St. Charles County

Others are worried that if the first district is redone, that you're going to have to dilute a lot of the first district and the Republican districts surrounding that to get Republicans into that, that you could create another Democratic district and we would be 4-4, which would be a frightening, frightening thing.

You know, we talked about last week how St. Charles County, how surprising it was that St. Louis County went from 11 representatives in the statehouse to eight.

Now there are three Democrats.

But, you know, it could have been much worse than that.

Dave Hinman won his reelection by 276 votes.

And Wendy Hausman, she won her reelection by 352 points.

When you dive into the numbers, St. Charles County voted roughly 17 points more Democratic than from 2024 to 2026.

Also diving into numbers that was very surprising, Amendment 3, you know, Jefferson County has turned considerably Republican over the last few years.

And as I mentioned, the co-host of St. Charles Patriot Radio.

So I see somebody who is always focused on the hyper local issues, especially things happening in St. Charles and in St. Charles County.

I think we saw a I think it's one of the biggest surprises.

And one of the biggest eye openings and messages sent by voters locally last week because St. Charles County, I think, has been thought of as a very strong red Republican county.

And that is not what happened.

Last week, when it came to the results of the vote.

I'm Megan Lynch.

Workers for St. Charles County would only get a modest raise next year under the county's proposed 2027 budget.

The county council started going through that budget last night.

Administrators cut about 21 million dollars from department requests in order to balance everything out.

Sales tax, St. Charles County's biggest source of money, Expected to grow just 1%, the plan gives employees a 2% merit raise and a 1% cost of living increase.

Councilman Dave Hammond wants more.

Well, I just say I'm not really happy that we can't give the employees a higher cost of living because the cost of living this year was almost 4%.

That's an issue that the caucus is

going to be discussing, especially when you have a 2022 map that splits up counties like St. Charles County.

Any map the legislature passes could be subject to a referendum, and if redistricting opponents get enough signatures for a vote, they could prevent it from going into effect.

Passionate opposition has killed a move to sell more than 100 acres of Jackson County's most beautiful and ecologically important land for development.

And I heard the same thing from Fred when I went to a few of his events, saying that we've had a couple – um cracks at this one with some good candidates well-funded candidate they didn't do anything the district was better in 2018 and 2020 than it is now um but um you know so there was a lot of apprehension to that so his fundraising numbers were were decent but you know it was he was you know ann wagner has a war chest or he had a war chest she's spinning all So on the fundraising metrics, on the redistricting, I did an analysis of the two districts, and I wrote a column about this at the time, if those ultra-gerrymandered districts were to uh, stay in effect.

I was like, you know, go for broke Democrats, uh, putting St. Charles County and Boone County together in, um, in a district has a lot of potential for, uh, a democratic pickup in the future as, as we picked up three state house seats in St. Charles County.

Well, this cycle, that's

where I was going to go there.

Right.

Cottleville is the heart of St. Charles County, and that's not saying a whole lot for a third-world country.

Oh,

for heaven's

Right.

Cottleville is the heart of St. Charles County, and that's not saying a whole lot for a third world country.

Oh,

for heaven's

The city of St. Charles passed an outright ban.

St. Charles County passed a six-month moratorium.

St. Louis County is drafting zoning rules after residents pushed for a full

moratorium.