Last Thursday Kirkwood agreed to its second consolidation of services with a neighboring municipality in the past two months. These examples were small and I doubt anyone will really notice anything has changed but I do think they’re worth celebrating. I also think they offer some important insight for how bigger, more significant consolidation can be achieved in the region, so at the end we’ll go over some of those too.
Glendale & Co.
First up, Kirkwood recently approved a measure to allow Glendale to contract it’s fire protection services (read: fire department) through Kirkwood’s existing department. The agreement runs through 2025. While Glendale will maintain its independent department and retain its employees, Kirkwood’s administrative level positions, like Chief and Assistant Chief, will also manage Glendale. In exchange for this service, Glendale will pay Kirkwood a yearly fee. Because Warson Woods contracts its services through Glendale, they will now fall within our jurisdiction as well. Oakland already contracts its fire services through Kirkwood bringing the scope of the district’s coverage to a total of four municipalities.
This case probably doesn’t make a real noticeable difference in very many people’s lives, (I doubt Kirkwood’s Fire Chief is that much better or worse than Glendale’s, or that having just one Chief streamlines response times all that much), but it does save Glendale a little money and earn Kirkwood a little money, and both of those things are good. (Plus I called for this in a piece called Potential Partners in the Consolidation Game back in 2018, so on a personal level, I find the move extremely validating as well, which is probably the most important thing here.)
Des Peres Comes Calling
Then, last Thursday, a month or so after the Glendale move, news of more consolidation broke as Des Peres requested that Kirkwood add its police dispatching services to the fire and EMS dispatching that Kirkwood already provides.
This agreement, contracted through 2026 with an option for continual renewal thereafter, much like the Glendale agreement, doesn’t actually mean the police departments themselves will be merging, (Des Peres police will remain independent), but rather that the Kirkwood call center will be handling 911 calls for both municipalities going forward. As per the agreement Des Peres will pay Kirkwood $184,372 in fiscal year 2021 and the amount will grow every year thereafter with payments reaching $211,571 by fiscal year 2026, the final year of the contract. According to the Webster-Kirkwood Times, Des Peres estimates they will save about $500,000 annually from the move.
While both of these instances are motivated by the massive COVID-induced fiscal crisis municipalities are finding themselves in rather than some larger ideological shift towards consolidation, these moves tend not to be reversed after they’ve been implemented and it’s exciting to see us execute when the opportunity arises.
The Future of Consolidation in St. Louis
While these examples are small and their impacts likely minimal beyond budgetary bottom lines, it’s exactly these sort of micro-fractures that too often get overlooked when ore region’s fractured state is brought up. Each of these make tackling larger scale consolidation feel so impossible.
I’m always reminded of Mark Mantovani’s position on consolidation. While Mantovani was in favor of the city re-entering the county as its 89th municipality, he was opposed to any consolidation of those municipalities themselves. That’s happening on its own now, department by department, municipality by municipality, and it’s good. Lowercase “c” consolidation can happen like this, with little fanfare. It happens not as the result of some grand effort to stitch two things together against their will but rather, simply when it makes immediate sense and no one really minds. While Kirkwood’s consolidation of fire districts and police dispatches illustrate how this can work at incredibly small scale, it can happen at a larger, regional scale too. Perhaps the best example of it is the Metropolitan Sewer District, better known as MSD. NextSTL has a really good piece documenting the whole process and how it came to be, but suffice it to say, there was a problem —sewage from the county had to flow through the city to get to the Mississippi— that needed a regional solution, and no one really was mad worse off, so it happened.
There are plenty of other examples of this sort of consolidation where the whole region benefits, happening too:
In 1950, Bi-State Development was formed to coordinate freight, public transportation, and river traffic. In 1965, East-West Gateway Council was created to help develop regional policy. In 1969, the Museum-Zoo Special Taxing District was created to share the burden of supporting our cultural amenities. This is what St. Louis consolidation looks like.
