Category: St. Louis

St. Louis proves that it owns all land, and private “owners” are just squatters. In its eyes, anyway.

St. Louis’ redevelopment agency sued a convent, a saint, a nun and an elderly woman in a wheelchair who has a 999-year lease on Friday, seeking to use eminent domain to condemn a property in the Ice House District north of Soulard.

City officials hope the area will be a hip entertainment district one day, but first they have to remove stubborn landowners and tenants.

St. Louis city officials have no shame. Starting with Rodney Crim, Executive Director of the St. Louis Development Corporation (314-622-3400 extension 300), to Mayor Francis Slay (contact), the overreaching, power-mad political class is the blight upon St. Louis that no land seizures for hip venues will solve.

Stripping a convent of land for nightclubs. EVICTING THE ELDERLY AND THE INFIRM FOR NIGHTCLUBS.

Nightclubs that might not come, for a redevelopment effort that will probably fail.

No shame.

Developer asks city to foot risk on office tower, mall:

A St. Louis developer is asking the city to back his purchase of the office tower that sits atop the St. Louis Centre downtown mall.

While it’s not unusual for the city to award tax breaks for downtown projects, what’s different in this deal is that the city would be putting it’s “full faith and credit” behind the development.

Normally, if a project fails, it’s the developer who’s liable. In this proposal, taxpayers would be responsible.

The city of St. Louis can’t afford to have decent schools or smooth roads, but it still feels the need to hump the leg of any developer that will contribute $1 private dollars against $10 public dollars for any cockamamie idea, like St. Louis Marketplace:

[Plan opponent St. Louis Comptroller Darlene] Green says there has been only one similar arrangement in the city’s history: the 1992 financing of the now desolate St. Louis Marketplace on Manchester Avenue. That agreement is still costing taxpayers more than $1 million a year.

Mayor Francis Slay regretfully endorses bullocks:

Slay said he endorsed the plan reluctantly, calling it the only way to complete renovation of St. Louis Centre.

“This particular piece of property is a cancer in downtown St. Louis,” Slay said of the office tower.

Twenty and a couple years ago, it was a shot in the arm for downtown St. Louis.

Deputy Mayor Barbara Geisman says, “Boondoggle or boondoggle; there is no nonboondoggle.”

“Nobody wants to do this, but circumstances are such that we really have no choice,” Geisman said.

The developer knows that downtown St. Louis is about at its saturation point for suckers, and that this development will only be a lottery ticket in case there’s no honest money to be made. I guess to a certain type of entrepreneur, the tick type, you have to try to suck whatever blood you can from the government hound.

Still, maybe it’s early, but here’s my prediction: in 2030, the biggest landowner in the city of St. Louis will be the city of St. Louis as it’s left with the derelict remains of its foolish and costly attempts to determine its own fate with sexy new sports teams and big, shiny, empty buildings at the expense of its infrastructure.

He says:

Brace yourselves, St. Louis. The convention industry is about to start beating the drum for another major expansion of the city’s meeting facilities.

There’s no official plan yet, just a consultant’s report. But that’s how these things start. A consultant identifies a problem, and pretty soon officials get busy figuring out what they can build to solve it.

And if that isn’t enough, I’d like to remind St. Louis that its football and hockey sports venues are now over a decade old, which means that they’re one championship and the attendent goodwill away from being obsolete enough to require publicly-funded replacement.

As the price of scrap metal has risen, bad men have begun stealing or destroying working and expensive equipment to get at the copper or aluminum within. The City of St. Louis will do something to help deter the thieves. No, not rigorous enforcement of existing laws nor increased patrols and police presence on the street. Perish the thought.

The city will introduce new regulations that deputize (and burden) private industry and inconvenience law-abiding citizens:

Alderman Lyda Krewson has an idea of what to do. She’s proposing a law requiring scrap buyers to pay only by check and to photograph, fingerprint and even take the license plate number of every seller.

Police say the paper trail would help stop the scourge of thefts from businesses and homes that has risen with the price of recycled metals.

Because it’s easier to catch businesses in breaking the law because they don’t run as fast nor do they shoot back at law enforcement.

Red tape: It’s like duct tape for the government.

