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Folks,
Kevin Horrigan of the Post was not born and raised in this area. Neither was I, or a few others I've talked with. The one thing that ALL St. Louisians seem to have in common, is their lack of trust for people who weren't born and reared here.
The St. Louis area has a lot of good things going for it, IMO. I love the central location. The weather here doesn't get too extreme. There's some pretty good fishing spots within a few hours drive. I like the Cardinals. And, there are a few other nice attractions.
However, this area has a problem IMO, with a lack of a comprehensive "regional" approach to planning for its future. Whther it's the city, county, east side, St. Charles Co, and so on. It seems aeac of these entities are only interested in their own needs, not the needs of the entire region.
Please take a few minutes to read, and then ponder what Kevin Horrigan is trying to convey.
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URBAN DEVELOPMENT: St. Louis, we've got a problem
By Kevin Horrigan
04/04/2004
The city has plenty of good reasons to sing the blues.
In Ron Howard's 1995 movie "Apollo 13," an oxygen tank explodes aboard a moon flight. There's pandemonium inside Mission Control. Nothing is working right. The flight director, Gene Kranz, lights a cigarette and says to one of his controllers:
"Can we review our status here, Sy? Let's look at this thing from a standpoint of status. Uh, what have we got on the spacecraft that's good?"
Sy, desperation on his face, turns to his console and says, "I'll get back to you, Gene."
On the ninth or 10th viewing of this movie, it suddenly became clear: It's about St. Louis.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Vince C. Schoemehl Jr., the city's former mayor and its youngest gray eminence, gave a speech calling for a major effort to fix St. Louis' problems. "Failure is not an option," Schoemehl said, stealing another line from "Apollo 13."
Schoemehl, who's now president of Grand Center Inc. and a member of the city's School Board, told the Missouri Growth Association that the city has been "sliding toward irrelevance" since the 1904 World's Fair. The "morbid fascination" with the past makes us complacent about current problems, he said, mentioning the city schools and Lambert Airport.
He was right, as far as he went. The schools are a wreck, having been run for decades mainly as a jobs program for adults rather than as an education system for kids. And the business community is apoplectic about Lambert, which lost its hub status and half its flights in November, just as the costs of a billion-dollar expansion were about to come due.
But as we look around Mission Control, there's not much else on the spacecraft that's looking good, either.
Growth is mostly internal, new suburbs stealing from old ones. Big employers have left, and getting back and forth to the jobs that are left is getting more difficult. Six months after the half-billion-dollar Cross County MetroLink line is completed in mid-2006, Metro will run out of money to operate it. That means either a tax increase or severe route cuts in a system that can't get people where they want to go.
Transit works best when huge numbers of people work in one place, i.e., downtown. But now St. Charles County has as many jobs as downtown St. Louis. Between downtown and say, Winghaven, are a million people and hundreds of thousands of jobs (many of them built with tax incentives on floodplains) linked only sporadically, if at all, by the transit system.
That puts more people and cars on the highways, which, by the way, won't be getting better any time soon because the Legislature spends a lot of the transportation money generated by the St. Louis region in outstate Missouri.
The state spends more money on its Grape and Wine Development Program ($1.3 million) than on public transit in St. Louis ($1.2 million).
Luckily, there's no reason to go downtown, according to the high-priced consultant hired by the Regional Chamber and Growth Association (a booster group!) who came to town and said, "Your downtown sucks."
Great. Thirty years and billions of dollars in tax credits and incentives, new stadiums and arenas and hotels, and the guy says it sucks. Hotel operators are griping about the convention business, which was going to be downtown's salvation, particularly because casino gambling on the riverfront was going to be such a boon. The unlikely solution: more and bigger casinos.
In his speech, Schoemehl said part of the solution was revamping the city's charter to put a strong mayor in charge. But I heard a city alderman say the other night that people were moving into the city, not out, and that the tax base was growing. This was the same alderman who allegedly urinated into a trash can during an aldermanic session a couple of years ago, so she knows what lures jobs and people.
People who live in the county shouldn't feel too smug. I heard the county executive and his director of administration say a couple of weeks ago that the county is now "built out," and it's becoming a strain to provide a decent level of services.
So what have we got on the spacecraft that's good? Well, it's a darn nice place to live, and the Cardinals open their season tomorrow. Legislators are all over the life-or-death issue of gay marriage.
Failure may not be an option, but it's not anything people seem too worked up about, either.
And how 'bout that 1904 World's Fair, huh?
