433 Signatures In, St. George Disincorporation Petition Two Weeks From Completion

At the Board of Aldermen meeting Monday night, Mayor Carmen Wilkerson reported that the petition to have the tiny municipality vote on disincorporation has gathered 433 signatures from registered voters and should be ready to send to St. Louis County election officials in two weeks.

The petition has been circulating the city of 1,400 for only a month, but disincorporation supporters may have already gathered signatures from the requisite 50 percent of registered voters. Once that mark is reached, the county elections commission must verify the petition, and St. Louis County will schedule an election on the issue.

If the disincorporation measure passes with 60 percent of the vote, the county will disincorporate the city. After that, the city and the county would work together to wind down the business of the municipality: settle contracts, collect assets, deal with outstanding legal matters.

The signature gathering is being combined with an effort to clean up the city’s voter registry. Of St. George’s 839 registered voters, Wilkerson said city workers have discovered 121 who have either died or moved out of the city. Meanwhile, petitioners have registered an additional 47 new voters.

These efforts have made the 50-percent mark a moving target, but Wilkerson said she expects to have gathered signatures from closer to 75 percent of voters by the time the county verifies voter registry changes in the next two weeks.

“We are fairly confident we have gotten to 50 percent,” Wilkerson said in an interview. “We aren’t going to turn in our petition until we are 100 percent certain.”

Wilkerson originally expected the process of dealing with the voter registry and gathering signatures to take the better part of a year, but instead the petition has come together in a matter of weeks.

“When we got to knocking on doors, we had very few people saying no,” Wilkerson said, noting that some who signed the petition haven’t made up their minds how they will vote when disincorporation is put on the ballot. “Really it’s been a pleasure. It hasn’t been challenging at all to get those signatures,” she said.

The effort was stymied somewhat by a legal technicality which voided the of a Disincorporation Exploratory Committee (DEC) to organize the gathering of signatures. City attorney Paul Martin said Monday that, after the measure to form the DEC was passed, he discovered that the board of aldermen did not in fact have that power to create it.

The technicality comes down to the difference between charter cities and statutory cities. Charter cities can make up their rules of operation as they go. As a statutory city, St. George can only do what its statutes explicitly allow. Martin said the error in crafting the resolution was his, and apologized for the misstep.

In the citizen’s comments portion of the meeting, Mary Jo Fitzpatrick, who wore a “Save Our City” button, asked whether the disincorporation petition was valid if the committee created to circulate it didn’t actually exist. Bob Burns, who was originally slated to head the committee, said that he and the other petitioners were gathering signatures as American citizens and didn’t need official recognition.

“We were looking for ways to counter all the misinformation that has been out there, but we were doing it without a committee anyway,” Wilkerson said. “Once Paul (Martin) found that technicality…what we did was just grab our petitions and get outside.”

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that the disincorporation measure must also be passed by the St. George board of aldermen. This is not the case.