Terry Jones, professor of political science at UMSL, wrote "Reconciling the Great Divorce: The City of St. Louis Reentering St. Louis County," a policy brief released this week by the Public Policy Research Center at UMSL.

In the 125 years since St. Louis separated from St. Louis County, there have been several conversations about a possible reunification. It’s that topic that Terry Jones, professor of political science at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, takes on in a new policy brief released this week by the Public Policy Research Center at UMSL.

Policy Brief 25, “Reconciling the Great Divorce: The City of St. Louis Reentering St. Louis County,” was issued to coincide with the launch of a new Governance section in the center’s online publication, Metropolitan Mirror: Facts and Trends Reflecting the Metropolitan Region.

“Any plan that has the city reentering the county as its 92nd municipality must address at least four issues, each of which has several devils lurking in the details,” Jones wrote in the policy brief.

Those issues, broadly stated, include:

1. how to combine the city’s existing nonjudicial “county functions” with the county counterparts

2. whether and how to merge the city’s and county’s judicial functions

3. whether and how to combine certain county-like functions now performed by the city’s municipal government with comparable county operations

4. whether to increase the number of county council districts and, whatever their number, draw their boundaries

Jones is an expert in metropolitan governance and urban public policy and the author of “Fragmented by Design: Why St. Louis Has So Many Governments.”

More information:
umsl.edu/~polisci/faculty/profiles.html#jones
pprc.umsl.edu/data/MetropolitanMirror/governance/pbrief_025_reentry.pdf
blogs.umsl.edu/news/2011/01/14/metropolitan/