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Backers of failed St. Louis soccer stadium bid spent $1.3M

A rendering of how a new riverfront stadium for a professional soccer team would look.
Courtesy of HOK
A rendering of how a new riverfront stadium for a professional soccer team would look.

Almost $1.3 million went into this year’s failed attempt to persuade St. Louis voters to help fund an MLS stadium, according to campaign finance reports filed Thursday.

The report, posted on the Missouri Ethics Commission website, shows AspireSTL raised just under $1.2 million for their failed quest to pass Proposition 2 in the April 4 election.

Proposition 2 was part of a two ballot-measure package; Proposition 1, which upped the sales tax by a half-cent for expanding public transportation and providing public safety equipment, passed. About 53 percent of the city’s voters had rejected Proposition 2, which would have directed about $50 million from an increased use tax to pay for the stadium.

But the total amount of money reported this week doesn’t include about $125,000 that the AspireSTL campaign committee collected this week from SC STL, the ownership group seeking the stadium, to pay off remaining expenses.

SC STL spokesman Jim Woodcock said in an e-mail to St. Louis Public Radio that its campaign is over.

“We are not actively exploring solutions or an alternate approach,” he said.

Krewson’s cash

St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson during her campaign
Credit File photo | Jason Rosenbaum | St. Louis Public Radio
St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson during her campaign

New St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson filed the other notable campaign-finance report from the April 4 election.  All told, Krewson reported raising $1.7 million, including almost $203,000 donated — mostly from labor unions — since her narrow victory in the March 7 Democratic primary.  

Krewson reported spending $1.58 million overall, with $247,000 left in her campaign bank account. That means she still has some significant campaign dollars to help political allies, or target critics, should she so choose.

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Copyright 2021 St. Louis Public Radio. To see more, visit St. Louis Public Radio.

Jo Mannies has been covering Missouri politics and government for almost four decades, much of that time as a reporter and columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She was the first woman to cover St. Louis City Hall, was the newspaper’s second woman sportswriter in its history, and spent four years in the Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau. She joined the St. Louis Beacon in 2009. She has won several local, regional and national awards, and has covered every president since Jimmy Carter. She scared fellow first-graders in the late 1950s when she showed them how close Alaska was to Russia and met Richard M. Nixon when she was in high school. She graduated from Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, and was the daughter of a high school basketball coach. She is married and has two grown children, both lawyers. She’s a history and movie buff, cultivates a massive flower garden, and bakes banana bread regularly for her colleagues.
Since entering the world of professional journalism in 2006, Jason Rosenbaum dove head first into the world of politics, policy and even rock and roll music. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Rosenbaum spent more than four years in the Missouri State Capitol writing for the Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri Lawyers Media and the St. Louis Beacon.