Grudge City

When Louis Blechle opened Blechle's Inn around 1950, state liquor laws required a town have at least 500 residents before its taverns could serve full-strength beer. At the time, O'Fallon, Missouri, lacked the necessary head count. Fortunately, though, the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood convent housed nearly 600 nuns — and it was inside the city limits.

"Thanks to the nuns, we got to drink 5-percent," says Jim Blechle, son of the late Louis Blechle.

Descended from German immigrants who settled the area in the 1830s, the 63-year-old Blechle is that rare O'Fallonite who remembers when the city was so small.

O'Fallon, once a mere rail stop amid farm country, is now the largest city in St. Charles County, its population exceeding 72,000. It has become a magnet for young families and, in July 2006, was named a "Best Place to Live" by Money magazine. Much of O'Fallon's growth came in the 1990s, after the city widened Highway K, its main drag south of Interstate 70.

Old Town O'Fallon is north of I-70 and Main Street is its heart. The road passes Assumption Catholic Church, the convent, city hall and a series of low-slung storefronts. Just off Main sits a fifteen-acre shopping center — O'Fallon Plaza — that Blechle has owned since 1976. He says he always supported the city's expansion; the more the merrier, he thought.

"The reason Highway K got widened was because of people like myself," Blechle says. "Then they fuck us," he adds, alluding to the bruising civic battle that, even more than four years later, continues to reverberate. In fact, the political angst that lingers in O'Fallon today can be traced back to a May evening in 2003, when city leaders unveiled a $200 million downtown development plan. Under the plan, a group called Main Street Ventures would acquire 100 acres through eminent domain and plow under dozens of businesses and homes in Old Town. Main Street Ventures' concept was to build villas, apartments and boutique retail shops around a series of trails, green spaces and small lakes.

A firestorm of protest erupted. The notion of uprooting longtime business- and homeowners struck a raw nerve, even among O'Fallon's newcomers. "I've never seen this town as unified as it was then," recalls Jim Blechle's son and business partner, Steve Blechle.

The Blechles joined with threatened business owners and residents — many of them senior citizens — to form the Old Town Preservation Committee. They launched a campaign to torpedo the project and, within three months, Main Street Ventures was dead. Though the fight was to prevent eminent domain, the Blechles also took aim at Mayor Paul Renaud, the project's ringleader.

Amid the public outrage, Renaud abandoned the downtown development project. But the Blechles would not be satisfied until they ousted Renaud and the aldermen who had gone along with him. "I went after them as far as I could," Jim Blechle says.

The Blechles teamed with Randy Hudson, another Main Street business owner, and Lyn Schipper, whose wife worked at Hudson's jewelry store. Their unofficial headquarters was the Trigg Banquet Center, a recent addition to O'Fallon Plaza, owned by a former police officer and North St. Louis County businessman, Tom Wilkerson.

Through Wilkerson they met Rick Fischer, a Clayton lawyer and fellow north-county transplant, who would stop by for a beer on his way home from work. In the April 2004 election that followed the Main Street Venture brouhaha, three political newcomers, including Schipper, defeated three sitting aldermen. All ousted were project supporters. A month later Renaud, who had held office since 1995, announced that he would not seek re-election.

In the late fall of that year, Blechle and Hudson recruited a citizen activist named Donna Morrow to run for mayor. Hudson and two others ran as a "smart growth" slate. Morrow and two of the three challengers won in the 2005 election. (One of the challengers, Jimmy Mitchell, lost his race, but Morrow appointed him to the board after a Renaud ally resigned.)

Steve Blechle remembers the day after the election. He and his father were in the O'Fallon Plaza office, reveling in their victory. Ervin Davis, a veteran of St. Charles County politics, made a visit and announced, "Well gentlemen, now the hard work begins." Still grinning, Blechle didn't understand. "Now you got to keep it together," the gruff, retired family-court judge explained.

Blechle would soon realize what Davis meant. Instead of fighting Renaud, the newly elected officials began to fight among themselves. "We lost our cause," says Steve Blechle. "We lost our unifier, which was Main Street Ventures."

