ST. LOUIS, Missouri — St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones sat down with 5 On Your Side Political Editor Mark Maxwell to discuss progress during her first two years in office.
Below is a complete, unedited interview of the 26-minute exchange.
Mark Maxwell: I was looking up some of your interviews before we did this, and I liked one. There was this TED Talk that you did a while back.
Mayor Tishaura Jones: Yeah.
Maxwell: It might have been right around the time you were being sworn in.
Jones: No, actually, I've done two.
Maxwell: Two. I saw two. This one's the one where you described yourself as a reluctant leader.
Jones: Yes.
Maxwell: You use this really interesting analogy about when things reach a boiling point, then there's political movement. There's action. There's momentum or power there.
Jones: Right.
Maxwell: But it left me with a certain impression. I'm just curious: Do you think things have to reach a boiling point before government takes action?
Jones: No, absolutely not. There are things that we can do that are preventive before we reach a boiling point. But unfortunately, that's not how government works. We are playing whack-a-mole and fighting fires literally and figuratively every day.
Maxwell: What's an example of the whack-a-mole you reference?
Jones: Like where state control or different issues that come up. You know, we can't predict natural disasters. No one could have predicted the flood back in July and how that would affect different neighborhoods. We had no idea that neighborhoods in north St. Louis would also be flooded along with those that were along the river Des Peres. We those are there are certain issues that we just cannot predict.
Maxwell: It sounds like you're saying there's long term planning, there's hopes and dreams, there's a politician's aspirations, and then there's short term emergencies that disrupt all those best laid plans.
Jones: Exactly.
Maxwell: That's an interesting question, because you also like to call yourself a recovering legislator and that term is interesting to me. I can imagine that a St. Louis Democrat takes their fair share of defeats in Jefferson City, in a red state. I wonder if maybe you have to dig in and play defense there. What's the biggest difference that you've noticed between being a legislator in that forum and an executive at City Hall?
Jones: Being a legislator, you have to get consensus from, you know, depending on the size of your body, and in the state, you have to get consensus from at least 80-plus other people. And being an executive, there are a lot of decisions that you can make that don't require you to get buy-in or talk to other people. There are decisions that you can make as an executive and just go with it.
Maxwell: Do you still feel compelled, or do you still feel it's in the public interest to still foster that public buy-in? Even though you may not need it at times.
Jones: Yes, absolutely. I ran on a platform that talked about getting public input and having people participate in their government. I talked about how our government should be easier to understand, easier to participate in and easier to navigate.
Maxwell: How do you score that progress so far?
Jones: I think we're doing okay. You know, if we look at the ARPA settlement or the ARPA dollars that we spent or that we're now deploying out into the community, we held several town halls. Thousands of people completed surveys to make sure that we could see what they wanted us to do with the money. We, for the most part, listened to the public and went in those directions.
Maxwell: Listening to the public is interesting. We just returned from Detroit, where we went there searching for solutions about a shrinking city, and we got off the plane and had to race to City Hall. Our first flight got canceled. We were running a little behind. When we got there, we were surprised to see hundreds of people, a big crowd in a big public amphitheater. And at the bottom, the bowl of this big building was Mayor Duggan. He was standing there holding a mic. And there was a little bit of that retail politics happening, I think. But he was also... It was a hybrid of customer service and a town hall. Turns out that was a city struggling with the cloud of corruption.
Jones: Right.
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Maxwell: A city where voters didn't have trust in elected officials. So they rewrote the city charter to say eight times a year -- roughly every six weeks or so -- the mayor is going to stand there and take questions for at least an hour. He went way overtime, a couple of hours, maybe more.
Maxwell: Do you see value in that level of engagement and or could you commit to that kind of transparency to the public in St. Louis?
Jones: Well, we've already done that kind of transparency. We have held many more town halls than my predecessors have. We like being out in the community, either at ward meetings, neighborhood meetings, taking the hard questions, answering the hard questions, and sometimes having difficult conversations.
Maxwell: Even when it's uncomfortable? You see value in that, because...?
Jones: Yes, absolutely. Because people will respect you if you take that hard question and that might not be the answer that they wanted, but they will respect you that you showed up. Ninety-percent of this job is showing up.
