Hiccup delays city vote on federal COVID money – STLtoday.com

ST. LOUIS — The city’s plan to spend federal coronavirus relief cash hit a bump this week after confusion delayed an aldermanic bill to approve Mayor Lyda Krewson’s spending plan.

The hiccup started on Thursday after some amendments, though generally agreed upon, confused an aldermanic committee, leading aldermen to hold up the bill. And that meant it missed a reading in front of the full board on Friday.

Krewson’s chief of staff, Steve Conway, said the delay shouldn’t affect the substance of the $64 million emergency measure.

“It doesn’t slow down anything at all,” Conway said.

The city has already started bidding some of the contracts paid for via the pandemic response money, he said.

The measure — which appropriates $35.3 million in funding from the federal CARES Act and close to $30 million from other federal sources — has drawn little dissent from aldermen. Despite the week’s confusion, aldermen have kept funding where Krewson initially proposed spending it when she released her plan for the emergency funds in late May.

Unlike in St. Louis County, where the council opted to give County Executive Sam Page’s administration unfettered authority over the money, the Krewson administration sent aldermen a plan with over 30 line items for spending the relief money. Among the largest spending categories are $8.1 million for testing kits and personal protective equipment, $5.4 million for rent and mortgage relief and $5 million for affordable housing construction.

The special aldermanic committee created to review the appropriation is scheduled to meet Tuesday to finish cleaning up the bill.

Also Friday, aldermen voted to expand the St. Louis Port Authority’s boundaries beyond the Mississippi riverfront. The measure was first proposed in early 2018, with the city noting that nearly every other port authority in Missouri is drawn to cover the entire city or county that created it.

The measure gained urgency last year as part of a package to levy a special 1% sales tax on the site of an under-construction Major League Soccer stadium to help pay for operations. But some aldermen balked, partly due to scandal at the St. Louis County Port Authority and concerns that port authorities can grant tax incentives or acquire land absent consent from aldermen.

As a compromise, the expanded boundaries were drawn to cover only part of downtown as well as the Anheuser-Busch brewery. Alderman Shane Cohn also amended the measure to take in an industrial area of his south side ward. It passed 23-2.

“Even though (economic development officials) say they’ll work with the alderpeople in those wards, it does go around the full board of aldermen,” said Alderman Joe Vaccaro, a no vote.

Meanwhile, Alderman Jeffrey Boyd held up a bill approving a $17.5 million budget for the parking division run by St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura Jones’ office, saying “irregularities” over a contract awarded by the division merited more scrutiny.

City Counselor Julian Bush said last month in an opinion requested by Boyd that a $7 million, three-year contract awarded April 10 to Hudson and Associates to manage parking meters was invalid because all of the money was not in the budget. Jones says the money for a single year is in the budget, which is how her office has always handled outside contracts. Jones and Boyd are running against each other in the August primary for treasurer and are longtime antagonists.

Jones noted the parking budget was passed unanimously by the streets committee Boyd chairs.

“Therefore, there is a certain irony to his pausing the budget to pretend to understand confusion that his own actions have created,” she said in a text.