Editor's note: A story on Megan Green, the other candidate for president of the Board of Alderman, published earlier this week.
ST. LOUIS — In many ways, Jack Coatar is a model political candidate.
He’s young, energetic, amiable, savvy. He’s worked his way up, from college kid volunteer to downtown alderman, impressing the right people in between. And on Tuesday, he’s gunning for a promotion, to aldermanic president, boasting a slew of heavyweight endorsements and classic messaging: He’ll fix the roads, pick up the trash and put more cops on the beat.
But there’s a problem. Middle-of-the-road, go-along-to-get-along politics have had a hard time these past few years. Progressive Democrats, galvanized by the Ferguson protests, have seized the initiative, promising to do more than police and potholes. They want to fight crime with social services, reroute development tax breaks to affordable housing, and do more to tackle the city’s racial inequities.
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And they’ve been winning. First it was seats on the board, then the mayor’s office. And now, Alderman Megan Green, Coatar’s opponent on Nov. 8, is looking to add another big win.
Coatar’s allies, including former Mayor Francis Slay and former Gov. Jay Nixon, say it’s time to get back to basics: Trash pickup nearly came to a halt this summer. Callers to 911 are still getting put on hold. And business leaders are calling for more police, not fewer.
Coatar, allies say, is the right man to fix the problems. He’s a straight shooter, they say, and someone who can get votes together. He’s a new father who cares deeply about making ºüÀêÊÓƵ a better place for his kid. And he can be progressive, they say, but the everyday stuff comes first.
“This election is about two things — safety and trash,†Nixon said. “And I think he’s right on both. It’s about whether you can run the damn city. Can it be done? Of course it can.â€
Coatar has spent the campaign hammering away at those basics.
He has promised to grow a shrinking police force and shore up the city’s corps of dispatchers and trash truck drivers. He’s said he’ll replicate his ward’s development success throughout the city. And he said he’s got the skills to get things done, pointing to endorsements from fellow aldermen on both sides of Delmar Boulevard.
Dressing up as Donald Rumsfeld
No one remembers exactly when Coatar first caught the politics bug — not even Coatar himself.
Maybe it came from his uncle, who served as chief of staff to the president of the Illinois Senate. Maybe it came from his father, a successful salesman who knew how to pitch an idea.
His father, Joe Coatar, just knows it started early. “He always had an inkling,†he said.
When Jack was 11, President Bill Clinton came to the Chicago suburbs, where Coatar grew up, for a campaign rally. Somehow Jack and a friend got in. He loved it.
“I liked the characters,†he said. “I liked the crowds. I liked the show.â€
He liked watching C-SPAN too, especially when they cut away from Washington to show the British Prime Minister’s Questions, the famously boisterous weekly question-and-answer sessions between U.K. leaders and their colleagues. “I love the rough-and-tumble of parliamentary politics,†Coatar said recently. “You have to know your stuff and debate, every day.â€
He had other interests, too: Swimming. Diving. Baseball. Golf. Friends say he’s still pretty good on the fairways.
But young Jack was also taken in by the 2000 presidential election, and then the Florida recount saga, and then the extraordinary Supreme Court decision deciding the race for George W. Bush. And in high school, after he moved to suburban Kansas City, he started getting really involved, protesting the Iraq invasion and supporting Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s insurgent campaign for president against the war, and then volunteering for U.S. Sen. John Kerry after Dean dropped out of the race.
One of Coatar’s high school history teachers, Tom Niermann, said Coatar’s enthusiasm was obvious in the classroom. He relished discussions on the latest news from Washington or Baghdad and the role of government in society. And, Niermann said, he stood out for his open-mindedness, always welcoming new ideas from other students — and for his good sense of humor.
One Halloween, he came to school dressed up as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who masterminded the Iraq invasion. He told teachers it was the scariest costume he could think of.
‘You have to be fearless’
After graduation, he attended ºüÀêÊÓƵ University, which was near the Kerry campaign’s local headquarters. Coatar quickly became a regular.
“He was one of those kids that really showed up,†said Brian Wahby, then the newly christened chair of the city’s Democratic Central Committee. “He was a rock star volunteer.â€
Coatar also put his own name on the ballot for student senate at SLU and won. But he quickly grew tired of debating the value of spending on various student functions. He craved real politics.
He got a crash course working for Jeff Smith’s campaign for state Senate in 2006.
Smith was a young dynamo himself then. But he was also a white guy running in a majority-minority district. To win, he and his supporters knocked on 75,000 doors, and won by double digits.
“He showed me you have to be fearless,†Coatar said recently. “You have to be able to talk to anyone.â€
Politics soon became his living. In 2008, he parlayed volunteering for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in Iowa into a staff job for the general election in ºüÀêÊÓƵ.