Maxwell: I'm glad you showed up for this. Perhaps the most noticeable public buy-in we saw in Detroit was in their Project Green Light program.
Maxwell: This was interesting. It was the mayor's office -- not the police department -- the mayor's office was marketing this where businesses would spend a few grand to install these HD cameras outside, not inside a place where you might expect privacy, but outside in the public square. And police would monitor all of this. And it came with this flashing green light, not the glaring red and blue that says 'police are here.' But it's almost a subconscious invitation that tells people, customers or potential criminals alike: 'You do something here, we're going to see it.'
Jones: Right.
Maxwell: It sends a certain message there. But it stuck out to me that it was the mayor's office marketing it. In St. Louis, the link to go fill out one of those applications to get a camera for the Real Time Crime Center is buried deep in like an old website that looks like it was made in 1996 or something. Do you think you've done enough to give police the tools they need to do their job?
Jones: Well, I would say that a lot of our city employees don't have the tools that they need to do their job. We still have typewriters in the Department of Personnel, for example. When I became Treasurer, we had antiquated systems, people that didn't have access to a computer or email.
Maxwell: But in this instance, it's the company buying the gear?
Jones: Right.
Maxwell: It's the mayor doing the messaging. Do you think the public is hearing a message from you that helps police do their job?
Jones: I think that they are hearing a message from me that that we are going to attack crime at the root cause. This is about transforming public safety. This is about making sure that we're deploying the right resource to the right call, because what we've been doing has not been working and has not made our city safer. So, we have to try new and innovative things in order to get different results. Knocking our head against a brick wall and expecting the same result is the definition -- or expecting a different result -- is the definition of insanity. So, we're trying new and innovative things, things that we know work in other places and have seen it firsthand. And bringing those things here, deploying it in our communities and tweaking it for better results.
Maxwell: And for our viewers watching, you might be talking about cops and clinicians, or call diversion, or sending the right person to the right problem. I've heard some people advocate for this under the phrase of 'work smarter, not harder.'
Jones: Exactly.
Maxwell: Do you have evidence today that it's working? Is the 911 response time improving?
Jones: I will say that we're we're working to combine our 911 operators all into one facility.
Maxwell: That sounds like a not yet.
Jones: Not yet. But we've been working really hard on it. We right now, our 911 dispatchers or all of our dispatchers are located in different places. We have police dispatchers, EMS dispatchers and fire dispatchers. So, we're in the process of looking at locating them all into one facility, upgrading the software. And we're also asking the state to help us build a new facility for what we call a public safety access point for all of our first responders; and hopefully attaching a early childhood center or daycare center to that facility, because we realize that dispatchers work 24 hours a day.
Maxwell: Those sound-like exciting blueprints for the future. Often, crime presents that emergency we talked about earlier. I went back and reading a little bit more about how you got elected because I wasn't here back then, and I wanted to learn some more of that history. The St Louis American published what amounts to an endorsement of your campaign for mayor, and that article said that St. Louis is one of the most dangerous places in the world for Black Americans. They used pretty stark language after that warning against backing candidates who were aloof, in their words, about, "war-zone levels of violence." And they took a shot at your then-opponent, Cara Spencer, saying "we often hear from several Cara Spencer supporters that Saint Louis isn't really dangerous or is just a perception about the way crime rates are tabulated." I heard similar responses from you in the last year. So I want to ask you now, is the crime problem in Saint Louis real or is it a perception about skewed statistics?
Jones: I think both things can be true. We definitely have to address crime as it occurs in our communities because one life lost to gun violence is one too many. And when you see that, when you look at the statistics as far as the demographics of people who are losing their lives to gun violence, a majority of them are African-American. So, this is a dangerous place for African-Americans. But we are trying to ... we are trying to make sure that we're deploying the right resources in community to help people deter ... to deter them, using three things called deterrence, intervention and prevention. So deterring people from a life of crime, intervening where necessary, and also preventing through our Office of Violence Prevention. Now, these things have been again, they, they work in other places. We've seen them work in other places, but they take time. And we just opened our Office of Violence Prevention last year. We've seen that it works, but it takes time. And we need ... We need patience from people because we didn't get here overnight. We won't get out of this overnight. And then the last point about that is the proliferation of guns in our community makes our job and makes law enforcement's job very difficult, especially because we're not able to pass common sense gun safety laws on the local level to take guns off our streets.
