Merging City and County: A Solution to St. Louis’s Structural Fragmentation

Based on the per capita cost of crime, St. Louis was the most dangerous city in the United States in both 2022 and 2023—now it’s number three, behind Oakland and Memphis (Bloom 2025). St. Louis has also experienced record levels of homelessness, blight, and population decline in recent years (McDermott 2023). In North City, a historically Black area of St. Louis that was influenced by decades of redlining, many houses are abandoned. Countless historic schools and churches are for sale, without enough residents left in the city to keep them open. There are simply not enough police officers to patrol the geographically large but sparsely populated city: When doorknocking for a political candidate, I spoke to a woman who said she is on her third car in three years after the first two were totaled by reckless drivers speeding down her street.

A major contributor to St. Louis’s current challenge is an invisible line that separates Metro St. Louis into two distinct areas: the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County. Each year, tens of thousands of St. Louis residents move away from the under-resourced city, not to New York or California, but just a few blocks down the street. Only around 300,000 of St. Louis’s residents live in the city; the other 2.5 million live in the surrounding St. Louis County, a substantially more white, affluent, and populous area than the City of St. Louis (Salsich and Caluori 2014).

This divide between the city and county of St. Louis has had overwhelming effects on the region’s safety, livability, infrastructure, and sense of self. St. Louis County itself is split into 81 different municipalities, each with its own tax base, tax rate, fire department, city government, and police department. These many geographic splits and their effects can be defined by the phrase “structural fragmentation.”

Structural fragmentation happens through a combination of three key problems. The first problem is the inability to unlock economies of scale. When each tax dollar goes to what are essentially completely different governments, it can be difficult to combine that funding to build large-scale projects or undertake plans with high start-up costs. The second problem is a lack of oversight and consistency across municipalities, which allows for courts and police systems to discriminate against minorities and exploit the complicated administrative web that shields bad actors. And the third problem is a combination of slow services and wasted money that come from multiple municipalities competing with each other in a race to the bottom (Fefer 2019).

St. Louis’s racial politics are key to the issue of structural fragmentation. African Americans comprise 48 percent of the city’s population, just slightly more than the city’s white population, at 46 percent. However, the county is 23 percent African American (Census Data n.d.). Given the disparity between the racial demographics of the city and the county, any merger would have a substantial impact on Black influence in the region. A straightforward merger of the city and county would decrease the percentage that Black voters occupy in the city, decreasing Black political power after decades of organizing and building have allowed Black politicians to thrive (Fefer 2019).

A long history of attempts to merge the city and county have failed because of St. Louis’s polarized racial divide and out-of-touch leadership from elites. In 1930, a policy was crafted to establish an overarching metropolitan government—however, it failed after being placed on the ballot. In 1987, the St. Louis County executive led an effort to combine the 90+ county municipalities. This too failed. In 2018, a million-dollar ballot initiative campaign to unite the city and county called Better Together, led once again by the St. Louis County elites, did not make it onto the ballot after several rounds of disastrous polling (Bose 2014). This attempt led to St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger pleading guilty to federal corruption charges and the resignation of St. Louis County’s NAACP president (Davis 2019).

None of these attempts invested significant amounts of their project’s budgets in public input, nor did they make a concerted effort to preserve Black political power. In the course of my research, I spoke to several community leaders across diverse parts of the city and county. They all agreed that the region needs a merger of some kind. This issue has been held back not because it is politically unfeasible, but because past attempts have tripped over themselves by not listening to the public. Taking lessons from other regions—including cities like Indianapolis and Nashville that have merged a city and a county into one—we can see a path toward replicating this in a way that is politically palatable and minimizes harm to minority communities.

This paper proposes a merging of the city and county that not only takes this into account but takes active steps to ensure equitable democracy for the region. I found this issue to be the most pressing one facing St. Louis’s democracy after much conversation with organizers and residents of St. Louis. While St. Louis must embrace merging its city and county to strengthen the area, promote growth, and combat structural fragmentation, it must be done equitably and with minority communities in mind. I recommend a merging of the City and County of St. Louis under one “metro” government, with a unified tax base, regional court system, and unified police department, overseeing a system of borough-level governments to maintain control over local services. I advocate for a system of progressive budgeting, minority-majority districts, and people-centered policy creation to ensure residents of color are represented in politics. In a time where Americans are grappling with the role of government, a unified St. Louis can show that government can work for the people if managed efficiently and equitably.

