Adam Paul rode a wave of regionalism to a seat of power.
The crest started to build in 2011 when the political neophyte helped lead opposition to the city of Ellisville using massive tax subsidies to lure a Walmart to a mostly vacant intersection on one of the West County city’s busiest intersections.
The fight was , but mostly it was about what happens in a county with 90 municipalities (now it is 89) constantly fighting over the same piece of the retail pie. Big-box stores go from city to city with their hands out. City councils hand over cash, much of it that would have gone to schools or libraries or ambulance service. The Walmarts of the world sail from municipality to municipality, leaving hulking empty buildings in their wake, like so many sunken ships.
Paul and his cohorts won that battle, and it was as important for Ellisville as it was for neighbors in Wildwood and Ballwin, or cities further away, in Hazelwood, in Florissant, in Sunset Hills. Paul became the mayor. He fought back impeachment. He vanquished his opponents.
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Now he’s become that which he railed against.
In June, Paul and his council voted to put before Ellisville voters in April. He wants the residents of Ellisville to stand against the forces of regionalism that are threatening to wash out the historic and arbitrary boundaries in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County that divide us and hold us back.
The action by Paul and his council mirror that of neighboring Chesterfield, where Mayor Bob Nation has gone so far as to to St. Charles County if the city of ºüÀêÊÓƵ and ºüÀêÊÓƵ County find a way to come together.
The “merger†discussion has been going on for decades, but there is more momentum for it now, it seems, than ever. After a couple of years of study, the nonprofit Better Together this summer that will spend the next year devising an actual plan for the future of regional government consolidation.
Maybe the city will re-enter the county and shed itself of duplicative county offices. Perhaps the city and county will form one large city, elevating ºüÀêÊÓƵ to top-10 city status nationally. And, of course, what Paul and Nation fear most, perhaps many of the 89 municipalities in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County will go away, or lose their ability to provide separate police forces, or municipal courts, or other duplicitous government services that cause regional taxpayers to pay more for government than the rest of our neighbors in the Midwest.
What the ultimate solution ends up being doesn’t matter to Paul at this point.
He’s against it. He told me he doesn’t want to bail out the city of ºüÀêÊÓƵ. He doesn’t trust Better Together. He thinks his constituents are opposed to change.
Like the mayor and council he and his colleagues replaced, they are thinking about their fiefdom, and their fiefdom only.
This is what has been holding ºüÀêÊÓƵ back for decades.
More and more, I believe residents of the region get it. They see it in the soccer stadium proposal and vote, in the Proposition P vote that helps one police department and hurts another, in the conflicts over MetroLink transit security as multiple jurisdictions bicker rather than work together for a solution.
They see it because they realize a strong ºüÀêÊÓƵ is more important than whether one municipality among 89 strengthens its retail corridor at the expense of another a few miles away.
Over the past three months, I’ve met with three dozen Post-Dispatch readers from all over ºüÀêÊÓƵ in a series of meetings over coffee to talk about the region. They were from Ellisville and Chesterfield, University City and O’Fallon, Lake ºüÀêÊÓƵ and the city of ºüÀêÊÓƵ. In every meeting, the concept of city-county consolidation dominated the discussion. Hardly a single voice was raised in opposition.
Some wish we’d consolidate school districts first. Others thought re-entry was a good first step. Some wanted to wipe the slate clean and start with one ºüÀêÊÓƵ.
But everybody realized it’s the single, overriding issue that is holding ºüÀêÊÓƵ back.
Consolidation of government services, stronger regional leadership, a structure that leads to more unity and less tribalism — these are the issues that infect nearly every public policy decision facing the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region.
My coffee discussions were not scientific. Perhaps the process was self-selecting, in that I write about this issue a lot. But in the period between 2011, when a political neophyte named Adam Paul struck a chord for regionalism, and 2017, when he’s standing against it as a mayor, the tide has turned.
ºüÀêÊÓƵ is ready for its more united future, whatever it may look like. Municipal leaders who stand against such progress risk getting washed away.