E-mail: [email protected]
Kevin Horrigan of the Post was not born and raised in this area. Neither was I, or a few others I've talked with. The one thing that ALL St. Louisians seem to have in common, is their lack of trust for people who weren't born and reared here.
The St. Louis area has a lot of good things going for it, IMO. I love the central location. The weather here doesn't get too extreme. There's some pretty good fishing spots within a few hours drive. I like the Cardinals. And, there are a few other nice attractions.
However, this area has a problem IMO, with a lack of a comprehensive "regional" approach to planning for its future. Whther it's the city, county, east side, St. Charles Co, and so on. It seems aeac of these entities are only interested in their own needs, not the needs of the entire region.
Please take a few minutes to read, and then ponder what Kevin Horrigan is trying to convey.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
URBAN DEVELOPMENT: St. Louis, we've got a problem
By Kevin Horrigan
04/04/2004
The city has plenty of good reasons to sing the blues.
In Ron Howard's 1995 movie "Apollo 13," an oxygen tank explodes aboard a moon flight. There's pandemonium inside Mission Control. Nothing is working right. The flight director, Gene Kranz, lights a cigarette and says to one of his controllers:
"Can we review our status here, Sy? Let's look at this thing from a standpoint of status. Uh, what have we got on the spacecraft that's good?"
Sy, desperation on his face, turns to his console and says, "I'll get back to you, Gene."
On the ninth or 10th viewing of this movie, it suddenly became clear: It's about St. Louis.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Vince C. Schoemehl Jr., the city's former mayor and its youngest gray eminence, gave a speech calling for a major effort to fix St. Louis' problems. "Failure is not an option," Schoemehl said, stealing another line from "Apollo 13."
Schoemehl, who's now president of Grand Center Inc. and a member of the city's School Board, told the Missouri Growth Association that the city has been "sliding toward irrelevance" since the 1904 World's Fair. The "morbid fascination" with the past makes us complacent about current problems, he said, mentioning the city schools and Lambert Airport.
He was right, as far as he went. The schools are a wreck, having been run for decades mainly as a jobs program for adults rather than as an education system for kids. And the business community is apoplectic about Lambert, which lost its hub status and half its flights in November, just as the costs of a billion-dollar expansion were about to come due.
But as we look around Mission Control, there's not much else on the spacecraft that's looking good, either.
Growth is mostly internal, new suburbs stealing from old ones. Big employers have left, and getting back and forth to the jobs that are left is getting more difficult. Six months after the half-billion-dollar Cross County MetroLink line is completed in mid-2006, Metro will run out of money to operate it. That means either a tax increase or severe route cuts in a system that can't get people where they want to go.
Transit works best when huge numbers of people work in one place, i.e., downtown. But now St. Charles County has as many jobs as downtown St. Louis. Between downtown and say, Winghaven, are a million people and hundreds of thousands of jobs (many of them built with tax incentives on floodplains) linked only sporadically, if at all, by the transit system.
That puts more people and cars on the highways, which, by the way, won't be getting better any time soon because the Legislature spends a lot of the transportation money generated by the St. Louis region in outstate Missouri.
The state spends more money on its Grape and Wine Development Program ($1.3 million) than on public transit in St. Louis ($1.2 million).
Luckily, there's no reason to go downtown, according to the high-priced consultant hired by the Regional Chamber and Growth Association (a booster group!) who came to town and said, "Your downtown sucks."
Great. Thirty years and billions of dollars in tax credits and incentives, new stadiums and arenas and hotels, and the guy says it sucks. Hotel operators are griping about the convention business, which was going to be downtown's salvation, particularly because casino gambling on the riverfront was going to be such a boon. The unlikely solution: more and bigger casinos.
In his speech, Schoemehl said part of the solution was revamping the city's charter to put a strong mayor in charge. But I heard a city alderman say the other night that people were moving into the city, not out, and that the tax base was growing. This was the same alderman who allegedly urinated into a trash can during an aldermanic session a couple of years ago, so she knows what lures jobs and people.
People who live in the county shouldn't feel too smug. I heard the county executive and his director of administration say a couple of weeks ago that the county is now "built out," and it's becoming a strain to provide a decent level of services.
So what have we got on the spacecraft that's good? Well, it's a darn nice place to live, and the Cardinals open their season tomorrow. Legislators are all over the life-or-death issue of gay marriage.
Failure may not be an option, but it's not anything people seem too worked up about, either.
And how 'bout that 1904 World's Fair, huh?
E-mail: [email protected]
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