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Since the contentious 2005 election, O'Fallon has weathered one political storm after the next. Top administrators fled, and the results of a blistering state audit — initiated by a petition drive during the Main Street Ventures fight — became public. Renaud's supporters were enraged by efforts to investigate the prior administration, calling it a witch-hunt. The backlash heightened when the anti-Renaud aldermen, forming a six-to-two majority, fired the city's popular police chief. The mistrust extended to a new city administrator, and the six-to-two alliance soon fractured. Three aldermen abruptly walked out of one meeting. Within a year, three members of the gang of six, as St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist John Sonderegger dubbed them, had resigned.

The state auditor's report, released in May 2005, vindicated Renaud's detractors. The findings showed city employees and elected officials were carelessly flinging around public money, including dubious travel and meal expenses. The city bought and sold land without documenting appraisals or soliciting bids, according to the report. One of the more incendiary findings revealed that in 2003 the city paid more than $200,000 in salary bonuses to top administrators for duties that should have been part of their regular jobs. The report also backed allegations the Blechles had raised about the city understating its debt.

"There was a lot of self-serving going on in the past government," says Jayne Voss-Robinson, the editor and owner of O'Fallon's free weekly, The Scoop. (Voss-Robinson shows her scorn for the former mayor by refusing to use his name in the proper title of the city's recreation venue, the Renaud Spirit Center.)

While the 27-page auditor's report focused on 2003, Schipper and Hudson believed backroom deals had gone on for years. They were hopeful about uncovering more wrongdoing when Morrow asked O'Fallon police officer Dave Buehrle to look into potential criminal action raised by the audit. She also appointed Fischer, the lawyer, as "special counsel."

The ongoing investigations lent an air of chaos to city hall. Morrow says her goal was to prepare a criminal case against a municipal court clerk who stole $350,000, but other tips started flooding in. Buehrle began scrutinizing the building inspection department, the city's towing contract and tracking down a missing September 11 memorial. Schipper, president of the board of aldermen, became Renaud's most vocal critic and flew to New York with Buehrle to look into the missing memorial.

Meanwhile, the board's six-to-two vote in August 2005 to fire police chief Steve Talbott, a home-towner whose wife taught in the local school district, gave Renaud's supporters further reason to cry foul. Talbott was accused of delaying the investigation of a drug-related death to shield a well-connected suspect. Criticism from Talbott's supporters rained down. Picketers showed up at Hudson's jewelry store. Fischer and some of the aldermen thought a private investigator was following them.

After Morrow hired a new city administrator (who, in an ironic twist, was Schipper and Hudson's top choice), the board began to fracture. Robert G. Lowery Jr. was the assistant police chief in Florissant and a friend of Wilkerson, the banquet center owner. Lowery took the job in October, but it wasn't long before he, Schipper and Hudson were at odds. Lowery says the aldermen wrongly assumed he would back the internal investigations, but he thought they should have been conducted by an outside agency. Schipper, who vowed that O'Fallon would not do favors for developers, says Lowery let homebuilders shape his opinions on key issues. Schipper and Hudson asked for Lowery's resignation. Lowery called their bluff; they didn't have the votes to fire him.

Tensions peaked in January 2006 when Hudson's colleagues discovered that he had been recording conversations inside city hall. Morrow publicly declared an end to their alliance. In February, Schipper was hospitalized with stress-induced health problems and later resigned. In March, Hudson and aldermen Terry Busken and Jimmy Mitchell abruptly walked out of a board meeting. By the end of that month, Hudson and Busken also resigned.

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It's almost time for Fischer and Schipper, O'Fallon's self-appointed shit-disturbers, to begin their fifteen-minute program on country station KFAV (99.9). They call it Fish and Ships. Before the show, they gather inside Fischer's office. A man who keeps odd hours, Fischer has left a pair of shorts and sandals scattered on the floor in front of his desk. He sits facing his computer, likely browsing a political blog or local message board.