Why Nothing Seems To Work In St. Louis City

The dumpsters behind my house in December 2024

It can feel like the city government is incapable of fixing basically any of the problems facing it. That’s not totally fair, as crime is on a fairly steady decline. It certainly hasn’t been “fixed”, but credit where credit is due. Still, many of us feel like we face an almost unending stream of dysfunction. Trash pickup that has remained uneven for years, traffic safety enforcement that often feels non-existent (notwithstanding the occasional photo op event), roads that are in the worst condition that most of us have ever seen… the list goes on. This comes despite city voters regularly approving new bonds and tax levies, making it even harder to understand. When combined with the COVID-era stimulus and Rams settlement windfalls… well, it doesn’t make much sense. At least not if the issue is money. That’s because money is only part of the equation that has led us to this unpleasant situation. Another big part is cultural.

Local politicians and pundits roll out a lot of reasons for this (cue complaints about fragmentation), but they generally avoid a central issue that connects many of these problems: a lack of internal city capacity. For decades, the city shed employees and turned more toward consultants to handle important city business. The recent issues at SLDC highlight how this appears in a lot of city departments. Lacking internal capacity to handle something, the default is to hire outside consultants. In this case, the initial consultant appears to have botched the application process. The solution? Have another outside consultant take over the process. Still facing a lack of trust? Hire yet another consultant to come in and audit the process that led to the problematic grant approvals. This process doesn’t seem to have been so complicated that it couldn’t have been done by a city employee. Many of the problematic grant decisions have been surfaced by reporters doing basic investigation of the applications and applicants. Verifying addresses and looking up delinquent tax bills aren’t tasks that one needs an advanced education or training to complete. While there are federal compliance issues that need to be taken into account, this is something that certainly could have been done by an in-house hire.

The SLDC project has already had a long time period of soliciting and reviewing applications. It will also likely need some kind of ongoing monitoring. This is standard with most grants that utilize federal funds. That means that SLDC will potentially also end up paying for monitoring services by a contractor. Instead of having someone internal to SLDC, who would’ve been able to follow the project through various phases, the agency is now in the position where various contractors are coming in to handle parts of the process. The point is that this wasn’t a short project for which contracting was an obviously prudent decision. 

Now, consider how this would have gone if the persons working on the project were SLDC staffers who regularly reported to other SLDC staff on the project. One would hope that having had a greater level of oversight of the work around applications would have alerted SLDC of issues at an earlier point in the process. This likely would’ve saved the agency time and money, all the while avoiding the embarrassing news stories about the flawed application process. Instead, the culture of hiring outside consultants has led to weeks of bad publicity for the agency.

This isn’t something unique to the current administration. Over multiple administrations, the decision has repeatedly been made to hire outside consultants to perform tasks that could’ve been done by city employees. Often, savings from not having pension and other costs has been used as the fiscal rationale for the outsourcing. Little thought has been given to the loss of internal capacity. We are now paying the price for an absence of a fundamental level of basic internal capacity. Sometimes it looks like overflowing trash cans, but it also looks like the current controversy facing SLDC and the grant program. They may seem unrelated, but there is a thread that connects the two issues: internal capacity.

That’s not the only way the city fails to invest in internal capacity. In other departments, the city has purposefully failed to invest in city services. Often this appears to have been because a plan had been made to privatize the service. This is what has led to over half a decade of dysfunctional trash pickup that has plagued the city. Lower level (especially blue collar employees) of the city have long been underpaid, which has led to a state of perpetual understaffing across many departments. It’s not just the trash or police departments, though they get the most attention. 

It’s important to note that the state of things doesn’t come from this or that individual contracting decision. Rather, this state has arisen from outsourcing having become the default cultural preference of our decision makers. For many of them, good governance basically just comes down to hiring the right contractors to do jobs. In this mindset, the city’s main function is simply to aggregate capital via taxes and fees, which is then given to contractors to complete jobs. Unfortunately for taxpayers, that’s not actually a good way to run the city. Outsourcing as a first choice is a cultural preference among our leadership class. To say that continual improvement and building internal capacity has been out of style is an understatement. This cultural preference has led us to a point where the city has little internal capacity left. How little? So little that we can all see it and experience it in our daily lives. Overflowing trash, unsightly and unsafe roads, water mains rupturing on a regular basis…the signs are all over.

This isn’t the case at every level or every department. Executive staffing has been expanded in some departments. Similarly, the President of the Board of Aldermen’s office has doubled staff over the past few years. It is unclear what, if any, difference this has made in the office’s performance. This was done after reductions to the number of aldermen, though there wasn’t a clear reason for doing so. Reducing the number of alders didn’t grant the Board new legal powers, etc. They have the same business to handle that they previously did. The most recently completed session saw 240 board bills debated. This is one less than the 241 board bills that came before the board in the 2019-2020 session and one more the 239 board bills of the 2020-2021. That means that the President’s office now has twice the amount of staff working on the same amount of legislation as prior to ward reduction. I’m guessing many city taxpayers would rather that payroll had been spent on departments that are obviously understaffed and unable to handle what is demanded of them.

At the end of the day, taxpayers have seen the result of decades of prioritizing outsourcing over preserving or building internal municipal capacity. It is not good. If we’re going to turn the corner, it is very likely that a new commitment to increasing the city’s internal capacity will be an important part of the solution. Of course, that would take city leadership that is willing to own failures. That’s the other reason elected officials default to outsourcing: it gives them someone else to blame.