News

Election Day in St. Louis

It's election day in Missouri and voters in St. Louis and Kansas City will head to the polls to decide whether to retain each community's 1 percent earnings tax. In St. Louis, the $140 million from the tax is about a third of the city's revenue. If the proposition fails, the tax will be phased out over the next ten years. 

Former NPR contributor Juan Williams used an availability with reports before a Monday event at Washington University to repeat his claim that the network would better serve its journalistic values if it gave up government funding.

NPR may be selective in the voices it uses to tell stories, Williams said, often excluding those with a more conservative point of view. But with the voices it uses, it produces quality journalism.

Reporting from WBEZ's Tony Arnold used in this report.

Illinois' two U.S. senators are saying party leaders are trying to avoid a government shut down. Lawmakers are facing a Friday deadline to finalize the federal budget.

Illinois' senior U.S. senator, Democrat Dick Durbin, said budget negotiations with House Republicans and Speaker John Boehner are close to wrapping up.

The Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis was once considered the template for post-war public housing, a national model.  For awhile it was—until it wasn’t.  The high rise complex was constructed in 1954.  Two decades later, and by then notorious, Pruitt-Igoe was a pile of rubble, imploded and bulldozed into history. What went wrong and why?  That’s the subject of a new documentary film called The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History.   Directed by Chad Freidrichs, the film will have its St. Louis premiere this Saturday at the Missouri History Museum.