đĖ stlmag.com July 2019 Photography by Elizabeth Wiseman
GATEWAY INSIDE INFOSt. Louis County Executive Sam Page has only been on the job for a little
while, but already he’s building trust. He persuaded State Auditor Nicole
Galloway to audit the county government and St. Louis Economic Develop-
ment Partnership after former County Exec Steve Stenger pled guilty in a
pay-to-play scheme. He promoted Hazel Erby, the county councilwoman
who voted against his nomination to county executive, to serve in his admin-
istration as director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And he’s working to
make his interim term count. “I’m here for a year and a half before I’m up
for re-election,” he says. “I feel a lot of urgency to accomplish things quickly.
There’s a lot of things I want to do.”
ON THE PARALLELS OF HIS JOB AS AN ANESTHESIOLOGIST AND GOVERNMENT
OFFICIAL: Public service is like being a doctor—you just take care of large
groups of people instead of one person at a time. The concept of sorting
out complicated issues and trying to make sure government works for
people, it’s the same process. As far as anesthesiology goes, it’s fast-paced,
intense, high stakes. Usually it goes smoothly, but sometimes you’re involved
in emergencies that are not ideal, and that requires you to keep your cool.
ON RESTORING TRUST: I have to empower the employees to feel comfortable
in making decisions without any fear that they may not please someone;
if they have good ideas, I want to hear their good ideas. And I think that
we should be much more transparent in
how our government works. We get a lot
of requests for information, and the last
administration worked hard to push back
and suppress those requests. They’re rel-
atively routine and harmless, and there’s
little that goes on in county government
that we shouldn’t be willing to share.ON THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC: I think we could
do a lot more working with our providers,
hospitals, and community groups, and we
need to make sure that we have enough
substance-abuse-treatment opportu-
nities for the people who need them. If
you don’t redirect someone into treat-
ment when they’ve recovered from an
overdose, you’ve missed an opportunity.ON THE COUNTY’S BIGGEST PROBLEM: Racial
segregation is really the root of a lot of
our issues: poverty, education, crime...
It all goes back to, there are certain seg-
ments in the county where kids grow up,
and they just don’t have the same oppor-
tunities for health care, for a good educa-
tion, for a job when they graduate from
high school. That’s just not right. County
government has a big role to play in try-
ing to make sure we put our resources
in the places that make a difference. We
should really be using our authority as
the largest political organization in this
region to be leading this conversation.ON BETTER TOGETHER’S NOW-TABLED CITY-
COUNTY MERGER PLAN: The proposal that
was brought forward had so many flaws,
it’s easy to see why it didn’t take off. But
the underlying issue that it was trying
to address is racial segregation and dis-
parities, and we need to keep that con-
versation going. What we see now is that
a lot of our leaders in the municipalities
in St. Louis County are more engaged.
They saw what looked like an assault on
their ability to run their municipalities
on sovereignty. And they’re pretty moti-
vated, and they’re talking to each other
and working together in ways that they
haven’t in a while.BY AMANDA WOYTUSTurning the Page
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