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ST. LOUIS — One of the reasons the city of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ sometimes struggles with moving forward is that it often seems to be stuck fighting battles from the past.

Take the Rams. Remember them? That once-beloved NFL team that left our fine city, which owner Stan Kroenke trashed on the way to the West Coast? The Rams left ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ in 2016, but the story didn’t end then. The city and ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County sued the Rams and the NFL. By the time the case was over, the city and county both had new leaders. The Fighting ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ans, on their way to defeating the Rams in court in 2021, wrested a $790 million settlement away from the billionaires who own the NFL.

Nearly four years later, the city of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ is going to the polls to elect its next mayor, and it still hasn’t spent its portion of the settlement, about $280 million. A couple of months ago, as the Board of Aldermen was tying itself in knots not spending the money, the issue of the settlement came up in another court case that haunts the city.

In January, a federal jury awarded the parents of Mansur Ball-Bey, who had been killed by ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ police in 2015, a $19 million settlement because of the actions of a former police officer, Kyle Chandler, who shot and killed Ball-Bey, an 18-year-old Black man who was unarmed at the time he was shot.

During the penalty phase of that trial, the city’s budget director, Paul Payne, told the jury that part of the Rams money might be needed to pay such a settlement because the city doesn’t have that kind of money budgeted for such payouts.

At a mayoral debate later that week, two of the then-candidates for mayor, Michael Butler and Andrew Jones, said the verdict should be paid out immediately to the family, that the Ball-Bey’s have waited too long for justice. Alderwoman Cara Spencer, called it a massive verdict: “Ninety minutes it took for a jury to deliberate and come to that conclusion,� she said. “I think that’s important because it’s very clear something was wrong here. While I can’t speak to the specifics of the case, it’s obvious to me that we have a problem.� Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, as is her practice, declined to comment on ongoing litigation. Her city counselor, Sheena Hamilton, has said in court documents she plans to appeal the ruling.

On Tuesday, city voters will decide between Jones and Spencer to be the city’s next mayor. Spencer won the primary in overwhelming fashion. If she also wins the general election, she might want to have a conversation with Payne, the city’s budget director, pretty quickly. That’s because there’s yet another piece of old business haunting the city that might cost a little money to rectify.

In February, Clayton attorney Mark Pedroli filed a motion for sanctions against the city because it has refused to produce — or destroyed — the recording of the last controversial meeting of the airport privatization process. The city, Pedroli wrote, kept all of its records except a recording of that meeting.

You remember airport privatization, right? It began under the administration of former Mayor Francis Slay and ended under the administration of Lyda Krewson. Both Jones and Spencer, to their credit, opposed the privatization of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Lambert International Airport. In 2019, as the process was still full steam ahead, Pedroli filed a lawsuit alleging violations of the state’s Sunshine Law that requires government transparency.

Early in her tenure, the Jones administration sent me an embargoed statement that I could only use if the lawsuit was settled, which they indicated to me was going to happen any day. It didn’t. And it drags on, Pedroli says in legal documents, in part because the city still won’t hand over key evidence.

In a deposition, Payne said the last meeting wasn’t recorded. His secretary contradicted him in her deposition. In fact, she told Pedroli that she used that recording to produce the minutes of the meeting.

“Based on the record, the subject recording either (1) exists and has not been produced; or (2) was destroyed, constituting sanctionable spoliation of evidence,� Pedroli writes in his recent motion asking the judge to compel the city to produce the audio recording, or punish them for not doing so.

A Sunshine Law case, unlike a police shooting, isn’t about to lead to anything close to a $19 million settlement, but finding a way to end the case, with meaningful accountability for taxpayers, is important if the next mayor, or the one after that, is ever going to regain the trust with city residents that has been trampled upon in the city in recent years, from the secretiveness of airport privatization, to federal bribery investigations of former aldermen, to Jones’ inability to take the Sunshine Law seriously. Pedroli says that forcing city officials to have to testify before a jury about a destroyed audiotape might wake them up and force better adherence to government transparency rules.

For Spencer, if she wins on Tuesday, this case offers her a chance to make an immediate statement about government transparency. The decision might be complicated by the fact that her top donor in the mayoral election, developer and construction magnate Bob Clark, was an airport privatization proponent.

As another mayor’s race comes and goes, three issues, from 2015, 2016 and 2019, all connected in their own way, haunt whomever wins the race.

How can ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ move forward if it is still running from its past failures?

Editor’s note: This column was updated to correctly characterize Cara Spencer’s remarks about the verdict.