Cara’s Vision for Restoring Basic City Services
Every day, residents in every neighborhood of St. Louis say they don’t feel like the city is meeting their basic needs. Take one look at the requests to the Citizens’ Service Bureau (CSB), and it’s easy to see what people complain about: the condition of roads and trash piling up in alleys.
Basic city services are clearly not a priority of the current administration. Cara has plans to ensure that roads are well maintained and trash and recycling services are reliable.
Fixing the Roads. The condition of our roads is getting worse over time. Potholes plague almost every city road. This not only impacts quality of life, but it also costs residents money for additional car maintenance and repairs. Cara has solutions to for these problems.
Staff up. The Street Department is terribly understaffed. About 60 of the 160 maintenance positions are open. These positions are budgeted and approved, and funds have been allocated. If staff can’t be hired, the department needs to contract with street repair services to supplement city staff.
Overhaul the paving policy. When a utility company digs up a street, the current policy directs it to pay the city to repave it at a cost that does not cover the cost of paving, thereby leaving streets with steel plates for months on end. Following the lead of other municipalities and requiring the utility companies to repave our streets themselves will free the short-staffed Street Department to work on other projects, such as street repair. This should also result in faster and more complete repairs by the utility companies.
Establish a Transportation Department with a dedicated funding source. The city’s street director estimates that general maintenance of the city’s roads would cost between $12 million and $13 million a year just to keep up with wear and tear. The department currently allocates between $2 million and $3 million a year for such work, $10 million less than actually needed. Recognizing the lack of funding for street repair is a first step. Prop V, which created a Transportation Department and passed on the ballot in November, is a good start. But the proposal included no funding. City leaders and the community will have to work together to find a solution to making the new department a helpful reality – not to mention determining a dependable funding source, given the current tax environment.
Picking up the Trash. Garbage in alleys has been piling up with no end in sight. CSB complaints regarding collection during this current administration have almost doubled compared to the previous one. The problem is not only frustrating, it’s a serious public health concern. The city needs to staff up, change policies to streamline collection and save money, and use the money saved to contract for service to fill in gaps.
Staff up. The Refuse Department is seriously understaffed. It is currently operating with about a 40% vacancy rate. Positions are budgeted and approved, and funds are allocated. But workers have not been hired. If the department is unable to hire staff it needs to contract for additional garbage collection services. City staff cannot be expected to work six or even seven days a week and still not keep up with the workload.
Honesty regarding recycling. Currently, the vast majority of recycling in alleys isn't being recycled. In fact, auditing the last three years shows only around 5% is actually getting recycled, a sharp drop from the previous five years. Residents are accustomed to seeing the refuse trucks pick up both the recycling and garbage and put them in the same truck. It's time to be honest with our citizens.
Expand the drop sites. The vast majority of the items residents drop at recycling spots is being recycled. Making it easier for residents by establishing more drop sites will result in more high-quality recycling items staying out of landfills and reducing the cost to dispose of the material. That would make the recycling program sustainable.
Opt-in Program. Piloting an opt-in recycling program would allow residents who want the convenience of home pick-up for recycling to pay an extra fee to help cover the cost of additional routes. Just as importantly, the program would identify people who are separating items for recycling from trash, thus enabling the city to collect clean recycling reliably. The city currently pays 4.5 times more for collecting recycling items, in part because of contamination from trash. Clearly separating recycling from trash would allow the city to cut costs.
Beef up consequences for illegal dumping. Almost every neighborhood is plagued with dumped furniture, tires, and construction waste. Expanding the camera program to catch dumpers, streamlining the process of collecting the data, and focusing the legal department on prosecuting these cases will reduce the personpower spent cleaning up the mess, the tonnage fees for getting rid of dumped trash, and, of course, the quality of life lessened by living with illegal dumping.
Modernize the Refuse Department. Right now, refuse workers are operating with old machines and paper maps. Even though the department is understaffed, drivers still show up to work and are met with an inadequate number of working trash trucks. This is unacceptable. Cara will prioritize unspent federal money investment in working trucks and equip them with tracking software so the department can keep track of blocks that are missed when routes get cut short. That way, areas won’t go weeks on end without garbage collection, as too often continues to happen.
Cara is committed to doing this work. Her plan goes beyond fixing roads and picking up trash. It’s about making St. Louis work. She believes the city needs a mayor who will put competent people in place, restore trust through transparency, and take action to solve the problems residents face every day. As mayor, she is committed to using reporting and transparency to rebuild confidence in city government, ensuring that residents know where their tax dollars are going and how services are being delivered.