Harmon vs. the political machine.

Judd, Dennis

The fragmentation of St. Louis's governmental structure is a well-worn topic, and many of the city's problems can no doubt be traced to the extreme refraction of political authority among an excessive number of office-holders. A weak mayor, a three-member Board of Estimate and Apportionment, a 28-member Board of Aldermen; these aspects of St. Louis's charter make it easy to understand why coherent decision-making is generally absent in the city's affairs. More than any other single factor - perhaps even more than the political isolation of St. Louis within its region - the absence of centralized political authority probably accounts for the city's poor record of revitalization. Although he has often been called politically naive, a little-known fact is that Mayor Clarence Harmon is on the brink of changing the culture of institutional stalemate in St. Louis. If he is successful, it will benefit St. Louis for many years to come.

In October, Mayor Harmon announced a plan to tear down the Arena and redevelop the site as a 26-acre office park with one million square feet of corporate office space. The attractiveness of this plan for the city was not hard to fathom. Right off Highway 40 and across from Forest Park, the site made it possible for the city to compete head-to-head with suburbs for big companies looking for a campus setting adjacent to a major freeway corridor. When the mayor said he had a developer in hand ready to buy the land, he no doubt expected to be praised for his bold leadership.

What Harmon got instead was a hostile reaction from preservationists who called the Arena an architectural gem, from citizen's groups saying that the Arena would be a splendid site for an aquarium, and from the Board of Aldermen, who challenged his authority to tear down the Arena without its consent. Indeed, when the aldermen took the mayor to court, it was quickly established that, indeed, the Arena could not be demolished without legislation specifically authorizing it.

This circus has many acts yet to come. Though some have said the mayor caused the Arena controversy because he didn't first seek approval from the aldermen, his lack of political acumen in this case would not likely have prevented the issue from being public and divisive. There are too many fingers in the pie for it to have gone smoothly. A major prospective tenant, Safeco Insurance Company, has threatened to withdraw from considering the site unless a quick decision is made to ready it for redevelopment. Under an agreement with the city to allow it to expand in Forest Park, the St. Louis Art Museum has said it will contribute $3 million to help develop the Arena site and to help the city make its $50,000 monthly payments on the Arena. A public/private Arena Advisory Board will soon give its assessment of the developers' plan. The Downtown St. Louis Partnership has yet to take a position, with some people believing that the office park could lure some businesses out of the downtown area more than from the suburbs. Preservationists and aquarium advocates are busy promoting their view that the Arena should be saved, while parrying claims that the Arena is not only an eyesore, but that its renovation is impractical (it is now basically an empty shell).

Meanwhile, Mike Jones, who in the middle of it all resigned as the mayor's chief of staff to accept the new post of Deputy Mayor of Development, has said that if the site isn't developed within a reasonable period (which he says is five years), "the last one out of the city needs to turn off the lights." The Arena controversy is one of the more entertaining shows to make the media tour of St. Louis.

A bad rap

It has often been said that Clarence Harmon has never made the transition from the bureaucratic demands of being a police chief to the political give-and-take of the mayor's office. He has regularly taken public positions and announced major initiatives without doing the necessary mending of fences, and as a result he has often had to beat very public retreats. If the Arena case were just another instance of this habit, it would hardly be noteworthy, though it would still be somewhat entertaining.

The Arena controversy does not show weak mayoral leadership, however, so much as it unmasks the nearly fatal institutional limitations placed upon any mayor in St. Louis.

And while Mayor Harmon has been taking his public losses, he has kept a quiet, single-minded focus upon something of enormous consequence for St. Louis's future - he has been quietly reforming the political fragmentation that leads to fiascoes such as the fight over the Arena.

In light of the circumstances that constrain him, the mayor was right to aggressively pursue a development project with the potential that the Arena site offers. What are these circumstances? The city, in fact, has no capacity to plan or assess individual economic development projects. In many other cities the development of the Arena site would have emerged on the public agenda much earlier, and within a context of an overall plan for economic development. A mayor would have been able to tap into the resources of a development or planning agency for information and recommendations. With some alternative ideas in hand, the mayor could then try to marry public resources with private capital, with some professional and administrative capacity as a backup. Any aggressive mayor would approach the legislative branch only after the ducks were in a row - that is, with a specific, detailed proposal in hand. Opposition would still arise in many cases, but the debate would be conducted at a higher level, with everyone forced to bring concrete proposals to the table.

