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County Council’s new budget now approved, but could ignite legal fights

St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger confers with Councilman Pat Dolan at a Dec. 19, 2017, meeting of the St. Louis County Council.
Carolina Hidalgo | St. Louis Public Radio
St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger confers with Councilman Pat Dolan at a Dec. 19, 2017, meeting of the St. Louis County Council.

The St. Louis County Council’s decision to draw up and approve its own budget ends a longstanding practice of allowing the county executive’s administration to craft a spending blueprint.

The big question now is whatwill happennext.

County Executive Steve Stenger has yet to talk about his nextmoveafter the council voted 6to1onTuesday to pass its own spending plan.

The council cut $31 million dollars from Stenger’s original budget proposal, trimming spending forparks, public health and transportation programs.

In most cases, the council froze spending at current levels, plus a 5 percent increase.  The council did increase spending for its own department by about $500,000, primarily to pay for additional employees thatStenger has refused to hire to aid county auditor Mark Tucker.

“We have initiated a very important spending freeze in St. Louis County to stop this trend of spending into our reserves and heading us down the road toward a tax increase or service cuts,” said Council Chairman Sam Page, D-Creve Coeur.

Stenger and Page, both Democrats, have been battling for months over Tucker, who Stenger contends is unqualified and should be fired.

Break in precedent

In any case, this may be the first time in the county’s modern history that the county council passed its own version of the budget — as opposed to adopting what the county executive proposed or ordering the administration to make changes. And legal questions may be looming.

County Counselor Peter Krane raised some technical concerns in an email sent to council members.

County resident Tom Sullivan, a regular at council meetings, also filed a complaint this week with Missouri Attorney General John Hawley’s office. SullivancontendsPage violated the state’s Sunshine Law because he filed the substitute budget bills about two hours before last week’s initial council vote.

Sullivan told the council Tuesday thatopen records laws requiresuch bills to be filed at least 24 hours before an initial vote is taken.

Councilman Pat Dolan, a Democrat from Richmond Heights, voted against the various budget bills primarily because he said he had been intentionally kept in the dark until right before last week’s meeting. Dolan is Stenger’s closest ally.

Page dismissed such complaints,and blamed Krane for any technical problems with the bills.Still, Page said he doesn’t believe Krane’s concerns will create legal problems for the council.

Stenger declined comment after the vote. But he said earlier this month that his budget was sound, and he accused Page of making false accusations about the administration’s proposed budget.

Councilman Mark Harder, R-Ballwin, reaffirmed Tuesday that his key concern was that Stenger’s budget relied on using about $18 million from the county’s reserve fund. The council’s substitute budget does not.

He said the county needs to curb spending to protect its bond rating.

“We’ve been told by our county budget director that there’s going to be a day of reckoning, every time we’ve put one of these budgets together,” Harder said.

He and fellow Republican Colleen Wasinger said Tuesday that they expected some county department heads may need to file supplementary budget requests, and that they would be receptive to the proposals if the departments provide adequate information.

Both made a point of publicly praising the county department heads for their work in drawing up their initial budget proposals, even though the council ended up rejecting them.

Harder and Wasinger often side with Stenger, and Harder observed that he still expects to work with Stenger on other issues.

Follow Jo on Twitter:@jmannies

Copyright 2021 St. Louis Public Radio. To see more, visit St. Louis Public Radio.

Jo Mannies has been covering Missouri politics and government for almost four decades, much of that time as a reporter and columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She was the first woman to cover St. Louis City Hall, was the newspaper’s second woman sportswriter in its history, and spent four years in the Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau. She joined the St. Louis Beacon in 2009. She has won several local, regional and national awards, and has covered every president since Jimmy Carter. She scared fellow first-graders in the late 1950s when she showed them how close Alaska was to Russia and met Richard M. Nixon when she was in high school. She graduated from Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, and was the daughter of a high school basketball coach. She is married and has two grown children, both lawyers. She’s a history and movie buff, cultivates a massive flower garden, and bakes banana bread regularly for her colleagues.