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ST. LOUIS — For most of an hour last weekend, Alderwoman Cara Spencer told a roomful of people at a candidate forum about her vision for the city.

It involved a lot of change: The city would be safer, bigger, stronger. More efficient, more functional, more populous.

Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, in her rebuttal, scoffed.

“It’s easy to criticize something,” Jones said, “when you’ve never run it.”

Spencer, over the last 10 years, has made her name in city politics as a critic. She’s fought against cash for sports teams, payday lenders and airport privatization. Once, when the city refused to put a stop sign near a school in her ward, she got a sledgehammer and did it herself.

She ran for mayor against Jones four years ago, promised change citywide, and lost by a few percentage points. And she’s done it again this campaign, pledging to fix a long list of the city’s biggest problems: Unreliable trash pickup. Broken streets. Continued population loss. The persistent perception that the city is not safe.

This time, voters have bought in. Spencer notched a 35-point win over Jones in the March primary and is the favorite in the April 8 run-off.

But, if she wins, the promises will become tasks. Residents will expect results.

Even Spencer acknowledges it will be tough.

City leaders have tried and failed to reverse population decline since the 1950s. ӣ����Ƶ’ struggle to hire the workers necessary to pick up trash and pave streets is challenging cities across the country. And public safety is about to get a lot more complicated, with the state taking over the police department.

“There are moments where I think, ‘I have made a lot of promises,’” Spencer said in an interview Thursday.

But she said she gets inspired looking at the Eads Bridge. The plan to build it was daring: James’ Eads design was novel. Rival engineers said it couldn’t be done. Steamboat owners and the local ferry monopoly didn’t want it built. But Eads did it anyway.

Big things like that can still be done here, she said, with the right team in place, a big coalition and a lot of hard work.

“I know it’s hokey, but I truly believe in St Louis,” she said. “Somebody has got to pull us out of decline.”

People who know ӣ����Ƶ politics and have worked in city government, from professors to contractors to former officials, agree with Spencer’s ambition. Some even think she has a shot at success.

But they’ve also heard it all before.

“I’ve been here since the 1970s,” said Ken Warren, the longtime pollster and political science professor at ӣ����Ƶ University. “I’ve heard the promises by each mayor since that time.”

“None of them,” he said, “have been able to fix the city’s problems.”

How Spencer picked fights

Spencer, 46, was born in ӣ����Ƶ and grew up in the suburbs. She went to Parkway South High School, was a cheerleader, played soccer and built a solar-powered bike for a national competition.

Next was Truman State University, where she earned a math degree. Then she landed a job — thanks in part to a well-timed profanity — building mathematical models for a ӣ����Ƶ consultancy, Mattson Jack Group in Westport.

“I goofed and dropped the F bomb during my interview,” she later wrote in a Q&A for math majors at Truman State. “They assumed because of the F bomb that I knew what I was talking about and was confident enough in my skills to be myself.”

In 2015, she entered politics. By then she had purchased a house in the Marine Villa neighborhood in south ӣ����Ƶ and started working at a co-working space in the Cherokee Street commercial area nearby. But she grew disappointed in city officials. She saw vacant buildings, a closed neighborhood pool, and a commercial strip she thought should be doing better.

“I really thought it was a neighborhood that was up and coming,” she said at a campaign forum in January. “And it was not coming up very fast.”

So she ran for alderman, defeated longtime incumbent Craig Schmid by 90 votes, and started making a name for herself. The pool reopened. The value of building permits on Cherokee got a bump. Accounts vary on who deserves the credit. But friends, like developer Jason Deem, said she was essential.

“She moves very quickly,” Deem said. “And she has a lot of energy, and that energy just wasn’t there before.”

As Spencer worked on ward issues, she also picked some bigger fights at the board.

In 2015, she joined a small group of aldermen to demand a public vote on city money for a new football stadium designed to keep the Rams in ӣ����Ƶ.

Two years later, she helped lead the opposition to spending more than $60 million to renovate Enterprise Center for the ӣ����Ƶ Blues. She even sued the team, calling the offering an unconstitutional gift to private interests.

The Rams bolted for Los Angeles. And the Blues .

But the resistance helped set the stage for different deals in the future, like the largely privately financed new soccer stadium in Midtown.

And it earned Spencer a reputation as a dogged legislator.

“She was determined,” said former Alderman Stephen Conway, one of the old guard board members Spencer sometimes fought against. “If an issue was important to her, she held onto it and rode it until it was complete.”

She spent much of the next few years bolstering that image. She led a push for new regulations on payday lenders, approved by voters in 2017, and pushed back on a plan to privatize the ӣ����Ƶ Lambert International Airport.

She was not the only upstart at the board then. More liberal Democrats, dubbed “progressives,” were gaining power in ӣ����Ƶ. She teamed up with them at times, but never saw herself as one of them.

When Alderwoman Megan Green fought a 2017 sales tax geared toward police raises, Spencer voted to put the tax on the ballot, and stayed neutral during the campaign. While Green fully embraced activists’ calls to close the Workhouse jail, long derided as inhumane, Spencer expressed reservations about activists’ timeline.

