April 10, 2026
St. Louis, MO – Yesterday, Mayor Cara Spencer announced that the City had filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state takeover of SLMPD under HB 495. This announcement comes as a growing Hands Off STL coalition is demanding that city officials reject the blatant money grab by the Board of Police Commissioners, a much-needed and long-overdue action by the mayor and the City Law Department. They are right to listen to the people of St. Louis and stand up against this illegal and destructive legislation.
But we should also understand that we got here by the same mayor and law department neglecting to take up this fight for nearly a year. And that failure has been at the expense of the citizens of St. Louis.
The plethora of constitutional problems with the state takeover bill was obvious from the beginning. Even the fiscal note of HB 495 reflects that it is an unfunded mandate. The City Budget Director knew it was an unfunded mandate. Anyone with a passing sense of the City budget knew it was going to spell disaster. After initially joining Board of Aldermen President Megan Green in filing suit, the City Counselor’s office dropped out of the litigation when Mayor Spencer took office.
This left the burden to Megan Green, individually; Jamala Rogers, who has spent decades warning people about the consequences of state involvement; Mike Milton, whose day job involves interrupting and resolving community violence; and their lawyers. ArchCity Defenders and our clients are not legally tasked with protecting the interests of the people of St. Louis, and yet we understood it was our moral and civic imperative to act.
The existing lawsuits have imposed financial and time costs over the past year, which have involved a great deal of work that can be fairly described as pleading with the City Law Department to do the bare minimum to support these efforts: hours spent trying to serve subpoenas when other government agencies simply accept such service, continued uncertainty about which City officials will agree to testify, and many more hours spent following up with emails and calls urging the City to produce very basic documents as evidence on behalf of our citizen taxpayer clients—documents that still have not been fully produced to this day.
Instead, we were told the City was focusing on negotiations with the Governor. That futile effort has failed miserably, so it is more important than ever that we press forward with our litigation to defeat the unlawful state takeover. And perhaps if the City had remained in the initial lawsuit, or joined the other existing suits, we would be in a different place in this City budget process. That we will never know.
We do know that the Governor and the Board of Police Commissioners were never going to play nice. They don’t care about whether our streets are passable or our parks have playgrounds. They care about policing and controlling our population—consequences for basic services be damned. It didn’t take our clients a year to figure that out, and the latest news only adds fuel to their fight.
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Media Contact:
Z Gorley, Director of Communications, ArchCity Defenders
(314) 898-8185 | zgorley@archcitydefenders.org