County councilman wants to use NFL settlement money on street repairs

ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – A St. Louis County councilman wants to address everything from potholes to worn-out streets giving drivers grief. He’s pushing the county government to spend more than $20 million of the Rams-NFL settlement money to repair bad streets and roads.

Councilman Mark Harder says there is about $200 million in work that needs to be done, but there’s not the money to do it.

“Well, we’ve got a lot of Rams money from the Rams settlement, and I want to make sure we use this appropriately,” he said. “And we’ve got a huge gap right now in our funding for roads, and this would be a way of giving a supplement to the money we already use on roads to catch up on the huge backlog we have for unrepaired roads.”

Harder says they can use that $20 million as leverage to gain more from the state and federal governments.

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“I think, probably, we use 10 of that, we hopefully can turn that into 50 or 60. We would pay the low matching funds, which is usually 20% or so, depending on the project,” he said. “And then, on the subdivision roads, we would pay $10 million to do $10 million worth of subdivision.”

It would take three or four years to get federal or state approval. And Harder still needs to get the measure past the county council. There’s a hearing set for March 19.

FOX 2 reached out to St. Louis County Executive Sam Page for a comment. A spokesman sent us the following statement:

“There are no restrictions or deadlines on how to spend these funds, so we need to be thoughtful and look at how the funds can be used in an equitable way. The funds continue to make St. Louis County a considerable amount of money, invested in an interest-bearing account; about $5 million so far.”

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