Last winter, an unusually brutal winter storm spelled trouble for St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones. Residents who’d been iced in for more than a week were livid when, at an aldermanic hearing focused on the conditions, Streets Director Betherny Williams seemed untroubled, casually detailing how workers had scaled back to 8-hour shifts. Williams apologized the next day, saying that when she drove the streets after the meeting, “it was clear that I had been given incorrect information.” Jones earned guffaws after giving her administration a B– for its snow response; a few weeks later, a homeless woman died in the frigid cold just outside City Hall.
Jones’ successor is determined not to make the same mistakes.
In an interview for The 314 Podcast, Mayor Cara Spencer pointedly refused to give her own snow removal efforts a grade. Speaking just a few days after the city endured an unusually early November snow, she said, ”I think that’s something that really we should leave to the voters to decide how well we did.” She added, “I don’t want us to be graded on just one event.”…