-Jake Rebe, NextSTL
I think that’s a pretty good take. Let’s tackle individual problems and make people’s lives better. It seems like a better idea than taking a massive bong rip and deciding that what would really help St. Louis is if we just slammed the city and county together, named Steve Stenger king, and added “oh by the way, your kids still have to go to the shitty schools they go to now, sorry :-/”
Speaking of Schools…
While the author suggests the consolidation of police departments as the next step towards this sort of problem-oriented consolidation, I think that perhaps even that is too contentious and politicized to actually be achievable any time soon. Instead, the most obvious application of this model going forward would be the consolidation of St. Louis City and County’s Special School Districts. St. Louis County’s various school districts have already consolidated their special education programs into a single unified special school district. This leaves only the underfunded St. Louis Public Schools left to be brought into the fold.
Why push for this? While eliminating redundancies might be one of the reasons (St. Louis Public Schools spends $15,300 per student while the county’s Special School District (SSD) only spends $15,100 likely due to benefits from economies of scale), it’s not the main one. SSD has a $460.1 million annual budget and $256.7 million in reserves, it’s in great financial shape. SLPS’s budget for special education services is just $43.4 million and they are struggling.
State Rep. Shamed Dogan, an admittedly impressive libertarian-minded Republican from Ballwin, has a plan to solve this problem: House Bill 458 is written almost exclusively to provide a mechanism for these two special education districts to become one.
The bill would first require St. Louis City residents to raise their tax rate to bring their funding contribution in line with that of residents of St. Louis County. After this is achieved, a second vote by St. Louis City residents would be required to approve annexation into the county’s Special School District. The current provision of the bill offers no mechanism for the county or it’s Special School District to deny this request for annexation, in what seems to be a feature rather than a bug. If city residents are to pull their own weight in taxes, there’s no legitimate grounds to keep them from joining the higher performing district. Nevertheless, many people will try
This possibility, that the issue is understood as county residents giving something up and city residents gaining something at their expense, while wrong, governs a whole host of issues, issues that comprise the other version of consolidation.
The Harder Cases
This sort of consolidation —the type that requires people to give up some very real advantages and privileges in order for a broader section of the public to benefit— requires, in short, altruism and must be fought for in a completely different way. In these cases individual municipalities, perhaps even individual leaders of municipalities, have to set an example, even if popular consensus throughout the region doesn’t yet exist.
And these types of issues really do have to be fought along the old party lines for change to really happen. If they’re not viewed as partisan issues, Republican or Democratic ones with moral weight behind them, then they will remain undisturbed as status quo so often does. But if zoning reform is considered a Democratic issue or Occupational licensing a Republican one, identity takes over and people fall in line. Ambitious politicians in Maplewood or Chesterfield adopt these new policies and all of a sudden things start to change.
In summary, it will require certain municipalities to decide that they want to claim the moral high ground, and the issue will have to be fought over one municipality at a time until a critical mass can be achieved, and its more embarrassing to not get on board with zoning reform than it is politically costly to make the change in the first place. This is how Mississippi’s state flag finally ditched the confederate flag. Eventually, you just convince enough people to change their mind on the particular issue, to get on “the right side of history” as people so often like to say, and eventually it spreads. Maplewood adopts zoning reform and Webster decides they want to have inclusionary zoning too, and then Kirkwood is embarrassed they’re still artificially restricting who can afford to live there so they join the party. Consolidation of school and police and fire districts work like this too. Residents of individual ideologically homogenous municipalities just must decide they want to make the first move, that they want to be the first domino to fall.
Anyway
Anyway, clearly at a financial level, small scale consolidation makes some sense and there are efficiencies are to be had. We should concentrate on where else these sorts of consolidations, the ones like Kirkwood and Des Peres and Glendale have undertaken, might be possible, and pursue those options systematically. And then if a couple more enterprising municipalities (or Kirkwood for that matter!) want to band together and pursue some larger agenda that gets us closer to consistent equitable policy or a consolidated school district, I think that’s the way to go over some grand re-unification. I want the re-unification too, but the re-unification is much easier if you’re trying to stitch two things together rather than eighty-nine.
Slow boring, hard boards. Keep up the good work everyone.