It was a nice way to get started. Obama’s charismatic appeal meant Coatar never lacked for volunteers. “To this day, that was the most fun I’ve had on a campaign,†Coatar said recently.
Falling in love
His next gig: field director for Mayor Francis Slay’s re-election campaign, a position that put him in front of the candidate quite a bit. And he made an impression going door-to-door with the mayor on early winter mornings.
“He loved people, and he seemed like he had a lot of fun going door-to-door,†Slay said recently. “He was a natural.â€
Later that year, Wahby, the city Democratic Party chair, hired Coatar as his executive director. He made about $2,000 a month. It wasn’t enough to cover law school tuition, but it paid the rent in Soulard, the lunch bills at Blues City Deli, and the bar tabs at Humphrey’s.
It also put him at a critical nexus of fundraising, campaign planning and party politics in the city. In between lectures on torts and property law, he was getting face time with power brokers and building up his Rolodex.
He also cultivated a reputation for being pretty good at the cat-herding that makes up more of politics than politicians might like to admit.
Jennifer Joyce, then the ºüÀêÊÓƵ circuit attorney, remembered how he called over and over to get her to sign up for the Halloween fundraiser one year. “He was very good at that polite pestering,†she said.
It was also around that time that Coatar got set up with Susan DiSario, who’d just moved from California. She was looking to get into politics and wanted to know the lay of the land in ºüÀêÊÓƵ.
They went out for a drink, then he asked her to dinner the same night. She was impressed with how he always did what he said he would. They married a few years later.
After law school, Coatar went to work for Joyce, first prosecuting property crimes and then low-level felonies. Joyce remembered him as a good, hard-working lawyer well-liked around the office, with an amusing habit of wearing seersucker suits one day each week in the summer.
Then, in the fall of 2014, he got a call from his alderman, Phyllis Young.
ºüÀêÊÓƵ has 99 problems
They’d met years earlier when Coatar was working on the Obama campaign, and he’d impressed her just like he’d impressed others. She liked that he seemed middle-of-the-road. She was planning to retire, she told him. Would he be interested in succeeding her?
He would be. “I’d gotten a lot of people elected, kept my nose squeaky clean, and I had my chance,†Coatar said.
He quit his job and started campaigning minutes after Young made her decision public. He quickly racked up endorsements from Slay and Aldermanic President Lewis Reed, and raised more money than any other candidate running for alderman that cycle, taking in close to $80,000 in three months.
He ran as a former prosecutor ready to fight crime, which was on voters’ minds after some high-profile incidents downtown. He won a three-way race by 33 percentage points.
It was a good time to be the 7th Ward alderman. People had been moving there in droves, especially downtown, and real estate investment was booming. He spent much of his first months in office attending ribbon cuttings.
But the Rams gave him his baptism by fire. He ended up carrying the bill on a new riverfront football stadium, meant to keep the team from moving to Los Angeles.
Never-ending negotiations with the NFL made it hard to keep provisions straight. Skeptical colleagues tried to force a public vote. Top officials said the city couldn’t afford the deal. “ºüÀêÊÓƵ has 99 problems,†then-Treasurer Tishaura Jones said, “and financing the construction of a new stadium is not one.â€
But with help from Slay and then-Gov. Jay Nixon, and months of late meetings and negotiations over minority business involvement in construction, the bill found the votes.
‘They can’t beat me’
The stadium ultimately fell through. But Coatar also backed a number of developments that got built, including the second phase of Ballpark Village and a slew of new homes in Soulard and Lafayette Square.
And he made good on his campaign message: He helped put together money for more security cameras in Soulard and backed a successful campaign to increase the city’s sales tax to pay for raises for police officers and firefighters.
But as Coatar was making his way to the center of the board, city politics was moving to the left.
Outside of the 7th Ward, the progressive movement began replacing older, more moderate Democrats with board members of its own.
And leaders like Green, Coatar’s opponent this fall, began to assert themselves on increasing the city’s minimum wage, and police oversight.
They also questioned the tax breaks Coatar offered developers, tanked Slay’s plan to privatize ºüÀêÊÓƵ Lambert International Airport — which Coatar supported — and pushed to close the city jail known as the Workhouse, alleging poor conditions for inmates.
Last year, they elected Jones as mayor, a slew of new aldermen, and got within 5 percentage points of beating Coatar.
Now they’re looking to finish the job.
Green and her supporters say he’s a tool of developers, jeering at the five-figure donations from corporate heavyweights. They say his campaign for more police is outdated. They point out his vote against raising the city’s minimum wage.
But Coatar brushes all that off. He thinks voters may soon have second thoughts about their new progressive leaders.
“They don’t like me,†Coatar said, “because they can’t beat me.â€
The Post-Dispatch and the League of Women Voters of Metro ºüÀêÊÓƵ present this guide to the candidates and races on the Nov. 8 ballot.