The other day my wife and I arrived with our two dogs at a West County park. I’m not sure which the dogs enjoy more, the walk in the park or the car ride to the park. This particular park doesn’t have a lot of hills and is easier for my older dog and me (on hot days) to walk around.   On this day there was no one using the park, except a postal carrier sorting mail in her truck. Often, if there is no one else walking I won’t put the leash on Sadie, my older English Springer Spaniel. It keeps the two leashes from getting tangled. Sadie is 11-years-old and doesn’t go too far from us. At this …

When I was a police officer in Liberty, MO, my partner’s mother-in-law ran the local office for Republican Tom Coleman, a U.S. congressman for northwest Missouri. The district included the then very Democratic counties of Clay and Platte, which also represented the majority of the votes in the district. Every two years, my partner’s wife would run the re-election campaign headquarters. My wife and I would often help out. The best job was that of seat-fillers at campaign fundraising dinners at hotels. If they couldn’t sell out all the tables, they wanted to have the appearance of a sellout …

What's happened with getting medicine when you need it? When I was a small child I can remember being sick—or better yet my sister being sick. An early evening call would go out to the pediatrician and about an hour later, at seven or eight o’clock at night, the doorbell would ring and a man from the Kaegel drugstore in Webster Groves would be there with medicine. Later, on weekends, I delivered prescriptions for the Shumate Prescription Shop on East Lockwood in Webster. (I liked to date girls and that usually required money.) The Shumate delivery car was a yellow Ford Maverick. Sitting on …

A statewide law calling for racial data on every driver stopped, or whose vehicle was searched, and who was arrested, can be a waste of time and money. This is especially true in rural areas of Missouri where there may be few people who are Asian, Hispanic and black. Even with some police departments in metropolitan areas, the data can be useless in determining if departments are making so-called DWB traffic stops— “driving while black.”  With the recent release by the Missouri Attorney General’s Office of the 2011 data on traffic stops, here are four area departments; three along I-64 and …

U.S. Senator from Missouri Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, sent me an invitation to a late lunch of snacks at a downtown hotel. To attend I could pay anywhere from $500 to $2,500. It was too pricey for my tastes, and I wrote about it here. But I have always liked Claire. She was a young girl in Houston, Missouri and then in Lebanon, Missouri. She finished high school in Columbia, Missouri, where her mother was on the city council and her father served in Governor Hearnes’ administration. What I liked best about Claire is that she worked her way through college and law school. One of the summer …

At a recent Chesterfield City Council meeting I ran into local attorney Chet Pleban, who was there speaking on behalf of an outlet mall developer and against another. In the course of talking about fairness and honesty in government dealing with the public, Pleban pointed to another case in which he represents a widow whose property was seized, but she's yet to see the $1 million awarded to her by a jury. Opal Henderson, 82, is owed over $1 million by several West County investors and the City of St. Louis.      The widow Henderson essentially lost her livelihood and family business when her …

Too many of us take for granted or have all but forgotten the effect American soldiers, sailors and Marines had on a generation of people around the world—who are now declining in numbers. Just look at Jefferson Barracks, and the many, many rows of bright white headstones lining the hills. But I've had few poignant encounters over the past 15 years in my travels, that taught me lessons about what Americans in uniform can mean. Verse 1  A week after September 11, 2001, my wife and I are on a train travelling through central Germany. At a stop, a well-dressed Dutchman, who we later learned was …

I really don’t have a huge interest in shopping at any outlet stores. I’m an L.L. Bean and J.C. Penney.com shopper. Maybe once every couple of years I buy something at the Men’s Wearhouse—I’m not an outlet guy.  But I enjoyed Chesterfield’s public hearing over St. Louis Premium Outlets last week, and whether the city will provide a Community Improvement District (CID) sales tax to developers.The hearing began with the city providing an overview. It was more of a lecture on how the CID sales tax would not cost the city anything, and it reminded me of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—it had many …

I've written several columns here opposing special sales tax schemes proposed for two outlet malls under development in Chesterfield Valley. Then Ed Rhode, a local public relations expert, sent me a link to a website: notooutletgiveaways.com The website waxes against giving tax increment funding by giving TIFs that defer property taxes and by allowing special sales tax districts for road construction known as TDDs or for simply paying for part of the costs for building the development know as a CID (Commercial Improvement District).    Chesterfield Patch Editor Jean Whitney made a reference …

In the past seven years, Chesterfield has gotten more money for parks from the St. Louis County Park Grants Commission than any other municipality, raking in $1.45 million. The next closest cites were Florissant, Kirkwood and Webster Groves. From 2003 to 2010, the nine members of the Park Grants Commission awarded $24.7 million in grants, total. Who administers the money? The staff of the St. Louis County Municipal League runs the administration of the Grants Commission. The Municipal League is a lobbying group to look out for the interest of municipalities in Jefferson City and with the …