In St. Louis such a leadership style would be scarcely possible. The city does not have nor could it now produce a city plan or a comprehensive economic development strategy. Without reference to larger objectives, deal-making ends up being both political and passive. Political because there are few standards for deciding whether a deal is a good one or not. Passive, because the city must wait for developers to make the first move.

St. Louis's institutional structure seems specifically designed to emasculate mayors and to politicize development efforts. Two agencies, the St. Louis Development Corporation (SLDC) and the Community Development Agency (CDA), are responsible for the city's economic development policy. The SLDC is a non-profit corporation that was formed in the early 1990s to coordinate several other agencies. The much older agency, the CDA, was founded in 1974 to administer the Community Development Block Grant funds made available through the block grant legislation passed by Congress that year. Depending upon whom one talks to, there is either a competitive and sometimes hostile relationship between these agencies, or a quite rational though ambiguous division of responsibilities. As the two agencies have evolved, the SLDC takes on bigger projects and tries to formulate overall economic policy, while the CDA administers CDBG funds. The bottom line is that the mayor's authority to provide direction has been sharply circumscribed.

The CDA administers more than $34 million in HUD funds, but most of this amount is already earmarked for various housing and social service categories. Even more significantly from a planning perspective, most of it is routed to the CDA through the Comptroller's office - and before the agency can receive this money, it must indicate how the funds will be allocated among the city's 28 aldermanic wards. In effect, every alderman can raise questions about allocations even before the CDA sees any federal money.

The CDA is responsible for funding the SLDC; the understanding is that each year the SLDC will get about 10 percent as much as the CDA. This might seem to be a straightforward relationship were it not for an interesting fact - the Executive Director of the CDA actually reports to the Executive Director of the SLDC!

According to a report issued last September by Focus St. Louis, one "strength" of the present structure is "the ingenuity demonstrated" by employees of the two agencies, who "independently develop informal relationships with other city government employees to address the myriad of complications that occasionally confront citizens requiring services from the city of St. Louis." In other words, because businesses, neighborhood groups and ordinary citizens cannot possibly figure out who is in charge on many questions, if they go to the wrong office, there are employees skilled enough to know whom to call. Another way to think of it is that administrators have learned how to act like machine politicians.

The CDA is preoccupied with administering CDBG housing programs, so it cannot be expected to do much, if any, overall planning. In principle there is nothing to prevent the SLDC from becoming a planning or economic development agency; however, and indeed according to the Focus St. Louis report, it has been trying to carry out a neighborhood planning process "designed to provide opportunities for citizen input into the establishment of citywide re-development priorities on a neighborhood basis." in reality, this has meant that the aldermen have been able to wield huge political authority over the distribution of funds.

A little history

To understand the relative weakness of the mayor's office versus the aldermen, some history is in order. Near the end of his administration, Mayor Vince Schoemehl made an attempt to consolidate development efforts in the city, which were then divided among at least six agencies, the Land Redevelopment Authority, the Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority, the Port Authority, the Community Development Agency, the Development Commission, and the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority. Each of these agencies was run by its own boards and had its own agendas. Schoemehl asked the aldermen to consolidate these agencies into a single redevelopment authority, and instead of being a city agency, it would be established as a public/private corporate with no civil service employees.

When they caught wind of this plan, the civil servants went ballistic. They complained to their aldermen, and Alderman Martie Aboussie spearheaded the demise of the plan. What Schoemehl managed to salvage was quite small. In 1990, the five agencies were brought together into a single building, and the St. Louis Development Corporation was established, though its funding was limited to a share of the federal funds flowing through the Community Development Agency. The CDA and SLDC were governed by an overlapping board, and though the division of responsibilities was not always clear, the SLDC was given responsibility for overall planning and economic development.

Schoemehl paid a high price for the little he got. In 1990, the city took out a loan against future block-grant funds, and agreed to divide the money ward-by-ward. In 1992, Schoemehl's administration launched Operation Conserv, designed to link the CDA to the neighborhoods via a cooperative planning process. This program did accomplish useful planning in the neighborhoods, but after Freeman Bosley became mayor in the spring of 1993, the program was relabeled the Neighborhood Stabilization Project and, critically, the funds became allocated to wards rather than neighborhoods. In addition to controlling the distribution of a big share of CDBG funds, the aldermen also got direct access to staff support in the CDA for projects in their wards. Aldermanic control over federal funds became even more institutionalized when Bosley sought a 3/8-cent sales and a 1.2-cent capital improvements tax. Schoemehl had tried but failed to get tax packages through, but under Bosley the proposal sailed through the Board of Aldermen and onto the election ballot because it was understood that the money would be distributed for projects ward-by-ward.

