STLPR0%
Page says people are interested in the idea of St. Louis joining St. Louis County 38%
By Jason Rosenbaum0%
4/6/2026, 10:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 21 faulty reasoning types, including Overconfidence Bias, Framing Effect, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 10.6% saturation with 84 hits. Analysis detected 735 faulty-reasoning hits from 793 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 43.7% and a BS Rank of 38% (10,525 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 62.60% of the article peer group.
St.
Louis County Executive Sam Page said he was expecting “aggressive pushback” after he held a press conference calling for renewed conversations about St.
Louis becoming a municipality in his county.
But in an interview last week, Page said people in St.
Louis County seem to be interested in the idea.
He said more than half of the respondents in a recent county survey said “something needs to be done.”
Page said 10% of the respondents said they want to see no changes, while another 10% needed to know more before agreeing to anything.
“So we want to hear more.
It’s all a glass half-full or a glass half-empty, depending on your perspective and experience with this question in the past.”
Page was referring to the public antipathy toward previous plans to end the so-called Great Divorce between St.
Louis and St.
Louis County.
During an appearance on “The Politically Speaking Hour on St.
Louis on the Air” on Friday, attorney Joseph Blanner, who has studied the city-county divide for years, noted that every single idea presented since the mid-1800s floundered.
The most recent was the Better Together plan that would have created a powerful metro government to oversee St.
Louis and St.
Louis County.
“There have been a lot of efforts over the years to modify the relationship between St.
Louis city and county, and ultimately, all of those arrangements have failed,” Blanner said.
“So the devil is certainly in the details.
It depends on what that arrangement looks like and whether or not it's going to be supported by city and county voters.”
Blanner said what Page is putting forward, commonly known as reentry, has never been voted on either in an election in St.
Louis and St.
Louis County or in a statewide ballot initiative.
“It's the most incremental approach that's ever been attempted,” he said.
Blanner said previous plans were often more ambitious in scope and, therefore, potentially more impactful on how local governments would function in the St.
Louis region.
For instance, the Better Together plan would have created a powerful metro mayor position and significantly reduced the responsibilities of municipalities.
Reentry would allow St.
Louis to retain key political leadership positions, such as the mayor’s office and Board of Aldermen.
It would almost certainly lead to the elimination of some of the city’s elected offices, such as recorder of deeds or collector of revenue.
“I think the biggest single factor is that St.
Louis County then would have a direct interest in what goes on in the city, and it would create a direct constituency relationship,” Blanner said.
“And so, I think that's something that would be largely beneficial … that there would no longer be this competition between the two.”
Dollars and cents
Blanner was Gov.
Mike Parson’s nominee in 2019 to serve on the Board of Freeholders, an entity that typically studies city-county consolidation plans and puts a specific idea to St.
Louis and St.
Louis County’s voters.
(It’s officially known as the Board of Electors thanks to a U.S.
Supreme Court decision in the 1980s, but it’s still colloquially known as the Board of Freeholders.)
The 2019 process became bogged down when St.
Louis aldermen couldn’t agree on then-Mayor Lyda Krewson’s nominees.
And then it effectively fizzled out because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A financial analysis could be helpful to a future board studying the city-county reentry issue, Blanner said.
He said past studies found that the reentry proposal didn’t usually save money but did create a larger funding stream to potentially hire more people and improve governmental service.
“[The county offices] are an unnecessary extra layer of government in the city that could be done away with if they were just another municipality in St.
Louis County, who, frankly, handles most of those functions very well,” said Blanner, referring to elected city offices such as recorder of deeds or treasurer.
Page, who is leaving office after 2026, said there should be a financial study of whether reentry makes sense before anything is put to voters.
He also said another option is having singular agencies that handle a government service throughout St.
Louis and St.
Louis County, such as the Metropolitan Sewer District or the Zoo-Museum District.
“There's a dozen joint ventures that have evolved because of our separated governments to provide a more efficient way to deliver a specific service line of government,” Page said.
“And we need to ask ourselves: Are there more opportunities somewhere else in the services that the government provides?
Or is the city coming into the county as a municipality and combining some of those county level responsibilities.
Is that the next step?”
Analysis
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