermen:

Under Rule 47 of the Board of Aldermen Rules, Mr. French explains his vote with the following:

Alderman French voted NAY on Board Bills 218CS and 219CS because of the particular developer’s treatment of the community in the five years he has been assembling land in poor neighborhoods. With much respect to the co-sponsors of these bills, Alderwomen Griffin, Triplett, Young, and Davis, and Alderman Bosley, who have crafted a very good redevelopment deal with many new safeguards to protect the community moving forward and makes requirements of the developer to finally force him to be a responsible partner, Alderman French stated in his remarks on the floor that the unanimous passage of these bills would send the wrong message to future developers also planning projects on a similar scale. It is Alderman French’s position that the manner in which this developer has acquired and not maintained his hundreds of parcels actually does more to damage communities in the short run.

I was also interviewed on KMOX radio on Friday to discuss my vote. You can listen to that interview right here: Listen to Alderman French’s KMOX interview.

The statement below was delivered by SLPS representatives to the City of St. Louis TIF Commission for last night’s meeting regarding the developer Paul McKee’s $390M TIF request:

“The St. Louis Public School District, the Special Administrative Board and its appointees to the City of St. Louis Tax Increment Financing Commission fully recognize the importance of major economic development projects, including the proposal being discussed today, to the future of the City and the entire St. Louis region. We know that projects of this magnitude stimulate the local economy during development and after completion.

This project, specifically, will require a significant investment in public infrastructure – streets, sidewalks, sewer, water and school buildings. Renovated or newly constructed school buildings will be a necessary part of the public infrastructure investment for this project. This project will attract new families to the area, and their children will need schools. For this reason, the St. Louis Public Schools, the Special Administrative Board and its appointees to the City of St. Louis Tax Increment Financing Commission encourage this commission to fully support the use of infrastructure funds within the TIF Zone for renovation or new construction of St. Louis Public School District facilities. We encourage this Commission to recommend that an agreement between the St. Louis Public Schools and the developer for new construction or substantial renovation of school buildings be a part of the Commission’s final project plan before it is submitted to the Board of Aldermen for approval.”

Backers of McKee’s project are attempting a TIF Commission shake up days before next week’s important meeting. SAB may replace David Jackson.

Here’s the story by Audrey Spalding of the Show-Me Institute…

David Jackson says he has been asked to resign from the city commission that will consider developer Paul McKee’s proposed $8.1 billion development in north Saint Louis and whether to award McKee $398 million in tax increment financing (TIF) money. Jackson is one of 11 members, and has served on the commission for a number of years.

Jackson, who is also on the Saint Louis Public School District’s Board of Education, said that a member of the district’s Special Administrative Board (SAB) asked him to step down. He wouldn’t specify who.

This news is controversial because Jackson is seen as more sympathetic to critics of the proposed north side development. In August, he spoke at a TIF workshop held by the North Side Community Benefits Alliance, a group that has opposed provisions of the proposed development. In that same month, he also voted to move the commission’s hearing of the development to 6 p.m. rather than 8 a.m., a move that might enable more working people to attend the hearing.

“I was just taken aback because one of the things the SAB did when they took over the school district was that they reappointed me to the TIF commission,” Jackson said.

“I had a relationship with two of their members,” he said. “And that it comes a week and a half before the north side renovation TIF meeting.” But Jackson would not say explicitly that the request for his resignation had anything to do with the proposed development.

Alderman Antonio French, who first posted notice that Jackson was being asked to resign, broke it — how else? — through his Twitter profile.

“Backers of McKee’s project are attempting a TIF Commission shake up days before next week’s important meeting,” he wrote. “SAB may replace David Jackson.” French, when reached by phone, said that Jackson had told him personally that he had been asked to resign.

On Sept. 23 at 6 p.m., the TIF Commission will hear McKee’s pitch. Jackson plans to be there as a commissioner, and said he won’t submit a letter of resignation as asked.

Though he can be removed by the SAB, Jackson says there is a state law that says TIF commission members must remain until a TIF project is submitted to its governing body.

In this case, he said it means that “I should remain until the NorthSide Renovation project is submitted to the Board of Aldermen.”

When contacted, Richard Gaines, one of the three members of the SAB, was surprised that any such allegations were made. He said that Jackson had not been asked to resign, and that his review was not related to the development.

“David Jackson, as well as all other commissioners, comes up for review every two years,” he said.

“I called David Jackson personally to ask if he wanted to stay,” Gaines said.

“This sounds like some diabolical scheme,” he said. “And I resent that.”.

As a young girl laid in her bed, butterflies swarmed in her belly with anticipation of the first day of school that awaits when she opens her eyes. A freshman no more, young Shaneick Golden would be starting her sophomore year at the V.