Maxwell: I do hear you about the long-term effects and the long-term solutions, I think. And you're saying you want patience from the public. Often the public wants urgency from elected officials. So that's sort of this interesting tension point. I think I want to ask with the local control, though, because that's the big political fight everyone's watching right now. You've said if the state wants to take over the local police department, they've got to pay for it. They need to buy the gear, the buildings, the property. How far down that road are you willing to go? On the day of a state takeover, for example, I wonder what that showdown looks like. Are you going to seize police property until the state cuts the city a big check?
Jones: Well, we're going to explore every option that we have in order to make sure that that if if the state is going to take over our police department, then they have to pay for it.
Maxwell: Including holding the property?
Jones: I'm not saying holding the property, but we know that this is probably going to get litigated for for for many, many months because the bill as it as it currently is written so that they can take over our police department on September 1. There are tons of administrative things that have to happen in order for that to happen that nobody's even thought about. And tons and millions of dollars in costs that no one has even thought about. And let's also say, is this constitutional? Is this constitutional?
Maxwell: You think it's an unfunded mandate?
Jones: It's an unfunded mandate. And it sets a dangerous precedent for the state to come in and take over any municipalities department when they see fit.
Maxwell: There's some history there and you've talked about that. But I want to move on to a different angle of this because I think it might underlie the issue. When you were running for mayor, you addressed an "elephant in the room," you said. A racial divide in what you called the city's law enforcement with separate unions for white officers and Black officers. At the time, the Ethical Society of Police, a group of Black police officers, believed in your vision for the city.
Jones: Mm hmm.
Maxwell: Today, they're backing a state takeover of the police department where they work. Why don't those Black police officers want to work for you anymore?
Jones: You know what? I can't answer that. I think you'll have to talk to them. I'm also surprised at their change in position. They talk about how, you know, morale is down. But what can I do as a mayor to increase morale? They just voted on a contract that gives them the largest raise in decades. But as far as everyday morale? That comes from the top. That comes from the police chief. And our police chief is about nine weeks old at the time when we were having this conversation.
Maxwell: You see that as a reset?
Jones: We need to give our police chief time to work.
Maxwell: Do you regret any of the public comments directed toward the Ethical Society of Police? That feels like, at least from where I can sit and see, that was the spark or the impetus of this split?
Jones: What was the spark?
Maxwell: Over the police oversight board? And there was a moment of disagreement. Maybe it's forgotten now.
Jones: No, there was... Well, you know, people will support things because they feel like this is a panacea. A state takeover of our police department does not make us safer. And I have not seen anyone who can point to what is going to make us safer if the state takes over our police department, because it's the same people policing our streets, it's the same police people in leadership. So what's going to change?
Maxwell: I think people in the public might wonder, though, if the mayor had built or protected alliances, because this was an alliance you had. I'll use the Abraham Lincoln would always use: "Have I not destroyed my enemies by making them my friends?" In this case, it's the converse. You had an ally who is now on the opposite side of an issue with you.
Jones: You know, people change. Things change and they change their positions. And I can't point to one thing or another that made the Ethical Society change. But I do know that the Ethical Society in its previous years, you know, since it was founded back in the 70s, stood for racial equality and racial justice; and a state takeover of our police department by outstate Republicans -- outstate white Republicans, I might add -- is not about racial justice or racial equality.
Maxwell: Are you suggesting they've lost their way?
Jones: They have absolutely lost their way.
Maxwell: Let's talk about some of the underlying issues. I know the economic justice plan that your administration just announced and rolled out has a lot in it. I want to zero in on some of the home ownership aspects of it and the real estate parts. Those were some of the solutions we saw in Detroit working well as well.
