Rams Settlement Survey Wants to Know About Your Sad, Sad Life

Earlier this week, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen announced a survey to help it figure out how to spend the $250 million windfall it received from its lawsuit over the Rams' departure.

But if you eagerly signed up to participate, thinking you could spam the survey with suggestions on how to spend the money on your pet projects, guess again. This survey has just two questions, and it is not asking you about your priorities. Instead, it wants to know about your miserable life. (It's also going to be really hard to spam.)

The survey is a curious thing, really. Once you register (more on that in a minute), you are asked just two questions. The first question wants to identify what challenges you are facing in your life — and the second offers the same possible challenges and asks if they impact others in your life.
These challenges run a wide gamut (as, let's face it, the lives of city residents do). Options include everything from being unemployed to having a criminal record to struggling with mental health issues to having medical debt or student loan debt. It's a litany of struggles.

But we couldn't help but notice that we, both on our own behalf and that of others in our lives, are also being asked about two things that relate not to poverty and the general lack of a safety net in the U.S. in the year 2023, but to the functions of the city itself.

Namely, these two options:

* My car has been damaged by poorly maintained roads and streets.
* I have not received a timely or appropriate emergency response when calling 911.
Now, many local armchair quarterbacks have been asking lately why the city can't just spend the Rams settlement money to fix the broken 911 system, which has notoriously failed to provide timely service even when residents find themselves crushed to death by trees or suffering from a heart attack in Forest Park. You'll also hear plenty of people wondering why the heck our streets look straight out of Beirut when we have all this Rams money.

Is this survey designed to gently guide us towards those particular issues? We can't say for sure, but they do feel like the two things on the list indisputably assigned to city government — and it's frankly hard to imagine $250 million making a dent in many of the others, no matter how pressing. (Beyond that, any local plan to provide student loan relief, as we've seen on the federal level, would surely end up stuck in litigation for years on end.)

One thing is also worth noting. As we mentioned earlier, it would be hard to spam this survey. Not only are respondents required to give their name and address, but they must provide an email address, where a code is sent that allows them access. All good — but it might make some people unwilling to open up about their problems. Do I personally want the Board of Aldermen to know that I don't have a primary care doctor (yes, that's a question) or a good salary (ditto), much less about my ongoing struggle to stop self-medicating with a bottle of gin? Nope, can't say that I do.

Yusuf Daneshyar, a spokesman for Aldermanic President Megan Green, confirms that the survey is something Green's office commissioned on behalf of the Board of Aldermen. The board is spending $9,800 on a one-year pilot program with a company called CitizenLab.

"Currently the scope of work is limited to the BOA's public engagement process for the Rams Settlement Fund," Daneshyar explains. "That said, once the pilot is over, we will evaluate how this service or a similar service could be used to make residents part of the legislative process and encourage participation. I think it's too early to tell if other city departments would find this engagement tool helpful, but we would be happy to share our experience to help other departments inform their approach to public engagement." So far, he adds, 854 residents signed up to take the survey.

Now, might the survey provide ammunition for the increasingly loud voices calling for a 911 fix? Only time will tell.  But unless you fill out these two questions now, you can't complain when the Board analyzes the results and come back in mid-October and begins to "establish the priority challenges." Give 'em that address and your full name and throw down about your sad, sad life! Just don't be surprised if $250 million isn't enough to change it for you and 300,000 of your neighbors, too.



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