On October 25, the St. Louis Federalist Society and the Show-Me Institute co-sponsored a debate entitled “Suppressing the Vote or Stopping Fraud: The Voter ID Debate.” It featured John Fund of The American Spectator and Denise Lieberman of Advancement Project. The Hon. Robert Dierker of the 22nd Judicial Circuit Court of Missouri moderated. The debate gets into full swing at 1:19.
Show-Me tech guru Josh Smith recorded the event.
Voters in the city of Saint Louis will decide on Tuesday if they would like to reduce the size of the Board of Aldermen from 28 to 14 (not including the president of the Board, which remains the same under either scenario). I think this would be a good change for the city. Why, you ask, would it be a positive change? Well, check out this op-ed on Proposition R and dive into the joy of debates about government structure.
For more information on the general question of government structure in Missouri, check out my policy study and this essay on the subject.
“Rent seeking,” better understood as privilege seeking, is the common practice of seeking economic gain through the political system without reciprocating with public benefits.
Recent news of the city of Columbia offering special incentives to American Airlines, but not to Delta, prompted Phil Garcia to write about the consequences of rent seeking (and even compared the situation to his children wanting more allowance). Garcia commented how rent seeking hurts competition and raises taxpayer burdens. Check out his excellent letter to the editor in the Jefferson City News Tribune — Your Opinion: Airport ‘rent-seeking’.
Also read our posts explaining why Columbia made a poor decision, and a related op-ed about how Columbia intends to pay for an airport expansion.
Is the Saint Louis Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) backsliding? About a year ago, former Show-Me Institute Policy Analyst Audrey Spalding attended an LRA meeting in which the Board of Commissioners did not reject a single offer to purchase property. Much to my dismay, in Wednesday’s LRA meeting, the board accepted a measly five out of 23 offers.
Cassandra Griffin pleaded with the board to let her buy a small lot right next to her house. She has been maintaining the lot for years because the owner neglected the property and Griffin wanted the neighborhood to look nice. She continued maintaining the lot when the LRA acquired it earlier this year. Her offer was lower than the city’s estimated value of $1,454 — but she explained that she has already spent close to $4,000 on upkeep.
The LRA should be happy to give this small plot of land to a woman who is proud of her neighborhood and wants to keep it in good shape. Instead, one of the board members remarked that the LRA has only owned this property for about a year, and it is big enough to build on so someone else might want to buy it. Is that a good reason to turn down a buyer?
Here is a picture of Griffin’s home and the empty lot she wants to purchase (from Google Maps):
The LRA’s mission is to put abandoned, tax-delinquent properties back into productive use. No one else has attempted to purchase this property. How long is the LRA going to hold onto it? If Griffin stopped maintaining the property, the city would spend taxpayer dollars on upkeep when they could let her own the property now, maintain it herself, and pay taxes on that land. The city could wait years before someone comes along who wants to build on this property (more likely, they may never come). Time is money.
Most people are familiar with Einstein’s E=mc2. In government, there is another powerful theory, the “Law of 1/n,” which states that as the size of a legislative body grows, that body increases spending. The larger a council or assembly, the more it spends. With that in mind, let us discuss the current proposal to reduce the size of the Saint Louis City Board of Aldermen from 28 aldermen and wards to 14.
When I was an assistant at the Saint Louis County Council, I once received a call from a resident who had just moved to an unincorporated part of the county from Saint Louis City. He wanted a new street light installed by his house. I explained in detail the various ways he or his neighborhood association could contact AmerenUE and arrange to pay for and install a new street light. After I went on in detail for several minutes, he finally cut me off and said, “Look, I just want you [meaning my boss, the councilman] to install a street light in front of my house.” The caller then explained that he just moved from the city, and, there, if he wanted a street light, he just called his alderman and he got a street light. He could not understand a system where he or his neighbors might be expected to actually handle something like this on their own.
The current makeup of the city’s board is unusual for at least two reasons. With 28 members for 320,000 residents, it is far larger on a per-resident basis than almost any other major city’s legislative body. By comparison, Kansas City has just 13 councilmembers for approximately 460,000 people. Furthermore, Saint Louis board rules authorize the filibuster, which is rare for local government councils. The filibuster — or often just the threat of it — gives each member of the board of aldermen substantial individual authority. There are benefits to that, but allowing so many officials to make certain their constituents get their “fair share” is a recipe for the creation of political fiefdoms. The benefits of getting a “fair share” for your ward are concentrated, and the costs are widely distributed among many other officials and taxpayers. In simpler terms, “Give that guy a street light!”
The “Law of 1/n” is a widely held finding of public choice economic theory. As any legislature has more members, they will seek a larger share of the pie for their voters. Both total spending and pork-barrel spending increase as an inevitable part of that quest. Taxes increase to pay for that spending. The accounting firm KPMG just released a study that found Saint Louis has the second highest business tax burden of major American cities. Those street lights aren’t free, you know.
There are counterweights to this. Most notably, Missouri’s Hancock Amendment thankfully limits the ability of governments to grow and grow. But another counterweight is a smaller legislative body. In a smaller body, the politician’s constituent will both receive the new street light and pay for a larger share of it. The politician has to consider both benefits and costs.
What about citizen representation? Clearly, there is a symbiosis between having a large number of aldermen and residents asking their alderman to do many things. If an alderman represents a small area, he or she can try to do many things for that area. That may be great, but individuals likely could do some of those things themselves if not for the easy availability of the alderman. I am reminded of the Australians in the “Simpson’s” episode who decide they must speak to their prime minister about a certain issue, and then just run to the neighboring farmhouse to see him.
