St. Louis comptroller slams plan to cut her job and Estimate Board (2024)

ST. LOUIS — The city’s chief financial officer is blasting proposals to eliminate her elected office and St. Louis’ unusual, three-headed executive branch.

Comptroller Darlene Green said Friday in a Facebook post that the plan, floated by a citizen-led commission, amounted to a “City Hall money grab” that would eliminate a check on government corruption.

“Don’t let them muzzle the city’s watchdog,” the post reads.

The comments from Green, who has been the city’s comptroller since 1995, are no surprise. She has long defended her position and the Board of Estimate and Apportionment along similar lines.

Both are artifacts of the 1914 reform charter aimed at curbing corruption by diluting the mayor’s power over city finances.

The Estimate Board, composed of the mayor, the comptroller and the aldermanic president, requires the chief executive to convince at least one of the other two to sign off on any spending. Having an independent comptroller’s office allows all bills to be paid separately from the mayor’s office. And a requirement for the comptroller to sign all contracts before they can become final gives leverage to resist a questionable deal.

But over the decades, critics have noted that the Estimate Board and the comptroller’s office are also choke points that enable more political maneuvering and delays in decision-making. While mayors in other cities only have to negotiate budgets with legislators, the mayor of St. Louis has to horse-trade with two other officials who have unusually powerful leverage.

Green, who is paid $112,000 per year, has also come under fire in the past year for failing to pay the city’s bills on time and coming into work only once or twice a week, leaving the office’s day-to-day operations to her deputies. Green has pushed back, blaming delays on city departments not properly submitting invoices and contracts and claiming that while she often works remotely, she is always in the office when necessary.

Meanwhile, the city’s Charter Commission has been hard at work reviewing the city’s foundational document, which lays out the basic rules and responsibilities of municipal government. Aldermen proposed the commission in 2022 as a way to update the old charter for the 21st century, and voters approved the idea last April. And last month, the commission published a list of proposed changes, including two that would eliminate the Estimate Board and the comptroller’s office in an effort to streamline decision-making:

A new professional finance director appointed by the mayor would take over the comptroller’s duties overseeing financial controls and payment processing. And a new, elected “public advocate” would get the power to audit other city offices and a slew of other functions aimed at making government more transparent.

The commission was scheduled to hold a hearing to hear public comment on the proposals at 7 p.m. Monday at Julia Davis Public Library, 4415 Natural Bridge Avenue. Other proposed changes include amendments that would:

Commissioners are expected to take final votes to forward ideas to the Board of Aldermen next week.

Aldermen will then decide whether to place proposed amendments on the November ballot, where they will need 60% of the vote to pass.