Back to the future

The only exception to city's inability to plan would seem to be related to downtown redevelopment, wherein Downtown Now and various civic leaders seem to be well on the way to crafting a plan for the revitalization of the downtown core, at a cost of just under $1 billion. Even this instance shows the mayor's weakness.

Civic organizations have filled a vacuum left by the relative absence of a public capacity to lead regeneration. In other cities, the mayor and development agencies would be expected to take the lead in planning the redevelopment of the downtown core, but in St. Louis the mayor can get on board, if he wants to, while civic leaders and consultants (sometimes hired by the city) assemble the redevelopment coalition. As might be expected, the coalition is extremely limited in authority, lacking the muscle to much influence what the Laclede's Landing Redevelopment Authority or the Park Service might want to do with the city's waterfront. A critical defect indeed, and one that could be remedied, if at all, only through strong mayoral leadership.

Clarence Harmon has been keenly aware of the chains that bind him, and he has been working hard to undo them. In April 1998 he appointed an 11-member Reorganization Committee, charging its members with the task of making recommendations for the reorganization of the city's development agencies. Chaired by his chief of staff, the committee included two aldermen (Paul Beckerie and Bernice Jones-King), plus several civic leaders. The committee released a preliminary report on Sept. 17, and after more than two months of discussion, this Nov. 4 the mayor sent a final report to the Board of Aldermen, under the title, "The Restructuring of the Development Operations." The changes urged by the mayor are the most far-reaching put forward in decades. If adopted, they might allow the city to finally achieve a capacity to plan. An important side benefit would be that at least some development policies might become depoliticized by taking them out of ward politics.

The Reorganization Committee calls its recommendations "radical" and "wide-ranging." And so they are. It recommends that a new office, a Deputy Mayor for Development, be established in the mayor's office. The Deputy Mayor would be charged with coordinating planning and economic development policies. The CDA would be dissolved as a city agency, and the SLDC would be substantially reorganized. A new City Plan Commission would take responsibility for planning for the city; it would oversee a new Planning and Urban Design Department and the SLDC (and the current Community Development Commission would be dissolved). Both would report to the Deputy Mayor. A separate Office of Federal Entitlement Programs would administer the city's federal entitlement funds. Instead o,f decisions flowing solely through the Comptroller's office, at least now the mayor would have a role because this agency would be supervised by the Board of Estimate and Apportionment. In place of the current allocation process that automatically divides CDBG funds into 28 pieces, a two-year plan and budget would allocate money to neighborhood and city-wide projects.

The reorganization plan depends upon two primary elements. First, it has to be expected that ward politics will continue to determine allocations of a substantial portion, and maybe most, of the federal dollars. Channeling these monies into a separate city office is a way - one hopes - of reducing aldermen's motivations to influence the activities of the plan commission and the SLDC. This tendency will be reinforced by the fact that the two development agencies would report to the mayor's office, through boards of directors appointed by the mayor. Second, the Reorganization Committee recommends that a critical flaw in the current development structure be remedied: the fact that no local funds are now available to the CDA or the SLDC. This fact has hamstrung development in St. Louis for decades. Under federal rules, HUD money cannot be used to promote the city, and most federal money is earmarked for specific purposes. Obviously local money is necessary to make the reorganization plan work.

This is the culture that Clarence Harmon inherited. Already he has made moves to change it. He has appointed Mike Jones as a Deputy Mayor for Development. Jones exercises informal influence over the CDA and the SLDC. Staff members of both agencies have sat through a series of meetings with Jones, who has been trying to sell the message that things will work better for the city if the agencies cooperate in implementing overall policy priorities. This is about as much as the mayor can accomplish until the Board of Aldermen agrees to pass legislation and recommend changes to the city's charter so that planning and economic development can be officially reorganized.

If Clarence Harmon succeeds at bringing reform to the planning and economic development process in the city, the legacy he leaves will be positive and far-reaching, even in the unlikely event that he becomes a one-term mayor. He may not always have the best political instincts, but if he manages to push through fundamental reform of the city's planning and development processes, his critics would be forced to acknowledge that he possessed the vision and political skills to alter the culture of political paralysis that has held back St. Louis for so long.

Dennis Judd is professor of political science at University of Missouri St. Louis.