ST. LOUIS, Missouri — A court battle could determine whether a former native St. Louis resident who recently returned home can qualify to serve as the President of the Board of Aldermen.
After the St. Louis City Election Board determined political newcomer Mark Kummer gathered enough petition signatures to appear on September's special election ballot, Alderman Jack Coatar filed a lawsuit challenging his residency status.
Voter registration records and campaign finance documents show Kummer was registered to vote in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the last election cycle. He just recently relocated back to St. Louis in December of last year after returning from a fellowship at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He says he lived in St. Louis "full-time from 1985 to 1996, as well as during the summer of 1997."
Coatar, Kummer, and Alderwoman Megan Green entered the contest. The top two candidates in September's election will face each other in a November runoff. If Coatar's suit to block Kummer's candidacy is successful, he will have effectively guaranteed himself a spot on the decisive November ballot.
The city charter says candidates must have lived in St. Louis for at least five years and must have been an "assessed taxpayer of the city" for two years.
Coatar's lawsuit highlights the words "next before" in the city charter to argue those five years must be the consecutive years immediately preceding the election, which would disqualify anyone who moved away and came back during that period.
Kummer says he has "lawyered up" and is in talks to hire attorney David Roland from the non-profit Freedom Center of Missouri to represent his case. Roland's website advertises their fight "to secure individual liberty and transparent, accountable, constitutionally-limited government in Missouri."
"While my lawyers are considering responses, it is my position that Mr. Coatar's argument citing an 1893 ruling in Collins v. Collins interpreting 'next before' was made with the intent of preventing freed and decedents of slaves from running for office in the State of Missouri, because it is based on being assessed for taxes on "real property" (land and structure) during the Jim Crow era," Kummer said in a written statement. "If a court upholds this discriminatory Jim Crow era ruling, it also automatically disqualifies my opponent Megan Green from running for President of the Board of Aldermen as she never owned 'real property in the City of St. Louis, living as a renter while a resident of the City of St. Louis."
Green disputes the accuracy of Kummer's claim and says other members of the Board of Aldermen live in rental properties and are still qualified to run.
"I have owned my house since 2014," she responded. "Even if I were a renter, that does not disqualify someone from being on the ballot."
Coatar said Kummer misunderstands the legal precedent and the qualifications to run for the job, which was suddenly vacated last month when former Board President Lewis Reed resigned under federal indictment.
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"Mr. Kummer's interpretation of the case law and the Charter residency requirement defies logic," Coatar said in a text message. "The lawsuit speaks for itself and in no way impacts any other candidates seeking the office of Board President."
Kummer, who is white, says Coatar, who is also white, is "leveraging significantly outdated and racist laws that should have been wiped off the books decades ago."
"Mr. Coatar may believe that a Jim Crow-era statute is appropriate for an election in the 21st Century," Kummer said. "That’s just another area where he and I, and our ideas about how this community should be run, differ."
"I believe there are countless victims of St. Louis' broken system in which power and wealth allow a privileged few to avoid accountability," Kummer said. "Jack Coatar used his donor base's power and wealth to circumvent free and fair elections. Thus, it is clear, Jack will continue to execute the doctrine of his mentor, and my Compton Heights neighbor Lewis Reed whereby he prioritizes the needs of developer class donors over citizens of this great city."
Kummer, a private equity contractor who boasts investment contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, deleted his old Twitter account before he announced his bid for office and scrambled to gather enough signatures to make the ballot. The entrepreneur says he's supported mostly Democrats and a few Republicans over the course of his adult life, but that he holds no proper party affiliation. He claims he's an independent. Coatar and Green are members of the Democratic party.
While the post will give the November winner the benefit of incumbency, the job could be short-lived. The winner this fall will serve the remainder of Reed's term before another election is held for a full four-year term in the Spring of 2023.