#Gleaming aluminum lost judgment free

The King Bridge can't stand the competition, and the revenue bonds sold to finance it almost certainly will go into default next year. Louis-is badly in need of resurfacing and the toll is 20 cents.

#Gleaming aluminum lost judgment free

Louis from the Missouri side of the river, one drives across the free Poplar Street bridge on Interstate 70 or over the recently renamed Martin Luther King Bridge. Louis property was $187.58‐million now it is $166‐million. Ten years ago, the assessed value of East St. That is a high propertion of red ink, considering that total municipal tax revenue is about $4.3‐million a year.įurthermore, costs are rising while tax revenue is declining. Its spending is continuing to exceed its income at that rate this, year. Louis had incurred a deficit of $1.2‐million last year. Hendry, city controller, disclosed the other day that East St.

Permanent revenue sharing by the Federal Government-a possibility by this summer-seems the only realistic answer to the city's difficulties.

Louis, with all its blight, will limp along, using Federal money in a way some critics find dubious, by paying its workers and suppliers late, by paring services already poor and perhaps by borrowing under a questionable procedure. Instead, they go to Washington.īy following this course, East St. Ranney warned, ‘is that “other cities, especially in the East and the Midwest, are rapidly moving toward the same conditions.”Īmerican cities in the nineteen‐seventies, unlike many local governments during the Depression, do not literally go bankrupt. Louis, concluded that the city “is on a collision course with bankruptcy, if, in fact, bankruptcy has not already been reached.” Ranney, two urban studies specialists who have prepared a study of the “fiscal crisis” of East St. “One, God is with me, and two, the people know that James Williams stands for right.” “There are two reasons they won't beat me,” he asserted recently. Williams and his one ally on the five‐man Board of Commissioners are a minority in a struggle for city control. Williams Sr., the city's black mayor, who has been in office slightly more than a year, is confident that he can “turn the town around,” despite odds that seem almost insurmountable. Louis if he could,” said one executive, who insisted on anonymity.īut James E. “There isn't a white businessman in town who wouldn't leave East St. More than 300 businesses have closed since 1960, often leaving empty buildings with broken or boarded‐up windows. Louis has sunk into a morass of problems, many of them economic. It was also a gambling town with a flourishing red‐light district, but a wave of reform in the nineteen‐fifties drove these activities out of sight, if not out of town, and in 1960 Look Magazine named East St. It provided workers for nearby aluminum, steel and chemical plants and stockyards. The city was once a sturdy railroad center, second only to Chicago. So remarked Shinichi Kumanomidoh, a 30‐year‐old Japanese‐American city planner here, as he attempted to describe the snarl of financial and social problems that have beset this Illinois city of 70,000 inhabitants‐70 per cent black-across the Mississippi from St. LOUIS, Ill.-“The city virtually bankrupt.”