Today concluded the 2023-2024 legislative session of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen — but that doesn’t mean they’re going on break. The 2024-2025 session begins tomorrow, and Aldermanic President Megan Green says the focus will be on protecting workers’ rights.
While much of the media coverage during the session focused on bills to bring red light cameras and oversight of police surveillance tools to St. Louis — and yes, both found final approval at today’s meeting — Green says the session’s true focus was tenants' rights.
She called the 2023-2034 legislative session “the year of the tenant.”
“We were able to get over the finish line an impacted tenants fund, a rental registry, a right-to-counsel program, some safe temperature requirements,” Green said during a press conference following today’s meeting. “But we also know that the work has to continue into next session.”
In the “year of the worker” Green says aldermen will focus on finding ways to ensure current worker’s rights laws are being enforced, as well as ways that conditions for workers can be improved.
“Next year look for a lot of worker support legislation,” Green says. “Starting first and foremost with how we can do better around a number of our workers rights bills that we have on the books right now. The place where the city is lacking is not necessarily in the legislation that is on the books but rather how we enforce it.”
Aldermen will also be starting a new committee focused on special taxing districts, Green says.
“We know that whether they’re community improvement districts or special business districts that we have a proliferation of these taxing districts that are really making St. Louis City just as fragmented as the county,” Green says.
Today the board passed a number of final bills, most notably Board Bill 185, which would create oversight of surveillance technologies in the city; Board Bill 105, which would bring back red light cameras; and 105’s companion, Board Bill 106, which would appropriate traffic improvement funds.
A spokesman for Mayor Tishaura Jones’ Office says it is unclear whether Jones will sign the police surveillance oversight bill, but she will not veto it.
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