I start my day in the most expansive city in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region and spend most of it in the most populous one.
At 68 square miles, , where I live, is larger than the city of ºüÀêÊÓƵ. Of course, it is known more for its trails and rolling hills than it is its people. There are but 36,000 of us in this spread-out place, compared to the more than 300,000 in the city where I spend most of my working day.
Both cities have been focused on economic development lately.
On Friday, the ºüÀêÊÓƵ Board of Aldermen for the April 4 ballot. One would raise the sales tax by one-half-cent to help pay for a future North-South MetroLink expansion and other neighborhood preservation efforts. The other one would dedicate $60 million in business use-tax increases for a new Major League Soccer stadium downtown. The new use-tax revenue will be created automatically if the other sales tax passes. A judge still has to decide if the issues will face voters.
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Meanwhile, Wildwood is getting into the economic development game, too. Last week, the city announced it had of economic development manager. Julian Jacquin started his job in October, at a yearly salary of $84,000.
When it comes to paying for things, my neighbors and I are getting the best end of both deals. In ºüÀêÊÓƵ, people with a median family income of $35,599 will be asked to pay the freight on the stadium and transit expansion, despite the fact that they are regional investments. In Wildwood, median income $123,578, our taxes won’t help pay for either the stadium or transit. Even our economic development manager gets subsidized by people who live elsewhere.
Wildwood is one of 10 cities in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County that doesn’t have a municipal residential property tax. Much of the city’s revenue comes from the county sales tax pool that gets distributed among most of ºüÀêÊÓƵ County’s 90 municipalities. That means when you shop in Town and Country, or Fenton, or Chesterfield, you’re helping to pay for Wildwood’s new economic development director, whose job it will be, in part, to make sure that businesses locate near where I live, instead of, for instance, Town and Country, or Fenton, or Chesterfield.
This is the reality outlined in that shows how badly the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region does economic development. In 20 years of creating dozens upon dozens of tax subsidy districts, all ºüÀêÊÓƵ economic development leaders did was move jobs around, most of them of the retail variety, without growing the economic vitality of the region.
The problem isn’t with people like Jacquin or the numerous other economic development directors and city managers in the region. Most are probably excellent professionals. It’s that there are so many of them, all working at cross purposes. According to nonprofit , the 90 municipalities in the county, plus the city of ºüÀêÊÓƵ, plus the county government, spend together more than $281 million on general administration alone, much of it on competing and repetitive practices and services.
Hiring an economic development director with other people’s money makes prudent sense considered in the Wildwood vacuum. But when Jacquin traveled to Salt Lake City in January to attend the , he was working against the interests of other cities in the same region hoping to bring a camping or recreational outlet to Crestwood, or Florissant, or Ballwin.
The bottom line: Fragmentation is bad for cities. That was the conclusion of a 2015 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development called It found that economic growth falls by up to 6 percent if you double the number of municipalities per 100,000 people in a metropolitan area.
Cities fight among themselves for a bigger piece of the same pie rather than working together to grow the pie to the entire region’s benefit. This is the story of economic development in ºüÀêÊÓƵ.
It’s why I won’t be paying for big-ticket economic development projects in the city that could affect my employment and home value much more than anything my local economic development manager might accomplish. Meanwhile, you’re paying his salary and if he’s successful, it might be at the expense of your hyper-local tax base.
With fragmentation, ºüÀêÊÓƵ loses every time it wins.