ST. LOUIS—On Monday night, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen will hold the last of its public hearings designed to more specifically explore options for spending the city’s roughly $250 million share of the NFL settlement.
The 5:30 p.m. meeting of the Committee of the Whole will focus on ideas for subsidizing childcare in the city and follows similar meetings that have discussed other suggestions which scored well in city surveys, including the replacement of city water mains, traffic calming and pedestrian street design, improved wages for city workers, and a proposal to improve downtown infrastructure.
Representatives for WEPOWER, a St. Louis-based non-profit organization, will use the meeting to unveil a two-pronged plan to attack problems with access to childcare in the city.
It’s proposing a $100 million endowment that would generate $5 million annually to go toward increasing the number of physical seats available for early childhood education from ages 0-5, and boosting wages for those teachers.
In addition, it supports legislation to put a half-cent sales tax on the spring ballot in 2025 that if passed, would provide $22 million annually that would be used to subsidize early childhood tuition.
“Because early childhood is so grossly under-funded, because there is no funding model, we have to create multiple new revenue streams and there is no silver bullet,” Charlie Cooksey, WEPOWER’s CEO told Spectrum News in a Monday interview.
Cooksey said it’s clear both streams are necessary and that an endowment, with a 5% annual return, wouldn’t be enough to fund the tuition subsidy.
“That wouldn’t lead to game changing impact so that’s the reason we’re calling on the Rams money to go towards facilities improvement and scale and workforce," she said.
"The math we’ve done, it can lead to some really awesome impact so in just the first five years we could redevelop or increase the capacity of about 35% of the centers across the city … We could support about 800 teachers per year and about 5,000 children per year through the workforce solution."
The push on this front comes as some aldermen have already endorsed a Greater St. Louis Inc. proposal that would use more than $230 million of the settlement on downtown infrastructure and to reinvest in parts of north and southeast St. Louis.
A bill introduced earlier this month with the support of four members of the board, including Alderwoman Cara Spencer, a 2025 candidate for mayor, caught board leadership and Mayor Tishaura Jones off guard.
Cooksey said she knows some in the city will try to pit the early childhood education plan against the GSL-backed infrastructure and investments but is ready to defend it.
“We intentionally didn’t call for almost all the money to go towards this because we wanted to respect that our city government has tough decisions to make and one of those tough decisions should be early childhood but not only early childhood,” she said.
“If they choose to invest in GSL’s proposal, we get it, but I think it would honestly be insane for that much money to go to that single proposal.”
A bill introduced earlier this month to lay out the GSL proposal that has support of four members of the board, including Alderwoman Cara Spencer, a 2025 candidate for mayor, caught board leadership and Mayor Tishaura Jones off guard. It’s resulted in days of back and forth statements from Jones, Board President Megan Green and GSL representatives.
"We truly did not believe legislative efforts to advance a policy priority that has been discussed publicly and privately for over a year – and about which we testified extensively just last month – would come as a surprise,” Greater St. Louis CEO Jason Hall wrote to Green Monday.
Neither Green or Greater St. Louis reacted directly to the early childhood education proposals Monday. In a statement, a spokesperson for Mayor Tishaura Jones said her office is working with Green on another bill related to Rams settlement funds that would be presented next month.
There is no deadline to spend money from the settlement.