Structural Fragmentation Issue 1: Abusive and Fractured Public Safety

In 2014, a racial reckoning in Ferguson, Missouri, shook the country. A white St. Louis County police officer shot Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, whose body was left in the street for four hours (AP News 2019). Residents of the Ferguson neighborhood, a majority African American area of St. Louis, were angered and shocked by the killing. Protests and angry crowds were met with an overwhelming police response, leading to weeks of mass arrests, lootings, property damage, and the activation of the National Guard (Jordan 2015).

The inflammatory media coverage and violence of the Ferguson uprising obscured the larger, more structural issues behind St. Louis County’s policing. The DOJ released a review of how police handled the subsequent protests, and found a police response that was “often chaotic and uncoordinated, with inconsistent leadership leading to communication and operational difficulties” (Lippmann 2015). The issue was caused because of fragmented municipalities with different rules creating a lack of oversight. The municipalities involved included Ferguson police (who patrolled the municipality where Brown was killed), St. Louis County police, St. Louis city police, and the Missouri State Highway patrol. Bureaucracy, obscured actors, and confusing orders and training led to a police response that the DOJ said was “widely considered abusive,” especially against African American people (Freivogel 2015).

Part of the abusive structure of St. Louis County’s policing lay in small municipalities imposing fines and fees to supplement revenue. Smaller municipalities, which are generally poorer and more diverse, do not generate the same tax revenue as larger, more affluent municipalities. Better Together, a previous ballot initiative campaign to merge St. Louis city and county, found that the 81 municipal courts in St. Louis County generated 52,000 pages of ordinances, and that there was no overarching set of practices or oversight across municipalities (Better Together n.d.). This allowed police in Ferguson to charge hundreds of dollars in fines for minor traffic and other ordinance violations on an almost entirely Black population to supplement the lack of revenue (Salsich and Caluori 2014).

Forward Through Ferguson, a commission formed to advance racially equitable systems in St. Louis after Brown’s death, found that fragmentation led to “confusion and anxiety among civilians,” who did not know who to call when a public safety issue arose (Forward Through Ferguson 2015). Furthermore, they found significant “differences in police training, accreditation, and licensure” across the county’s 60 different police departments (Better Together n.d.). Systemic fragmentation wastes millions of dollars in court operations costs, makes it difficult for organizers or watchdogs to monitor compliance, and prevents Black St. Louisans from easily interacting with the legal system (Forward Through Ferguson 2015).

Structural Fragmentation Issue 2: Smaller Tax Bases Prevent Economies of Scale

The ability for cities to fund big projects from a large tax base comes from economies of scale. Large projects like energy plants, public transportation, or new housing units all require a large initial investment. But once built, the marginal cost of adding an additional user is low (Hall and Matti 2018). Larger tax bases allow governments to save in the long run by building larger projects, thus saving money per capita. Purchasing in bulk also lowers average costs. In 2011, PFM Group, an economic analysis group, estimated that St. Louis would save $2 million each year by bundling every municipality’s employees under one health insurance plan (Hall and Matti 2018).

The inability to access economies of scale due to structural fragmentation disproportionately hurts economically disadvantaged St. Louisans. When municipalities are divided into administrative bubbles, they tend to compete against each other for sources of tax revenue, like residents and businesses. That makes some local jurisdictions more wealthy than others, because people and commerce are forced to choose between two distinct areas.

The region’s racial division is similarly visible in cities across the US, prompted largely by redlining, segregation, and “white flight,” or the migration of white urbanites to suburbs around a city. Similar merging of urban areas with their surrounding suburbs has benefited other cities in the US. Indianapolis’s merger with its surrounding county saved the city from declining growth due to white flight. When the city’s tax base became larger in the 1960s post-merger, new growth allowed Indianapolis to build a zoo and a children’s museum, and to establish an NFL team. Population growth did not slow until 2011 (Woytus 2019).

