“That’s not a plan,” said Pat Kelly, executive director of the Municipal League of Metro St. Louis, an association of area municipalities. “How are you going to accomplish that? What is going to be reduced? If that’s really the analysis they have, that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.”

Inside the Post-Dispatch: Better Together says rough road ahead for St. Louis city-county merger Better Together staffer Dave Leipholtz reveals frustrations, explains details and admits that the road ahead for the St. Louis city and St. Lo…

University of Missouri-St. Louis professor E. Terrance Jones, another vocal critic of Better Together so far, said he and colleagues were waiting to see the figures. “We plan, as part of our obligation as researchers, to review them and check them out,” said Jones, who occasionally contracts with municipalities.

Jones and Kelly both added that multiple studies had shown that mergers don’t always produce savings. A study of Louisville, Ky., where voters approved a merger in 2000, compared spending in the five years before the consolidation with the five years after, and marked savings at about 1 percent. Jones said that savings had since disappeared.

And a larger study of nine consolidations, including Nashville, Tenn., “found no systematic relationship between merger and cost-savings,” Jones said.