Besides our average Alderman having been in office for 12 years, we have too many. There has been talk about cutting the current number of 28 in half for years. Such a proposal was rejected by St. Louis voters in November 2004. It is time to revisit the issue.
To evaluate where St. Louis stood I turned to my friend Rob Ryan. Ryan is a recent SLU alumni, an employee at RegionWise and a consult along with Mark Baum at Baum & Ryan.
Here is what we know based on what he gathered. St. Louis is #1 or #2 in having representatives representing the fewest number of residents or percent of the population, respectively.
Ryan’s notes on each of the above cities:
St. Louis: The Board of Aldermen is made up of 28 members (one elected from each of the city’s wards) plus a board president who is elected city-wide
Cleveland: The number of council members has decreased over the years. In 1885 there were 50 council members, by the 1960s there were 33, in 1981 Cleveland voters approved reducing council to 21 members, and today there is debate about further reductions (some suggest as few as seven members
Pittsburgh: City council members are chosen by plurality elections in each of nine districts
Milwaukee:Â The mayor oversees a Common Council of elected members, each representing one of 15 districts in the city
Baltimore: The Baltimore City Council is now made up of 14 single member districts and one elected at-large council president
Denver: elected from 11 districts with two at-large council-members
Chicago: one elected from each ward
Kansas City: one member for each district, plus one at large member per district
Memphis: six elected at large from throughout the city and seven elected from geographic districts
New Orleans: The city council consists of five council members who are elected by district and two at-large council members
Cincinnati: members are elected at large
Detroit: city government is run by a mayor and nine-member city council and clerk elected on an at-large nonpartisan ballot
All info on government structure was taken from wikipedia, 2000 pops from factfinder.census.gov
A couple of my unsolicited observations; Out of my non-scientific sample, St. Louis has the lowest population per representative Cleveland is 2nd, but they have been reducing the number of districts for the past several decades St. Louis drops to #2 when you rank by percent of total population per representative, behind Chicago. This really confirms the argument that St. Louis is a lot like Chicago in its collection of semi-independent machine-style fiefdoms. Neither city have any meaningful number of at-large representative positions and both have a bunch of aldermen representing less than 5% of the city’s population
Clearly our current number of representatives is not in line with many other cites. We had 28 wards when our city had half a million more people than we had as of the 2000 census. What is the magic number? Looking at the above I’d say cutting out half isn’t enough. Our current system is broken and does need fixing. I don’t expect the current Aldermen to eliminate their own jobs. We must do it for them.
The question is how do we get it done? I’m not overly concerned about collecting signatures. The big question is do we have some reps from districts and some at large? How do we want to restructure our city charter for the 21st Century?