And when Spencer and Jones faced off in the 2021 mayoral election, most progressive aldermen and activists endorsed Jones, who promised to reimagine the city’s approach to public safety, economic development and more.

Four years later, Jones' coalition is fractured in large part because she didn't do all she promised. And Spencer has taken advantage.

But can she make the changes she’s pitching?

Can trash be fixed?

Take trash pickup. For at least three years, the city has not had the manpower needed to cover all of the routes each day, leaving dumpsters at risk of overflowing and sending citizen complaints skyrocketing.

Spencer has proposed several solutions, starting with the most straightforward one: Hire more workers. If the city can’t do that, she says, then it should hire contractors to fill gaps.

But the city has tried to hire more drivers, and it’s been tough, even after the city offered raises — private trash companies still pay more, officials have said.

And the city uses a special kind of truck to pick up its alleyway dumpsters, which serve about 80% of the city. Contractors wouldn’t have the same equipment. The current administration has considered contracting with drivers themselves, but a Jones spokesperson said they’ve held off because of liability concerns.

Spencer has also talked about “streamlining” trash collection.

But the easiest way to do that, as the Jones administration found when it studied the idea, is to send more trucks to places that generate more trash, like the central and southern parts of the city — which could prompt allegations of racism from less populous, largely Black north ӣ����Ƶ.

Another idea might be more impactful: changing how the city handles recycling.

In recent years, only about a third of what’s put into the blue bins has actually been processed. The rest, littered with trash, is taken to the dump at an extra charge to the city. At the same time, collecting recycling means the city has fewer trucks for trash.

Spencer has suggested piloting an “opt-in” system where residents take materials to drop-off sites in the city instead of having truck drivers pick it up in alley bins.

That worked in late 2021 and early 2022 when the city suspended alley recycling because of a staffing shortage. Sure enough, the trash got picked up and the recycling was cleaner.

But city officials have been reticent to make such a change long-term.

Residents want alleyway recycling, officials say.

Can she hire more cops?

There are even bigger roadblocks to her public safety agenda.

Spencer would inherit a city making real progress. Homicides have dropped 40% since hitting a record high in 2020. And overall crime dropped 15% last year.

But Spencer says more must be done to make people truly feel safer:

The police department, down 300 officers from its 2020 roster, needs to be fully staffed, so it can properly respond to emergencies, she says.

The 911 system — which improved under Jones but still doesn’t answer 90% of calls within 10 seconds, the national standard — needs a boost.

And traffic enforcement has to stiffen, she says.

But as of this past week, City Hall no longer has direct control over those things.

The police department is returning to state control, in which the mayor is just one of five voting commissioners on the department’s governing board, and the only one not appointed by the governor.

The mayor will need to negotiate plans and priorities, and there’s no guarantee the board will cooperate.

Jeff Rainford, chief of staff to Mayor Francis Slay, the most recent mayor to deal with the board, said some commissioners worked with Slay. Others didn’t.

Spencer acknowledged the worry. “It’s going to be a little more difficult, certainly.”

Could she reverse population loss?

And then there’s the big one: growing the city’s population.

It’s Spencer’s top priority. “The purpose of city government is very simple,” she says. “It’s making the city a place people want to be.”

It’s what fixing city services and helping people feel safer are supposed to do, she says.

The potential benefits are obvious: More people means more activity, more jobs, more tax money, all which could further improve services and the city.

But the city has lost population in every decade since 1950, with crime rising and falling, services in good shape and bad. And reversing that is tough.

The ӣ����Ƶ population can’t grow by itself. There aren’t enough births to offset deaths in an aging population.

Immigration has offered some hope in recent years amid aggressive efforts to resettle Afghan and Hispanic immigrants here. But advocates say the Trump administration’s moves to curtail refugee resettlement and other programs will limit benefits for at least the next few years.

Ness Sandoval, a ӣ����Ƶ University professor who studies the region’s demographics, said the city needs to attract more people from other parts of the country.

But that, he said, will require big changes: A region infamous for fragmentation will have to work as one to promote itself. The city will have to improve its worn-down downtown to impress potential movers. And the public schools, mired in controversy and behind schedule on building closures, will have to improve.

Cities like Indianapolis and Cincinnati are working on those kinds of things, Sandoval said.

“But there’s a sense of urgency there,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s a sense of urgency here.”

Spencer, for her part, has promised to change that.

She says she’ll work with business leaders, many of whom are supporting her campaign, to retain existing downtown firms and attract new ones.

She has pledged to work more closely with the school board, and tackle problems like last year’s transportation crisis before they get out of control.

She has even talked about ӣ����Ƶ re-entering ӣ����Ƶ County as a first step toward a more united region.

But accomplishing just one of those tasks would be a remarkable feat of politics. Business leaders have for years been migrating to Clayton, the region’s other downtown, or leaving the area altogether. The mayor has no official authority over the independently elected school board. And every attempt since 1876 to bring the city and county back together has failed.

“She could do everything imaginable,” said Warren, the political scientist, “but at best, she would meet with very, very modest success.”