Structural fragmentation Issue 3: Administrative Bloating

Several other cities and counties have consolidated successfully, including Nashville, Louisville, Denver, Philadelphia, and Indianapolis (Woytus 2019). The city of Nashville attributes its success to merging with its surrounding Davidson County, allowing the city to eliminate administrative redundancies. Former Mayor Karl Dean described the efficiency of one centralized government, saying about nonconsolidated cities, “You hear about the mayor having to deal with multiple school boards . . . multiple law enforcement jurisdictions, tax rates. We don’t have those issues” (Bradner 2010).

Like Nashville before its merger, the City of St. Louis wastes millions of dollars on administrative redundancies. Almost every municipality of St. Louis County has its own public works department, mayor, police force, zoning commission, and school district (Better Together n.d.). Each official has to work with dozens of other people in a long chain across municipalities to complete simple tasks like filling a pothole or building a sidewalk (Hall and Matti 2018). That work is both time-consuming and expensive. In Louisville, consolidation with its surrounding county resulted in 41 percent less administrative spending per person than St. Louis currently spends (Woytus 2019).

Ferguson, the municipality where Michael Brown was killed, was motivated to target Black residents with predatory fines and fees in part to generate revenue to cover administrative costs. Ferguson had to cover its own case processing, court facilities, equipment, and staff, which could easily be combined with other municipalities under a single centralized court, eliminating these costs. ArchCity Defenders, a legal aid clinic in St. Louis, found that combining the court system into just four courts would cut costs from $16 million a year to just $6 million (Feinzig, McAllister, and Harvey 2015). Outside of just the courts, Better Together estimated that “government” in St. Louis drains the region of $2.3 billion annually (Better Together n.d.).

Policy Analysis

A population model developed by Charles Tiebout, professor of economics at the University of Washington, coined the idea that, when people are free to sort into different jurisdictions, they do so based on race and wealth (Hall and Matti 2018). This model is referred to as the Tiebout model, or “voting with your feet.” It allows wealthy residents to group into enclaves, funding their own school districts and police forces while using zoning restrictions to prevent poorer residents from moving in. Inevitably, the result is inequality. Merging the city and the county would avoid this problem, allowing resources to be more equitably distributed.

However, since the 1920s, many attempts to merge the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County have failed. In the 20th century, major merger efforts took place in 1926, 1930, 1954, 1955, 1959, 1962, and 1987 (Luisetti 2019). Complicating the matter was the growing presence of African Americans moving to the city and white residents leaving for the county in droves, yielding a racialized landscape divided by the city-county border (Hall and Matti 2018). These past mergers failed largely because either the city or the county thought that the other side was getting a better deal. Any argument in favor of consolidation must strongly consider the diverse makeup of St. Louis and understand the key sets of stakeholders that must be involved in decision-making.

One set of stakeholders include Black elected officials, who could see their positions jeopardized by the mostly Black city being subsumed by the mostly white county. Black votes would go from a majority in the city to a minority in the new county, diluting Black political power. With a history of segregation and voter suppression in St. Louis, any plan to consolidate the city and county would need to make protecting minority voices a key priority (Davis 2019). In order to do so, a unified government would need to elect single-member districts across the region, rather than an at-large council (Skelley 2023). Several majority-minority districts across North City and North County could form a key voting bloc representing Black residents. Majority-minority districts have worked at the federal level, increasing candidates of color in Congress as districts are drawn. During the post-1990 census redistricting, majority-minority districts doubled, and so did Black representatives in Congress (Skelley 2023).

Additionally, St. Louis County residents who might be forced to incur the debt of other municipalities must be kept in mind. Property taxes of net wealthier counties have needed to increase in previous models to offset the city debt, angering county residents. Other opponents include public employees, whose jobs would be in jeopardy as administrative redundancies get eliminated (Luisetti 2019).

Forward Through Ferguson offers a model for how government can be reimagined through community-centered design. Born out of the Ferguson Commission, it took a grassroots approach to policy creation, convening community members and town halls to understand what issues were important to people (Forward Through Ferguson 2015). Their report makes their priorities clear: “Equity is realized when identity—such as race, ethnicity, gender, or zip code—no longer predicts outcomes.” Any consolidation effort in St. Louis must be built on that principle.