But her dreams of walking the halls of Vashon were violently interrupted when a loud noise and a sharp pain opened the 15-year-old’s eyes. A bullet pierced her back as she slept on her living room couch. By nothing less than the grace of God, the hot metal stopped short of her heart and lodged tight in her ribs — too close, the doctors say, to safely remove. So when young Golden does finally make it to school for her first day, she will carry with her, inside her, a bullet and a reminder that in her neighborhood there is no safe place from the terror of the gunmen that run the streets of north St. Louis.

My story today is not about the violence that is all too common in our city, and which has unfortunately defined St. Louis for many, many people. My story today is about the response to that senseless violence, a response that is too common, and which has unfortunately defined St. Louis for many, many people.

“They don’t care. Point blank,” says a neighbor of mine, not specifically about Golden’s shooting, but whenever we discuss the city’s response to the violence that plagues our neighborhood.

“They don’t give a fuck unless it happens to them, in their neighborhoods,” he says.

If you believe the responses to the story of Golden’s shooting on the daily newspaper’s website, you’d have to agree with my neighbor’s pessimistic assessment.

“This is a cultural problem wherein thug behavior is lauded and cooperation with the authorities is frowned upon,” writes “CrabbyAbby” at STLToday.com. “Until the residents of these neighborhoods rise up united against thugs, gangs, druggies, etc. and let them know they will report the criminal, no longer be intimitated or paid off with dirty money, and take back their neighborhoods, these daily shootings will continue.”

“Rise up against the thugs”? CrabbyAbby is expressing a point of view that is common among people who do not live in these areas. It is a view that is often expressed in the comments section of this website too when I write about city violence. It is the view that northside violence is northsiders’ problem and exists because northsiders don’t take control of (and responsibility for) their neighborhoods and their violent neighbors.

This view is both ignorant and offensive. In hearing it, I can imagine how the average Iraqi feels when he hears American leaders on television saying that Iraqis need to get their act together and get a functioning Democracy in place ASAP, that they need to hurry up and get their infrastructure rebuilt so the country has 24-hour electricity, that they need to hurry up and end the government corruption so aid money directly benefits the poor and not corrupt politicians.

The hypocrisy is laughable. In demanding these people take full and rapid responsibility, the American pundits take none. The same is true here.

The security situation in the Hyde Park, O’Fallon Park, and Fairground Park neighborhoods (and many others), is more a result of City government and police department policies than it is the fault of the Golden family or families like theirs.

FACT: The City of St. Louis is the owner of more drug houses than any drug dealer in St. Louis. When it comes to slumlords, Paul McKee doesn’t hold a candle to the City’s Land Reutilization Authority. In the 3rd Ward, where Hyde Park is located and where Shaneick was shot, the city is holding onto entire blocks of vacant, unsafe buildings. Land banking, they call it. And what is happening inside these buildings between when city employees come to cut the grass every four to six weeks? The drug trade.

FACT: The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has surrendered parts of this city to drug dealers and thugs. What would happen if I drove my 2009 Cadillac Escalade over the curb and onto a grassy hill in Forest Park? What would happen if I blasted the newest Young Jeezy track as the summer sun reflected off my 30-inch rims and a steady stream of people made their way to and from my passenger side window? You know what would happen.

Not since the worst days in this city’s history have drug dealers behaved that brazenly in the Central West End, since before there was a “Central West End”. But there are parts of the city that are reminiscent of “Hamsterdam” from HBO’s “The Wire”, where drug activity is so open that the lack of police activity sends a clear message to the good residents that live in these neighborhoods: “You’re on your own.”

You’re on your own. That’s the underlying message relayed from the comments of “CrabbyAbby” on the Post’s website, and also in comments from Mayor Francis Slay and former Police Chief Joe Mokwa when they voiced outrage over St. Louis being labeled as “most dangerous” in national surveys. That’s just “some neighborhoods”, they say. Surely not the neighborhoods of their constituents.

But what about the good people who do live in these neighborhoods? They are, by the way, the majority of people living in these neighborhoods. For them — for us — St. Louis is most dangerous. Many of them vote. Many of them pay taxes. Many of them don’t want their kids to live their whole lives in these neighborhoods. And none of them want to see their kids die.

What responsibility does a government take in defending its people against domestic terrorists like the young, armed men that control some of our northern streets?

What responsibility does a government take for a girl like 15 year-old Shaneick Golden, who couldn’t even make it to attend her first day at her underperforming high school because she lives in a war zone just 3 miles from City Hall?

What responsibility? Ideally, a lot.