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ST. LOUIS — Lauren Green voted for Mayor Tishaura O. Jones four years ago. She thought St. Louis needed more diversity in government, and picked the first Black female mayor in city history.

Then she saw city refuse trucks combining trash with the recycling her family carefully separated, and, just last month, the streets covered in snow and ice for weeks. She’s not voting for Jones again.

“Why does it take so long to get a basic service?” said Green, 39, a teacher and design consultant from Tower Grove South. “Where are our tax dollars going?”

At Tuesday’s mayoral primary, the city is going to find out how many voters are like her. For four years, the city has battled breakdowns in basic services, from answering 911 calls to filling potholes to clearing snow to hiring cops. Now the mayor is back before voters seeking reelection. And at nearly every turn of the campaign trail, she’s faced questions from residents on how she’ll fix things and from challengers saying she can’t — that it’s time for a change.

Alderwoman Cara Spencer, who lost to Jones in the mayoral race four years ago, has gone from neighborhood to neighborhood with her speech.

“We can do better at filling potholes,” she says. “We can do better at picking up your trash.”

Recorder of Deeds Michael Butler has turned the issue into a mantra. “Back to the basics,” he says.

And businessman Andrew Jones, making his third run for mayor, says hiring more police officers will improve everything else. “It starts with police,” he says.

The mayor inherited a city with problems: She came into the office in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the city reeling from a record spike in homicides and hamstrung by staffing shortages, made worse by a tough labor market.

She says her administration has worked hard to turn things around as quickly as possible.

“We had to fix a lot of things in my first term,” she told the Post-Dispatch in a recent interview, “and for anybody to say that they’re going to do better is laughable to me.”

Crime is down in St. Louis, she notes, even with the police department down hundreds of positions. Last year’s homicide rate was the lowest recorded in a decade.

Still, residents are frustrated. And data indicate they have reason to be.

A crisis in city services

The 911 problems predated Jones. Dispatchers, poorly paid for stressful hours, had been leaving in droves. Replacements were hard to come by.

By the time Jones took office, a unit that was supposed to answer at least 90% of calls within 10 seconds — the national standard for quality service — was answering closer to 60% in that time. Residents complained of being put on hold as they reported crimes happening right in front of them.

In the summer of 2021, Jones announced a plan to combine police and fire dispatcher units to simplify operations and bolster the number of people taking calls, a task long reserved for the short-staffed police unit. But labor leaders resisted, the plan went nowhere, and hold times continued to worsen.

A few months later, the trash problems began. For months, trash division leaders had managed their own staffing shortage by having drivers throw out alley recycling with the trash, saving them an extra trip and freeing up time to hit more trash routes. Then, in May 2022, the administration ordered alley recycling to resume.

And the division buckled.

Dumpsters across the city were left untouched for weeks. Frustrated residents pelted the city with complaints in record numbers. Even after city workers pulled overtime to clean up, clearing the dramatic scenes of trash piles overwhelming alleys, the problems persisted.

The city got some good news in 2023, when officials finally raised pay for 911 dispatchers, filled a bunch of empty positions and saw wait times return to 2018 levels.

As campaign season heated up last year, Jones focused her message on falling crime rates and burgeoning investments in long-neglected neighborhoods.

“Our future looks vibrant,” Jones said in her State of the City address on May 14. “And it’s not too far off.”

But the most recent data available show services are still struggling:

• Complaints to the customer service bureau about trash not being picked up on time, which have increased every year that Jones has been in office, hit a new record high in 2024 at more than 7,000.
• Complaints about potholes on major thoroughfares, which were trending in the right direction in 2023, hit a five-year high in 2024. Worse, it took the city two months on average to fill them — nearly twice the amount of time it took under Jones’ predecessor — and it hasn’t yet even filled them all.
• The percentages of 911 calls answered within 10 seconds each month dropped from the mid-80s in the first three months of 2024 to the low 70s by the end of it.
• Complaints about derelict vehicles also hit an eight-year high, though the time it took to close requests decreased slightly.
• And staffing remained a challenge: As of December, more than a quarter of civil service positions remained unfilled — nearly double the vacancies pre-pandemic — including 28% in the trash division and 27% in streets.
• The police department employed about 900 commissioned officers early this year, down from nearly 1,200 when Jones took office.

Then January arrived. A storm hit St. Louis, dropping ice, then snow. The city, following longstanding practice, plowed only main arteries and other key routes. But many protested even those were done poorly.

And as neighborhood streets turned into ice rinks for weeks, residents and officials boiled.

