The sappy part: St. Louis isn’t just a place to be for four years; this is a place where we live. This is our home. We work here, eat here, play here, and are entertained here. This is as much our city as it is to those who have lived in it for decades.
The important part: Why don’t we care about local politics? Why don’t we care about the Clayton aldermen who enact our parking legislation, our zoning laws, our sales and property taxes? Why don’t we care what they decide about the Metrolink expansion or the new buildings we’re constructing?
We should.
Unfortunately, many of us get caught in the “bubble” of Washington University, an ironic cultural phenomenon in which a wealth of diversity is thrown into a student body that then refuses to leave the two-mile radius surrounding the school. (Show of hands: how many of you could locate Ladue or Arnold on a map?)
While some of us might have this bubble-centric viewpoint, the university-like us, its students-has a responsibility to the community. The school, with its own governmental affairs department, regularly confronts legislators on a local level, from St. Louis, University City and Clayton, and also on state and national levels.
Clayton is as much a part of the university as the Bunny (albeit, Clayton is a lot prettier). The City of Clayton determines our zoning and parking regulations and our sales and property taxes. Clayton provides law enforcement, emergency care, and fire protection. Clayton salts the roads when it snows. Clayton decides where the Metrolink will be built in a few years. Clayton provides opportunities for students to work, shop, and eat. Clayton says where we can build new buildings, how the new buildings ought to look, and where we can park our cars. We and our parents spend millions of dollars in Clayton.
We ought to care what Clayton says, and we ought to have a voice in what they do.
For those living in Clayton’s Ward 1-bound by Forsyth, Skinker, Clayton Road, and Big Bend-there is an opportunity in April to make an impact on all of the issues that affect us.
On April 8, residents will elect their Ward 1 Alderman. With this election, students have the opportunity to make a monumental change in local politics. Consider this: last spring, only about 400 citizens voted in the Ward 1 elections. The population of the South Forty, which lies within Ward 1, is approximately 3,000. Hundreds more students live in the Demun neighborhood, also a part of Ward 1. If WU students choose to vote, and choose to support a candidate, a landslide victory would be a simple achievement and would provide us with an amazing asset: somebody who cares about the school and heavily considers the impact of new legislation, as well as enforcement of current ordinances and laws, on the university and its residents-us.
We now have a candidate who will listen to us and represent our thoughts and ideas. His name is John Porter. His wife, Sarah Russell, is an associate dean of Arts and Sciences, and his son Jonathan lived on the South Forty before graduating from WU in 1999. In recent memory, Porter is the first candidate to express an interest in representing all of the residents of Ward 1 (including WU students).
Last year, Porter was defeated in the Aldermanic election by a group of anti-WU residents who supported a candidate who ran on one issue: that Porter has a conflict of interest. Bev Wagner stated that because Porter’s wife is a WU dean, he would not be fair in voting or representing the “true” residents of Clayton. The conflict-of-interest issue was not ethically or legally true, but common sense, logic, and Porter’s voting record on other boards during the past 15 years did not stop his opponent or supporters from saying it was.
For the next few years, we will be here during the November and April elections, national and local. We should register to vote now that we have a reason to.
The deadline to register for the April elections is March 12, five weeks away. You can pick up a voter registration ballot at the Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles, Clayton Bureau (32 North Central Ave. in Clayton), or at the Office of Student Activities.