Your economic justice plan would steer support to strategic neighborhoods in the city of St Louis, targeting a racial divide in wealth and income. That economic justice plan cites statistics that show Black workers often or on average make half of what their white counterparts may make. And the average Black household has just 10% of the accrued wealth on average as the white household. It says that giving downpayment assistance to new homeowners living in these specific neighborhoods, or living in or near poverty levels can help reverse the city's population loss. That stood out to me. We went to Detroit as a shrinking city. We're looking at what we can do to turn that around here. Is population a fair way to measure your success?
Jones: I would say that's one way to measure our success, because if we look at the population decline, it's been declining since the 1950s. So I would say if we're looking at population to measure success of all of the mayors, then I guess we've all failed. But we are looking at this as a way to not only take care of the people who are in those communities, who put down roots, who are saying that, you know, 'I'm city born and bred, I'm staying here,' so we have home repair programs for those people as well. But we're also looking to see what can we do to attract more people to move into St Louis. We realize that crime is an issue, but also we want to make sure that that we have tools to attract new residents.
Maxwell: Is it fair for the public to evaluate whether population has grown from the time you took office to the time you run for re-election? Are you running for re-election?
Jones: I'm absolutely running for reelection, but I've only been here for less than two years at the time that we're talking. So, population can't change that much in two years.
Maxwell: Some of the recent trends are interesting, too. It seems like ... and I don't know how you evaluate this, but the city is not just getting smaller. It's getting whiter. The Black population is leaving at a faster rate in these last few years. What's driving that?
Jones: Well, opportunity. You know, when I talk to people that I know that have left St. Louis for other cities, it's opportunities. They feel like, you know, St. Louis still has a racial divide and racism is still alive and well here. You know, we have to have these difficult conversations about how we provide opportunities to people that don't look like us. How do we even the playing field for our educational opportunities? We have some of the best universities in the country right here in St. Louis. But what are we doing to attract our citizens to attend those universities and then stay here after they complete their degrees?
Maxwell: What are we doing?
Jones: That's the question. We have, you know, the 2030 Jobs Report from Greater St. Louis saying that is about inclusive growth. Also, you know, talking about entrepreneurship, we've done some things with SLDC to do that as well. We have to expand the pot to make to make sure that St. Louis is an inclusive and welcoming city for anyone.
Maxwell: The initial draft of that Economic Justice Plan. I think this dovetails with what you were just saying. It says the city of St. Louis, initially, the plan was to encourage businesses to pitch in money for these down payment for workers to get into homes. But instead, your plan uses federal COVID-19 dollars to do that. What happens when that money runs out? And why haven't businesses bought into your plan yet?
Jones: We just launched the Economic Justice Action Plan.
Maxwell: This draft was from a while ago.
Jones: Right, in April of last year. So, what we've been doing is we have been having conversations with businesses and philanthropy, other corporations as well, to get their buy in. And you talk about Detroit. It took a while for them to get buy-in from the local philanthropy, local businesses.
Maxwell: They said they had to hit rock bottom.
Jones: We're not at rock bottom. We're trying to prevent from getting to rock bottom. I think we St. Louis is on the cusp right now of a wonderful opportunity and we have to get everybody on board.
Maxwell: You said something that I've heard from a lot of civic leaders in the area just now. I talked to them about the success we've seen in Detroit. They say, 'Yeah, that's great, but ... and then they shrug their shoulders. They say, 'Well, they've got a Dan Gilbert. They've got the big billionaires, they've got Ford and General Motors and all these big companies at their back.' And that's true.
Jones: We have them, too.
Maxwell: Isn't that part of your job is to close that deal or to win the trust of those civic partners, those business minds, the philanthropists in town? What is the progress? Can you give us a status update on those conversations, specific, granular or overview, however you'd like? Can you close the deal and bring those big voices to the table to help build St. Louis back?
Jones: Well, these conversations are happening and they're happening over time, and we are getting some interest from some of our local philanthropic leaders. But...
Maxwell: Some?
Jones: Yeah, and that's all I can say because they...
Maxwell: That sounds like a tease? Or it sounds like a work in progress?
Jones: They prefer not to be named specifically...
Maxwell: Why do you think that is?