Policy Proposals

I propose a full metropolitan merger—similar to the Nashville-Davidson County or Indianapolis-Marion County models—to create one metro government that would serve the entire region. The most important consolidations would need to be a unified tax base, regional court system, and police department to fix the three issues of structural fragmentation outlined above. I advocate for a borough system within the metro government, allowing local governments to maintain control over parks, trash collection, and zoning, such as in Philadelphia (8 PA Cons Stat § 1202 2025). Such a merger could unlock massive savings, improve transparency, and offer a more equitable tax structure across racial and economic lines. A single tax base would allow investment in historically underfunded neighborhoods and unlock unprecedented economies of scale. Reduced court costs and police departments would improve oversight and standardize practices, creating more equity in public safety.

But this model requires careful attention to political representation. An effective merger would put preserving minority voices as a priority, rather than as an afterthought. Inclusive districting to amplify Black St. Louisans would build equity, as is the case in Nashville’s representative Metro Council. Nashville proudly uses majority-minority districts when drawing its electoral boundaries to preserve Black political power (Abrams 2025). Indianapolis, on the other hand, consolidated without taking into account the importance of minority representation. Patrick Chavis, a former Black state senator, correctly predicted that any at-large seats “would inevitably be white, diluting Black voting power” (Wachter 2014). Black politicians who had been elected in the city versus county structure lost their seats after the consolidation. But preserving majority-minority districts would have allowed Indianapolis to reap the economic benefits of consolidation while maintaining an equitable electoral system and amplifying Black voices.

In order for the merger to be politically feasible, I advocate for areas that a metro government would not control. For example, in Indianapolis, the highly politicized issue of school districts were consolidated on a much different timeline. They implemented the consolidation in two phases: first the cities and townships, then fire departments, then schools in the decade following (Woytus 2019). Fire and police unions are both powerful political forces in St. Louis, and a separate phase for merging these districts would allow them to find alternatives for administrators concerned about their jobs. Additionally, education is, historically, deeply segregated. Wealthy parents want to ensure their students receive the best education possible, often through exclusion and segregation (Taylor 2013). Merging Indianapolis’s school districts later allowed the region to slowly adjust to the change, using a newly expanded tax base to finance the complicated school mergers and provide a better education for everyone (Woytus 2019). Creating phases for the merger—the first being taxation and administration, then fire departments and police departments, then schools—would make the proposal more politically popular.

Additionally, a borough system nestled within the larger metro government would allow smaller districts to maintain some agency over their schools and police departments, while making sure that funding is distributed equitably and standard practices are enforceable. Better Together’s ultimately rejected plan understood the importance of maintaining local sovereignty, maintaining “municipal districts” that were supposed to have limited control over zoning, budgeting, and municipal services (Better Together n.d.). However, unlike Better Together, my proposal requires in-depth, purposeful, and prevalent communication with residents, which will shape and guide any decisions that are made.

Conclusion

The future of St. Louis depends on its ability to break free from outdated political structures that no longer serve its people. Merging the City of St. Louis City and St. Louis County must not only be about improving roads, services, and budgets, but also about equity. Structural change should center those who have historically been excluded, especially Black residents of the city who bear the brunt of population decline and a shrinking tax base. By creating more oversight of policing systems and increasing Black political power, St. Louis can uplift communities who have been tread upon for decades, correct the history of redlining and segregation that is still seen today, and make sure that public safety works for all, not just those with enough money.

By eliminating administrative redundancies, St. Louis can unlock the spending potential to reinvest in its communities. Across other cities with over 1 million residents, St. Louis ranks below average in spending per person (Fefer 2019). Libraries, roads, sidewalks, waste disposal, community centers, sports venues, parks, museums, and infrastructure could all be better funded if paperwork and ordinances could be simplified. St. Louis can be a vibrant city—with an NFL team, a vibrant downtown, safe neighborhoods, and excellent schools—if it can work together.

Improving governance is an often overlooked tenet of democracy. A government that serves people effectively and fairly can rebuild trust, foster civic engagement, and change the economic trajectory of a region. “Democracy” is an all-encompassing term, and merging the city and the county is a necessary step to achieving justice and equity in the area. A better life for people in St. Louis includes good jobs, attractive areas to live, tourism, safety, transportation, and a region working together.