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I hope everyone had a great 4th! Another week with lots to talk about! Let's get into it!
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- Let's start off with some good news: there's finally some action on Pitman Place, the 60-apartment mixed-use project the Council approved last September, as slightly revised designs for the project popped up on Monday's ARB agenda. I was worried stubbornly high interest rates may have sunk the project, so I'm very glad to see this project move forward, not least of all because it will provide a desperately needed infusion of tax revenue for the city.
- Unlike some of the recent Post-Dispatch stories that have verged on gossipy, I thought this St. Louis Magazine article offered the best tick-tock yet of what happened at the Electric Department. It contained several scoops but perhaps the most interesting one is that Hawes pushed the Council to sell the electric utility. A few extra thoughts:
- This, again, smells more like incompetence to me than malfeasance, but people try to cover up their own incompetence all the time, and that is called fraud.
- The Kirkwood CAO position pays $225k a year. You're not going to find someone at that salary who has the electric transmission expertise to be able to offer any kind of informed oversight. Ideally, Kirkwood Electric would be governed by a board full of industry and business experts who would be able to offer that oversight, but Kirkwood Electric's board is the City Council, which is comprised of people who, in most cases, are even less qualified.
- People trusted Petty because, on the electric side, he really did know what he was talking about, even as he clearly was out of his depth on the financials and played it all far too fast and loose. Hiring a new director will be incredibly challenging given how hot the energy infrastructure market is right now, but clearly a new director alone is not sufficient. We need a new governance structure, and I'd like for a lawyer to tell us what our options are for implementing one.
- On the water side, Missouri American Water, the company that offer to buy Kirkwood Water, announced that they are petitioning to raise their rates on the rest of St. Louis County by 30%. As The Kirkwood Ledger notes, even if half of that gets approved, their rates once again be higher than those paid by Kirkwood Water customers. I'll say it again: selling our utilities because we're in a short-term fiscal hole is dumb. We should only sell if we get a price so good that it more than compensates us for the higher rates folks would pay under a private utility. More on what I think Missouri American Water's long-play is here.
- In last week's Webster-Kirkwood Times:
- On pg. 1, I was glad to see an update on the Kirkwood Station renovations and that Mayor Gibbons is advocating for state support of rail services, a subject she's been able to wield real positive influence on in the past. As I've noted before, I'd love to see city leadership think more creatively about how to utilize this asset. Perhaps they should even look into lifting the defacto AirBnB ban in the Downtown area. Tourism, after all, is one tried and true way of boosting revenue (which is also why I'm so keen on getting the Grant's Trail extension built). I don't quite get why people keep saying Kirkwood is now the second busiest Amtrak station in the state though. If you look at FY25 ridership, the most recent year for which data is available, our ~60k riders still trail STL (~400k) and KC (~165k).
- On pg. 8, I really liked the mailbag letter from the Webster Historical Society speaking to the significant expenses associated with historic preservation and the recent demolition in Kirkwood. I encourage Save Historic Kirkwood people to grapple with these tradeoffs directly rather than handwaving them away. We'd also be wise to steal some ideas from Webster for funding that work, including building out a more robust historic plaque program of our own.
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That's all for this week! Tunes at 10 is back at the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning and the Making Music Concert Series returns to Lions Ampitheater on Saturday night with Colonel Ford (classic country) at 7:30. Have a great weekend, everyone!
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