Slay disputes St. Louis ranking as most dangerous city:

Mayor Francis Slay makes no bones about it: Morgan Quitno Press is dead wrong to call St. Louis the most dangerous city in the United States.

“It’s bogus,” Slay said of the group’s annual ranking released Monday. “To suggest that St. Louis is more dangerous than Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Chicago — it just doesn’t make any sense. I will beat anyone who says that to my face within inches of his life, and then I will take his wallet to help fund some sports venue or another.” [Emphasis, actual words added]

Police Chief Joseph Makewar concurred.

In a story about how Macy’s will revitalize downtown when its preceding Famous-Barr gave up and lie curled in a fetal position at the corner of 6th and Olive, we have a gusher:

“This is exactly the punch in the arm downtown needed,” she said. “I think this is just the beginning. Famous-Barr had been here for years. Then Macy’s took it over and, boom, they brought it back.”

There you have it. Macy’s is giving downtown a punch in the arm. Sorta like the bigger kids in gym class. No word on when Macy’s will demand the lunch money of downtown, but all corporations do, sooner or later.

A large public works project that goes hundreds of millions over budget, leads to suits and counter suits between the city and the contractors, and leads to an unsustainable business model that’s freshly-mewling for more tax money. What could make it better? Oh, yeah, brag about the tunnels:

Instead of burrowing underground like miners, crews ripped open Forest Park Parkway and dug a trench that in some places is 45 feet deep. Reinforced concrete shored up the tunnel walls, and massive precast concrete tops – some weighing up to 30 tons – covered the tunnel.

Oh, boy.

I suspect this one, as only a minor boondoggle, won’t collapse, but if it does, we can easily point our fingers at nearby home owners who will have cost lives to maintain their property values.

Also, the ACLU, somehow.

He wrote:

Today’s Post-Dispatch has almost all the information you need to know about the grand opening of Metrolink’s Cross-County Extension next Saturday.

It probably didn’t cover this, either:

A woman was critically injured when she apparently jumped into the path of a MetroLink train early today near the campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Wow, the enemies of light rail are going all out to sabotage the triumph of this inflexible marvel of modern transit just as its latest, and only second, rail line opens, only a year late and only hundreds of million over budget!

He wrote:

Today’s Post-Dispatch has almost all the information you need to know about the grand opening of Metrolink’s Cross-County Extension next Saturday.

It probably didn’t cover this:

Several passengers suffered minor injuries when equipment on a MetroLink train got tangled and smashed into a window near Forest Park in St. Louis Monday evening.

Remember, friends, you can enjoy this sort of fun on the Shrewsbury-Clayton line starting this weekend!

Voters approve increasing license fees for businesses:

St. Louis voters approved an increase to the business license fee, dealing a victory to Mayor Francis Slay’s assault on crime.

And a victory to Francis Slay’s assault on companies located in the city limits.

How is this a victory in the assault on crime? Is Francis Slay’s opponents in this war on crime businesses? Giving the questionable government of the city of St. Louis more money to squander as it sees fit (and more money in the general fund for slush like sports commissions) doesn’t directly impact crime. But if the “assault on crime” is all about raising money, I guess I stand corrected and it is a victory.

When searching for a scapegoat or man-made entity to shake its impotent fist at after the recent storms, the city of St. Louis settles on Ameren UE:

City officials expressed frustration today that Ameren Corp. has kept them in the dark while more than half of the city remains without power.

Mayor Francis Slay — whose own home has lost power — said the utility has been “playing it very close to the vest” about when power would be restored to St. Louis.

“They have been very, very vague,” Slay said in a briefing to aldermen at City Hall. “They don”t really promise anything specifically — I think intentionally so.”

Dear politicians:

When dealing with actual concrete things, such as incompletely troubleshot interruptions of service, undiagnosed downed lines, and incomplete timetables of unknown repairs on undiscovered problems, people in the real world don’t make rash promises that they probably cannot meet. Although this is commonplace in your industry, how about you just shut your yap, sweat with your constituents, and never consider about how your efforts to hamstring public utilities might actually have helped lead to the situation you’re in now?

Nah, nevermind. Use this as a pretext to puff your three-pieced chest up and to further meddle with all the incompetent power of preening government.

