This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 6, 2011 - Mayor Francis Slay basked in the overwhelming victory for retention of the city's 1 percent earnings tax Tuesday night, but he acknowledged that the message sent by voters "was not a blank check for the future."
Instead, he said, over the next five years St. Louis will have to make sure that it can work harder and smarter to make sure it provides basic services in the most efficient way, including possible collaboration with St. Louis County.
The earnings tax won a solid victory, capturing nearly 88 percent of the vote. (There were 34,190 favoring Prop E; 4,864 opposed. View complete city election results here . )
In Kansas City -- which also had to hold an earnings tax retention election because of the passage of Proposition A statewide in November -- the victory was smaller but still decisive, with 78 percent of voters saying the tax should remain for another five years.
Slay thanked the broad coalition of individuals, businesses and organizations that had backed Proposition E. He also thanked the voters in St. Louis and said that while he hadn't taken the victory for granted, he wasn't that surprised either.
"It's not shocking to me that it won this big," he told the Beacon. "I was out all over the city. I went to 85 neighborhood organization meetings all over the city, and all I was getting was a lot of concern and a lot of support. People really seemed to understand what was at stake for the future of St. Louis.
"I was confident that the people of St. Louis would do the right thing for the city if they were armed with the facts. This is their government, and I think they understood well what was at stake. They knew that regardless of what you thought of the earnings tax, it would be irresponsible to get rid of it without a viable alternative in place."
Now, he said, it is up to him and other leaders -- not only in the city but throughout the region -- to use their authority to make sure tax dollars are spent as wisely as possible.
"I think the people of St. Louis expect us as government leaders to engage in an effort that will help address what we see in the census and what we see in the economy," Slay said. "We need to do things better and more efficiently, and we need to make sure that however we tax ourselves is the best way to make sure we grow in the future.
"I think we can celebrate what the voters gave us, but we have five years to do what the voters allowed us to do -- to make the changes necessary to help St. Louis do a better job to compete with other cities and with the world instead of competing with ourselves."
That effort, he said, may not mean merging with St. Louis County, but it does mean looking at what kinds of services can be better delivered through collaborative efforts.
"We have to be taking a hard look at ourselves as a region," Slay said. "What we have seen tonight, I believe, is an important step in achieving necessary and inevitable change in the way the city provides services and the way we operate as a region. If we continue let things stay the way they are, I think we will be making a big mistake.
"What the voters did tonight is critical to that effort. They gave us five years to get it done. Having some kind of pressure to really take a hard look at ourselves is not a bad thing. Otherwise we could just be floating around and continuing to do things the way we have been doing them."