He said there have been “ongoing conversations” with St. Louis County and the state of Missouri, neither of which were discussed at the news conference in which Stillman and the civic leaders pitched a plan to commit taxpayer funds to help modernize the city-owned arena.

Nashville. Indianapolis. Louisville.

Stillman and the other civic leaders who mentioned those cities might not have been trying to make a point about regionalism, but it came through anyway.

Each of those cities was once, as St. Louis is today and has been since 1875, a city separated from a county that is very much a part of its metro area. Long ago, the leaders of each of those cities realized that economically, they were better off united than divided. Nashville merged its city-county government in 1963, Indianapolis followed in 1970, and Louisville did the same in 2003.

Now each of those cities, once dwarfed by St. Louis, is being pointed to by leaders here as the competition. They’re on their way up, while the city’s disunity holds it back.

The regional division rears its ugly head every time the concept of investing in the region’s future is discussed, whether it’s sports stadiums, convention centers, mass transit or roads.