Rail manufacturers, tar producers, and chicken plucking futures have just gone up! Explosion injures two Mallinckrodt workers:

Two employees of Mallinckrodt Inc. suffered minor injuries this morning in a flash fire that occurred while one of them was mixing chemicals.

St. Louis Fire Department Capt. Steve Simpson said the explosion occurred when dust was ignited, possibly from static electricity. It happened at Building 235 at the Mallinckrodt complex at 3700 N. Broadway at about 10:20 a.m.

Those of us who watched the Praxair accident aftermath (my coverage here, here, and here) have to wonder if Mallinckrodt will suffer the same banishment for the industrial accident, or if there are other criteria which a company meet to draw the ire of the government of the city of St. Louis, such as:

• Dramatic pyrotechnics the whole neighborhood can see.
• Live coverage on CNN.
• Continuous drum-beating by the local daily paper.
• ?

Either way, if the city doesn’t punish the company, it will demonstrate once again the fickle nature of our governments and prove that businesses and citizens exist, live, and do business at the leisure of the regal ruling class.

Last of radioactive waste passing through area:

The last of nearly 4,000 massive containers of radioactive waste are expected to travel through the St. Louis area today on their way to a temporary storage site in West Texas.

Funny, when the authorities first mentioned the plan, it was going to be THE END OF US ALL!!!!!

Better luck next time, environmental doommongers.

Plan to silence noisy car stereos is pulled:

The city’s get-tough plan to silence booming car stereos was pulled Friday after the mayor and comptroller turned up the political pressure.

Alderman Craig Schmid’s proposal to allow police to impound cars with enhanced stereo equipment was criticized as overly broad and intrusive. The bill would have allowed the city to fine motorists with some sound systems straight from the factory, technically enabling police to take their cars regardless of whether music was pumping or not.

Headlines that focus on the minor bad thing that this legislation would address–annoying loud car sound systems–overlooks the far greater evil in its punishment–government seizure of private property for a small infraction.

Because I’m not so far from my youth to have forgotten how I would occasionally turn up my radio to probably inappropriate levels when a good song came on the radio. A ticket, I could have handled. Taking my car would have driven me to unemployment, as most of the places I lived in my twenties didn’t offer quick or convenient mass transit that could convey me twenty miles to my various places of underpaid employment.

Legislating to eliminate pet peeves by putting down their owners should never pass nor be considered seriously, but with 200 years of legislation and a thousand years of English common law behind them, our legislators have to make busy to citizens’ detriment.

Back in the old days, the Milwaukee Journal ran a cartoon in its Green Sheet called “There Ought to Be a Law”, whose rejoinder/punchline “TOBAL.” followed annoying day to day situations. One would suspect that many the current generation of revered legislators steeped themselves in this comic strip instead of the Constitution, the Federalist papers, or even the watered-down civics books that public schools offer. For behold, the stupidest St. Louis aldermanic idea since peeing in a trash can: Big stereo could cost you your car

City police would be able to seize cars blasting loud music under an ordinance passed Friday by the Board of Aldermen.

The ordinance, which would take effect once signed by Mayor Francis Slay, prohibits the use and even installation of some enhanced speakers.

Hell, you only own your home at the leisure of the leisurely ruling class. Why not your cars, too? Instead of ticketing you, they’ll take your car. And what will they do with that seized car? Sell it at auction, no doubt.

Some people were just born to work in fast food:

Then everyone’s attention turned to a woman in line – the one with a shredded sequined purse on the tile floor near her feet.

“She picked up her purse like it was some kind of disease,” explained Shelley White, the store manager on duty.

“I ain’t got no gun,” was the only thing the stranger told the crowd in the restaurant before gathering her purse and teenage daughter from a nearby booth and running out of the place about 1 p.m. Friday.

But she did have a gun, investigators said, apparently a low-quality one that discharged by accident when she dropped her purse.

She had a secret too, one that she might have kept had White not rushed to the window and called out the license number for a customer to jot down. The fleeing woman was an off-duty St. Louis police officer.

After the woman inadvertantly discharged a firearm, fled the scene, and threw the firearm out of her window on the interstate before she was caught, she resigned when the internal affairs department of her police department opened an investigation.

As someone who travels into the city almost daily, I would hope the city of St. Louis would weed these people out before they’re actually, you know, cops.