Jones: I don't know. You know, I'm not going to ask them why they don't want to be named. But we are attracting investors not only locally but nationally as well. As you saw MasterCard also contributing $1,000,000 last week.
Maxwell: I often ask people in this type of conversation about economic development, what your pitch is to them? But I want to ask the question in reverse. What do they want to see from you?
Jones: I think they want to see that we have a plan, a plan to turn St. Louis around. We do have a plan. We have a plan with our economic justice accelerator and our action plan that is specific, and it marked specific places in specific neighborhoods and how we're going to get there. So, a lot of times we have ... St. Louis has put together these studies, these plans, these reports. But they sat on a desk and collected dust for years. And so not only ... We've taken a little bit from a lot of those reports and put it into action. That's why we call it an action plan.
Maxwell: When I hear you talk and give speeches and go around different parts of the community, you often lead with your story of growing up here. And that part of just who you are.
Jones: Right.
Maxwell: I think a lot of people appreciate that part of it. But when you talk about the future of St. Louis, you often talk about it hand-in-glove with the federal pandemic money that's going to give us a once in a lifetime opportunity, or the Rams settlement money that's going to give us this unique moment. With respect, both of those things were made available by voters in Georgia who gave the president power to have the American Rescue Plan and Stan Kroenke pulling the Rams up and leaving Saint Louis. Those pots of money were going to be here whether you were elected or not.
Jones: Right.
Maxwell: So, let's set those aside for a minute. What else can you point to -- to say this is a win that we delivered to the city of St Louis? During your two years in office so far, where would you point -- aside from those two -- to say, that's real progress, that's tangible?
Jones: We are making sure that we're upgrading our city services to make sure that they are more responsive. There are other things that we're doing. So, for example, LouStat, that is a program that we're working with our departments to make sure that they are responsive to our citizens when they do call in through our CSB (Citizens' Service Bureau) or our service bureau to make requests. And we're trying to make sure that that those requests are fulfilled and people feel like that their government is listening to them.
Maxwell: There's been pay raises for those workers.
Jones: Pay raises for all city workers, a retention bonus. But that also came through ARPA. So I guess I can't talk about that.
Maxwell: Well we can talk about it, but I guess I think what I'm asking about is the results. Are city services actually improving. Can you point to data? Can you point to evidence that it's getting better?
Jones: Yes, absolutely. Our trash is getting picked up on a frequent basis. Potholes are being filled and we put that data out on a regular basis. And again, we are we are concentrating on making sure that we're that our city services are being are... That city services are being completed.
Maxwell: Well, Mayor, I want to thank you for stopping by our studio. Any final thoughts you'd like to add about this upcoming political cycle or what's at stake with the ward reduction? What should voters have on their minds? What should they look for as they head to the polls next month?
Jones: I would ask voters to... To look at some of the candidates and make sure that those candidates represent their interests. Just because someone has served for 20, 30 years on the board doesn't necessarily mean that that's the right candidate to continue to serve on the board.
Maxwell: Are you talking about Joe Vaccaro or Sharon Tyus?
Jones: I'm not talking about anybody in particular. I'm just saying that sometimes that change is good and sometimes new people bring new ideas and fresh perspective on our legislative process.
Maxwell: You have endorsed Tashara Earl against Sharon Tyus. Alderwoman Tyus says that you started a war with her and she's going to give you two in return. That's a quote. What's the issue?
Jones: Oh, bless her heart. I'm not sure what the issue is with Alderwoman Tyus. I have reached out to her to have conversations. She doesn't return my phone calls. So it's not from me not trying to extend the olive branch. I would say bless her heart.
Maxwell: Is this a unique opportunity for you to sort of ... Some people have said consolidate power. There's a shrinking number of members of the Board of Aldermen. You're involved in some of these races trying to reshape it there. Is this a unique moment in the political power or the political capital in the City of St. Louis if the voters start to back your preferred candidate?
Jones: Well, I'm not the only one who was involved in the races. President Megan Green has endorsed candidates, so has control of Darlene Green. So we're just making sure that we're endorsing candidates who have a vision for the future of our city that's not steeped in what we've always done, and we've always done it this way, or 'Not-In-My-Backyard-isms.'
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