In 2011, I thought about how the Parkway School District had been doing a good job keeping out of the spotlight that can shine on all things negative. While the 2011 MAP (Missouri Assessment Program) test scores were not so kind to Parkway, the district still likes to claim it is one of the top districts in St. Louis County. However, for a number of years Lindbergh, Clayton, Ladue, Webster Groves, Kirkwood and Rockwood have all been ahead of Parkway in test results. The good news for Parkway was that Webster Groves fell behind it in math for 2011.  Then, 2011 saw the neighboring Rockwood …

The St. Louis County Library Board recently voted to ask for a six-cent tax hike on the current 16-cent per $100 property valuation, for the purpose of tearing down and rebuilding the County library’s headquarters. I went to the library headquarters after that. The building is on Lindbergh Boulevard in Ladue. What did I find? They had just remodeled the place—the same building they now want to tear down. And I don’t mean they remodeled the place several years ago, I mean in the last nine months. An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Paul Hampel said the headquarters was built in 1960 …

A conference room at Chesterfield City Hall was jammed for a Planning and Public Works Committee meeting earlier this month, with pumpkin farms, outlet malls, snow, roads, and dump trucks on the agenda. But first, most cities have a Planning and Zoning Commission that makes recommendations to the City Council or Board of Aldermen on new developments and zoning issues. A good example of how this system is not supposed to work is the new Schnucks store on Clarkson Road at Kehr’s Mill. The Ballwin P&Z Commission voted against the Schnucks. But the Board of Aldermen ignored entirely their own …

I've described how Charter Communications apparently doesn’t communicate well with its older customers, when they moved Turner Classic Movies (TCM) channel off the expanded basic cable. Now, if you want to wallow in wonderful classics, you must "upgrade" to a digital box. I pointed out this would be a hardship for older people, who represent a core viewership for TCM. They will have to deal with the cable company, a digital box, extra coaxial cable and another remote control device. And what's behind it all? Greed Greed, because cable television companies make their money in three ways: The …

Chesterfield's City Council had its annual swearing-in ceremony last week, of four incumbents who won their seats back on the April 3 election. No new faces. Few people come to the regular meetings. But before the ceremony, there was the usual pre-meeting, meeting—called the Agenda Meeting in Chesterfield—a work session in other towns. The pre-meeting is open to the public and held in a small, awkward conference room. The table is too big for the room, and chairs face the wrong direction to view Powerpoint screenings. The pre-meetings are often more interesting than anything you'll see in a …

Listening to talk radio, I don’t really care what "Bob from Affton" thinks about the Cardinals’ bullpen or if "Alice from O’Fallon" wants Congress to ban abortions. But Chesterfield Patch likes feedback from its users. That's why you see weekly surveys asking about your favorite type of restaurant. Although after 45 weeks or so, we could run low on types of restaurants and be down to a survey on favorite Mongolian eateries! While I don’t set out to write a column that will generate a lot of feedback, I have done a few that I thought would get comments—but was surprised when few or none …

Let me say this—I have been into cable TV since its inception. In 1981 when my new bride was househunting for us in Kansas City while I worked the midnight shift as a police officer, my only instructions to her were this: the house had to get cable TV so I could watch baseball games with announcers Harry Carey (Cubs) and Skip Carey (Braves.)  So I like cable TV. And while I have written about my trials and tribulations in the last year with Charter Cable, I wasn’t so unhappy—until now.   On Saturday, April 21, Charter is changing the channel lineup. In doing so, a very few select channels …

In my lifetime I have been falsely accused of things several times. I am not even counting all the times defense attorneys would try to convince a judge that when I was a police detective I didn’t advise their clients of their Miranda Rights or tricked a confession out of them. Once when I was police detective in a Kansas City suburb, I was assigned the case of a person shot at home. The logical suspect was the victim’s live-in girlfriend, but he claimed he accidently shot himself. The girlfriend was a bartender at a local bar and restaurant.  I had no plans to pursue the investigation …

Have Chesterfield decision-makers fallen prey to feeling a need to over-beautify a commercial development and making it harder for the businesses to succeed? I've seen this happen in West County—including instances when a city and a developer together hurt the chances that potential customers will find stores. Problem Cities want lots of landscaping. Trees and bushes are a favorite. Signs listing all the stores in a shopping center are often unwanted since they just clutter up things, say some city councils. Once developers rent the center, they are happy. Often they forget about the trees …

When there is a rare open public meeting at Chesterfield's March Fire Protection District, someone from Chesterfield Patch tries to attend. On Monday night, there were a total of three people at the meeting, including me. One left early. Here's what I heard. A Nazi on staff: During a discussion about increasing firefighter/paramedic on-the-job training from half-an-hour a day to two hours a day, district Training Officer Robin Echele used statistics to make a point. He referred to a staffer as the “Data Nazi” who had come up with certain statistics. It struck me as odd that a person working …