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Despite a full meeting schedule, there's not a whole lot of action this week, so instead I want to engage in some meta commentary on the journalistic coverage the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has been giving the city. It seems like every week for the past six months the Post is publishing one (and often two!) new pieces about some new "crisis" or another. The Queen of the Suburbs undeniably faces some real challenges right now—Kirkwood Electric's overspending, the Public Works Site & Chapter 100 for Double Eagle— and I certainly believe those issues are worthy of coverage, especially from a professional outfit like the Post. It's true that democracy dies in darkness and I'm glad they're expending resources on shining a light.
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But then I see something like this week's coverage of noise complaints around Billy G's and 4-Hands, or last July's coverage of a lawsuit claiming that Kirkwood Electric's budget shortfall was responsible for an elderly couple's house burning down (which was immediately dismissed) —complete non-stories— and I start to wonder if something a little more calculated is going on. So I looked into it a bit. And it turns out that basically all these stories have been written by a single reporter, Seth Nelson.
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Nelson, started as an intern at the Post in the Summer of 2025 ahead of his senior year of college and then joined the paper's staff as a reporter on the St. Louis County beat this past May. He published his first story as a full-time reporter on May 16th. The first 8 stories of his professional career were on other communities in the County, but then, on June 5th, Mr. Nelson turned his attention to Kirkwood. In the 124 days since, Nelson has published an astounding 31 stories on city, which, by my estimate, accounts for more 60% of his total output. Kirkwood makes up approximately 3% of the County's overall population, so I sort of found that stat astounding. The Post isn't exactly awash in excess reporting capacity either; on their website I only found two other reporters specifically on the County beat, and some of those journalists have also published Kirkwood-specific stories. Worse still, nearly all of these stories have painted the City in an incredibly negative light.
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I don't want to be too hard on Nelson, I’m sure he is a nice guy. He managed to get a job in journalism just out of undergrad (which, these days is impressive in and of itself). But clearly the same one or two people are pitching him any story that reflects negatively on the City that they can think of (and more or less have been since last April's City Council election) and he's dutifully written them up. I'm sure it's been good for his career too. As a baseline, we know negative stories gets more clicks than positive stories and then on top of that, he's guaranteed to get broad distribution in social media channels for his stories (accompanied by an AI-generated meme!) from Kirkwood's curmudgeons and misanthropes who fail to ever state what they want or what their alternative affirmative vision is.
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I can't know for sure who is feeding Nelson these stories, but I do know that they do not have Kirkwood's best interest in mind. I encourage him to exercise a bit more discretion in the stories he chooses to write and I encourage you all to use discretion in the stories you choose to engage with online.
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The only other thing of note to mention this week is that there's an item before P&Z that would change developments in R-5 multifamily zoning districts from by-right to discretionary approval at the hands of the Council. The developers of the Auffenburg site have requested this change to ensure that the Council can vote on the exact site plan of their proposal rather than asking them to approve the R-5 rezoning while leaving questions of design to the Architectural Review Board (ARB) as the zoning code currently prescribes.
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I appreciate that these developers are just trying to get their project through and that the Council has essentially thrown up a bunch of imaginary concerns that make them hesitant to do so under the current rules (which again, are prescriptive in all aspects besides the actual aesthetic finishes of the building, which are left to ARB). I also appreciate that this may make the council feel more comfortable rezoning additional sites to R-5 in the future. But I still think this change is bad as it makes development approval on sites currently zoned R-5 much more unpredictable and politically contentious. The Council should simply decide what design principles they want new developments in Kirkwood to abide by, and write those into the City's Architectural Design Guidelines. But the problem is I don't think they really know what they want.
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Instead, the Council wants to be able to use the same standard to determine what constitutes a good project that should be approved from a bad one that should be blocked that US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to define what sort of media content was fine and should be protected by the first amendment vs which media content constituted "hard-core pornography" and thus be subject to censorship: They'll know it when they see it.
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