The current members of the board represent slightly more than 10,000 people each. In Saint Louis County, the councilmember for the sixth council district (South County), along with one assistant, serve the constituent needs of 140,000 unincorporated county residents. If one county councilmember and one assistant can service 140,000 constituents, I think the members of the city board of aldermen can handle 23,000. Unless, that is, they really want to give a new street light to everyone who asks for it. Perhaps the largest benefit to a smaller board of aldermen is that it will say “no” a little more often.
David Stokes is a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.
On Nov. 6, Missouri voters will have the opportunity to make a modest change to the way judges are appointed to Missouri’s Supreme Court and appellate courts. Currently, a nominating commission comprised of three non-lawyers that the governor chooses and four lawyers (three that the Missouri Bar elects plus one judge) picks the candidates which the current governor can appoint to these courts. The reform would allow the governor to appoint four citizens to the commission — making a non-lawyer majority possible — and would make a retired judge a non-voting advisor. Lawyer-elected representation would remain unchanged.
Opponents of Amendment 3 like to portray the current lawyer-dominated court plan as immune to even minor improvements. As a lawyer, I strongly disagree.
Missouri’s current court system dates back to middle of the 20th Century. Tired of overly partisan courts, Missourians enacted a new court plan that moved the state from a substantively partisan judge selection process to one that tried to remove some of the overt political pressures that campaigns produce.
Unfortunately, the structure of Missouri’s judicial selection system biases strongly toward lawyers, entrusting great power to those who would practice before the Court to choose what the Court looks like. As the Wall Street Journal noted in 2007, “[a] democratic system of choosing judges requires a transparent process — and accountability for those who make the choice.” Unfortunately, the lawyer-selected representatives of the Missouri court plan simply are not accountable to the rest of the state.
Does a system where lawyers get to approve their judges sound like a good system for everyone else? Not to me. It is bad policy to delegate immense power to a few thousand lawyers and let them effectively build a court over time that renders justice on the other six million or so non-lawyer Missourians. Inmates do not get to vote on who runs the prison. Lawyers should not have preferential rights for who metes out Missouri justice.
Initiative opponents suggest the proposed amendment would inject politics into Missouri’s court system. Nonsense. Politics have controlled Missouri’s courts for decades, albeit behind closed doors. Instead of currying favor with several special interests, prospective judges need only to keep on good terms with the members of one interest — the Missouri Bar. There are many fine lawyers, but I do not agree that we as a profession are better equipped to choose our referees than regular Missourians.
This reform is important because a court which is more accountable to Missourians is less likely to be beholden to today’s ingrained special interests. A judicial selection process that returns power to Missourians through their representatives while removing the most salient and destructive aspects of judicial elections would add confidence to Missouri’s court system. Indeed, reforms that empower Missourians to reassert majority control in their judicial system over special interests should be lauded — by both non-lawyers and members of the Bar.
Missouri’s court plan is far from perfect and needs reform. This initiative is a step in the right direction.
Patrick Ishmael is a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.
Yesterday, I testified in front of the Saint Louis City Tax Increment Financing (TIF) Commission regarding the proposed $10 million subsidy for a proposed new apartment complex and grocery store in the Central West End. I have said before that, like an unhappy family in a Russian novel, every TIF is awful in its own unique way.
This TIF is no different. Two awful policy items stand out in this TIF. First, this is one of the wealthiest and most successful parts of Missouri. If the corner of Euclid and West Pine needs a subsidy, then everywhere in the state deserves a subsidy for anything. Let’s just end the dog-and-pony shows and subsidize everything. We can stop paying Development Strategies to come up with terrible analysis that would flunk a high school economics course. We can stop pretending there is a deliberative process involved and just go right to cutting checks upon request. Because that is basically where we are now in Missouri.
The second awful aspect is the special absurdity of the “blight” designation here. The owners of the property — who are seeking the TIF and blight designation — have owned the property for some time and are benefiting from allowing the property to be “blighted” in legal terms. (Note: It is not really “blighted.”) Because the owners tore down the prior office building and did not improve the property for several years, their baseline tax rate under TIF will be far lower than it would have been otherwise. State statutes should be changed to prevent property owners from deliberately decreasing the assessed value of their property so that they can have substantially lower payments-in-lieu-of-taxes (the method by which a TIF subsidy operates) when they apply for a TIF.
This project absolutely does not need a tax subsidy. So, of course, the proposal passed the TIF Commission unanimously, 8-0. Even the few commission members who asked tough questions about the TIF voted in favor of it. So it goes.
David Stokes has a recurring spot on McGraw Milhaven’s KTRS radio program. In this appearance, Stokes and the host discuss topics such as the speed limit change on Forest Park Parkway in Saint Louis, traffic safety policy generally, the city of Florissant getting a new WalMart despite turning down the requested TIF, the difference between pro-market and pro-business, and the final ballot initiative: the special school district tax increase.
David Stokes has a recurring spot on McGraw Milhaven’s KTRS radio program. In this appearance, Stokes and the host discuss topics such as the sudden lowering of the speed limit on Forest Park Parkway in Saint Louis, the benefits of synchronized stoplights, the Saint Louis County sales tax pool and why it should be kept, the issue of “local control” in the city of Saint Louis, and the issue of ticket scalping.
