Grow America, SLDC, And Unanswered Questions
Recent weeks have brought a significant amount of local media furor over the botched grant selection process for St. Louis Development Corporation (SLDC)’s North St. Louis Small Business and Nonprofit Grant Program. Much of the coverage has focused on the selection of politically connected projects, including those run by relatives of elected city officials. Some of the grants even seem to have been awarded to projects that don’t really exist. Any person paying attention can tell that the grant selection process was botched. Some may see corruption. Others may see the outcome as just the product of laziness, a total lack of oversight by SLDC, or just run-of-the-mill incompetence. That said, nobody who is looking at how this has unfolded thinks that the process was well run.
In situations like this, if it is in any way possible, local officials are going to pass the buck–and indeed they have. SLDC has placed the blame for this process at the feet of the contractor hired to oversee the application selection process. The contractor in question is Grow America. Looking at their website, it seems to be just another generic community development consultancy outfit. Grow America doesn’t have offices here or display much of a track record in the St. Louis area. Still, they were able to land this SLDC contract overseeing the selection of awardees in line for millions of federal dollars. SLDC even doubled Grow America’s contract while they were actively failing to deliver competent services. This is where the lack of oversight by SLDC staff becomes apparent. In the article about the value of the botched contract being increased, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch notes some previous SLDC contracts with Grow America. These were awarded to National Development Council (NDC), which was the name used by Grow America until recently. These contracts only go back to 2022 and are also part of the drawn out process that eventually ended with the obviously flawed assessments. Thus it appears that all of their contracts with SLDC, under either name, were awarded in relation to this grant program.
If you’ve been reading local reporting on this issue, you’ve seen that few questions have been raised about how Grow America was chosen to lead this process. So far reporting hasn’t looked into why this contractor was selected, and it also hasn’t looked into the process that selected Grow America to vet the grant applications. So how did Grow America/NDC come to play such a key role in this well-publicized program? Prior to this program’s development, there doesn’t seem to be an indication that they had a relationship with SLDC, nor do they have an office listed in St. Louis. It is fair to wonder what brought them to our city and to this particular project.
A search of the Grow America website will bring you to the page that lists their board members. On this page, you will find that former St. Louis Deputy Mayor Nicole Hudson sits on the board of the group. Now at Washington University in St. Louis Hudson is a familiar figure in local politics. Outside of this, Grow America has no apparent connection to St. Louis. Is her presence of Grow America’s board and the awarding of these contracts related? Same goes for her current seat on the board of InvestSTL, which would’ve also looked good on an application. Is it also possible that her work with InvestSTL led to her spot on Grow America’s board? It seems strange that none of the reporters have followed what appears to be the only staff or board connection between St. Louis and Grow America. Maybe this is all coincidence, but the fact that local outlets have totally ignored Grow America’s only apparent connection to St. Louis is problematic. Why have they failed to raise these obvious questions in their reporting?
While largely ignoring the question of how Grow America was selected, reports have mostly leaned into the potential of corruption in the list of grantees recommended by the firm. This leaves unexplored the question of whether potential corruption of the process started much earlier, when this company with no real previous presence in the city was selected to run the selection process. It is quite possible that how and why Grow America was selected is a very important part of the story. The Hudson link is basically the only real connection Grow America seems to have to St. Louis. If Hudson played a part in Grow America’s landing the contract, her former position as Deputy Mayor of Racial Equity and Priority Initiatives under the Krewson administration would have likely been a boost to the contractor’s application.
Another largely unexplored avenue of inquiry is that of local subcontractors. As Grow America has no office in St. Louis, it is likely that much of this work was subcontracted down to local partners. There is little to no indication that any of the national agency’s staff (none of whom seem to be based in St. Louis) were on the ground and working in our city for the duration of the project. If Grow America did have to rely on local partners, which seems probable, then those local vendors share in the blame for how this has played out. Were these subcontractors also politically connected? If so, doesn’t this mean the same pattern of not vetting happens a third time in the process? Taking a step back, one can see the pattern potentially happening at three points: 1. at the point of Grow America/NDC’s selection, 2. at the point of local subcontractor hiring, and then 3. when the grantee application process was botched. Over and over, it appears that the decision was made to give public dollars to entities based on political connections, rather than worthiness.
Awarding funds to politically connected groups for dubious reasons is the core theme in the unfolding narrative around SLDC’s bungling of this grant program. This is not only the case with the grantees selected, though local reporting would lead most to think otherwise. Why do local political connections for potential grantees matter, but not for Grow America? They have spent many hours investigating people who have yet to receive any money from this project, while ignoring people who already have. It doesn’t make much sense.
St. Louisans deserve to know more about how grantees were chosen, but we also need to know more about how Grow America was selected to lead the project. Taxpayers additionally deserve to know if the vetting process was then subcontracted to a local vendor. If so, who was the local subcontractor that failed to deliver proper vetting? By keeping stories largely focused all the way down at the level of some applicants who appear to be petty hucksters or folks whose dreams are bigger than they can really deliver, the local press is keeping us distracted from discovering the root causes of the program’s dysfunction and multi-level failures. Furthermore, If SLDC did such a poor job of oversight on this project, it is likely that other SLDC contracting decisions have been similarly flawed. Focusing mostly on projects that obviously shouldn’t have been awarded grants misses the larger story that this embarrassing episode seems to point toward. We certainly hope that outlets with the resources needed to follow these lines of questioning choose to do so. St. Louisans deserve to know the full story about the latest failure at SLDC, an agency that repeatedly finds itself in the middle of local corruption scandals.