Cut workers. Pay more.

Jones’ rivals say they can do better.

Butler says he’ll fix the staffing problem the same way he has kept his current office full: Reduce the number of positions, and use the extra money to pay remaining workers more.

“I believe in quality over quantity,” he says. Indeed, budget records show headcount in the recorder’s office dropped to 34 in 2024 from 39 in 2018, the year before Butler became recorder. Meanwhile, the average salary in the office jumped about 30%.

The Jones administration did just that in the police department, cutting 124 positions to give remaining officers raises of up to 7%.

But Butler said he would do it throughout the city. And he said the money saved would not go to across-the-board raises, but instead to key positions — police officers, trash truck drivers, street pavers — to compete with the private sector and suburban governments.

“We’ve got to be able to target and give way more,” he said.

Spencer has indicated interest in a right-sizing effort, too. “We have a budget that allows for 6,000 employees and we had just over 4,000,” she told an audience on Jan. 27. “This is no way to deliver services.”

On her website, Spencer calls for hiring private contractors to repair streets and pick up trash if the city can’t hire enough workers itself.

She has also proposed reworking the city’s recycling system, which struggled in recent years with people throwing trash into the blue bins, spoiling loads to the point where only a third of recycling was being processed.

The city, she says, should expand the number of drop-off sites, where officials have said contamination is generally lower because the people who use them really want to recycle.

The city should consider charging an extra fee, she says, for people who want to keep home pickup.

Spencer has also proposed raising more money for road maintenance. The city’s streets chief said last year that his division needs about $10 million more per year to keep up.

Some of that, she says, should come from the city’s $20 million-per-year parking meter operation, which is run by the city’s elected treasurer, and whose office uses the money for its own expenses.

Businessman Andrew Jones has focused almost exclusively on policing and staffing up the department.

“Everything, starting today, it starts with police,” he said at a recent forum.

The mayor brushed off the criticism from Spencer and Butler in an interview last week.

“Neither one of them has any idea how the hiring and personnel process really works,” she said. “It’s not as easy to fill vacancies and to keep people employed as they think it is.”

�The sidewalks are a mess’

Jones said she and her staff have improved the city.

They’ve thrown out slow, carbon paper-based systems and installed new software speeding up applications and processing.

They’ve given multiple rounds of across-the-board raises to city employees in an effort to make up some of the gap with competitors, and done so in part by eliminating vacant positions and reallocating their salaries.

They’ve conducted employee training meant to reduce harassment and promote diversity, equity and inclusion in departments.

“We have been hard at work,” Jones said.

But at candidate forums across the city, and in neighborhoods from north to south, the questions about basic services keep coming.

Mike Hill, a Shaw resident who recently relocated from rural Tennessee, showed up at a recent debate in the Southwest Garden neighborhood to ask Jones if she had fired the Street Department director over the snowstorm response. She hadn’t.

“They’re not taking care of the basic things,” Hill said in an interview later.

He said Spencer, who said on stage that Streets Director Betherny Williams has to go, appeared to be the only one with a clue.

Ann Stanley, 70, of Tower Grove South, was of similar mind.

“I think a lot of things that are going on in the city are heading in the wrong direction,” she said in an interview. “The core responsibility of the city is making sure the trash is picked up and the streets are maintained. The sidewalks are a mess.”

She voted for Spencer over Jones last time, and will again.

Green, the teacher in the Tower Grove South who voted for Jones last time, has a Spencer sign in her yard now.

“There hasn’t been a lot of change that I’ve seen, or a lot of positive things happening in city government,” she said. “I’m going to vote for Cara this time.”

Jason Best is moving in the opposite direction. The Tower Grove South resident voted for Spencer last time. And he’s heard the frustrations about city services. But he’s been impressed by the reduction in crime over the past four years, and feels like Jones should get some credit for that.

“I feel like the city is as safe as it’s been,” said Best, 51.

Helen Money was less sure as she looked out from her porch in the Walnut Park neighborhood in north St. Louis. She said her street desperately needs to be repaved and fitted with a speed hump to slow down drivers — her car’s been hit three times — but it probably won’t happen. She said she reports derelict vehicles to be towed, but it takes forever. And she thought the snowstorm response was a disgrace.

“People couldn’t get to work,” she said. “I’m 65 years old, out there shoveling the snow in the middle of the street. What the hell?”

She didn’t think anyone running for mayor could fix the problem, though.

“Until I see progress,” she said, “I’m done voting.”