Bill Makes Government Transparency Available to All Missourians

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

One of the biggest shortcomings of Missouri’s Sunshine Law is that—apart from local governments giving incomplete answers or overcharging for requested documents—it can be hard for the public to get any response to Sunshine Law requests. The two biggest reasons for this are (1) it’s hard to compel action from government, because the consequences for Sunshine violations are so weak; and (2) sometimes contact information for a local government can be outdated as staff churns, so requests are sent but never actually received.

That’s where House Bill 2873 (HB 2873) comes in.

HB 2873 would create permanent email accounts with the office of the Secretary of State (SOS) where Sunshine Law requests can be sent to local government at all times. For example, Battlefield, Mo., might be “[email protected],” or Clay County might be “[email protected].” The simplicity of the system is its advantage. Residents wouldn’t need to track down everchanging contact information for a city or school district, because these permanent email addresses will always work. Moreover, the Secretary of State would retain a copy of all requests to ensure compliance from local governments. Local governments wouldn’t be able to plausibly deny that a request was lost within the recesses of the Internet.

What if a local government already has an active Sunshine Law email address? The proposal contemplates this, too, allowing local governments to have requests sent to the new SOS accounts forwarded to an existing contact point for Sunshine Law requests. Alternatively, they could manage such requests within the state’s own email system like you or I might with our work email, or with web email. Importantly, as soon as an email request was received by the email address hosted by the Secretary of State, the three-day clock for a response required under the law would start ticking. However local government chose to field these requests, they couldn’t simply ignore them or act like the email was not received. Indeed, the state would know better.

Also included in the bill is a fix to something we encountered on a handful of occasions during our Show-Me Curricula project. Some school districts claimed that the schools they manage were not covered under the Sunshine Law. This is, of course, nonsense, but HB 2873 strengthens language around who precisely is subject to the state’s public transparency requirements, specifically around schools.

Along with the Parents’ Bill of Rights and mandatory transparency provisions dotting a handful of legislation, HB 2873 stands as one of the most important transparency ideas of the 2022 legislative session. The bill would act as a check against local government Sunshine Law failures. It leaves no flexibility for schools to deny transparency requests made under the law. I look forward to its hearing and hope that it will pass either on its own or as a prioritized amendment before the end of the session.

A Needed Improvement to CID Laws

Posted on by David Stokes

Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) are special taxing districts that are funded by a sales or property tax (almost always a sales tax) to subsidize certain public improvements within a defined area. Show-Me Institute researchers have identified many problems with CIDs over the years, but one big issue is that Missouri won’t release certain tax information about some smaller CIDs, even though they are government agencies and all of their money is public money!

The state’s department of revenue previously determined that for the smallest CIDs—CIDs that only have a few parcels and property owners—releasing tax information is the same as releasing an individual’s personal tax information. So, as you can see in this report on CIDs from the state auditor, certain CIDs have their information redacted, as if secret details from the Gulf of Tonkin are buried in Missouri CID reports or something.

Senate Bill 1066 has been introduced to address this issue and clarify that all CID revenues, which, if I didn’t make this clear enough the first time, are all public tax dollars, can be collected and shared by various state agencies. This is a good bill for government transparency, something that has long been important to the Show-Me Institute.

Does St. Louis Have a Housing Problem?

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

How affordable is housing in St. Louis? A recently released report graded the region on just that, and the results were not good. Overall, the report’s authors gave St. Louis City and County a “C” grade. But for residents with the lowest incomes, St. Louis received an “F.” By most metrics, St. Louis normally ranks pretty highly in terms of affordability, so such a poor performance warrants further investigation.

First, there’s the question of what makes housing “affordable.” Academic research on housing (and this report) typically defines “affordable” as housing where the resident spends less than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. This is a key point, because instead of affordability being solely measured by the price of housing, it is also dependent on the income of the people who live there.

Tying affordability to resident income also helps researchers explain how a region can be affordable for some but not all income groups, which is exactly what the report shows for St. Louis. For the wealthiest in the region, finding an affordable place to live is easy—St. Louis earns an “A” grade for this demographic. There’s also sufficient affordable housing for those making around and somewhat below the area’s median income (AMI). The same cannot be said for those making less than 30% of the AMI, which represents a family of three making less than $23,000 per year in total.

One problem with tying affordability to income is that it’s yet another imperfect measure for gaining insight into what residents find affordable, especially for those with lower incomes. For example, if you don’t have a car or another means of transportation, housing that’s miles away from your place of work that costs 30% of your income is likely not affordable once you account for daily commute costs. Or, if your income is low enough to qualify for other government programs (food stamps, housing vouchers, etc.) paying more than 30% of your monthly income may still be affordable for you despite what the income guidelines suggest.

So, what does it mean for a region to have an affordability problem? According to the report, you have to look at the number of people earning different incomes and compare that to the number of housing options that would be affordable for them. For example, the wealthiest St. Louisans have an enormous surplus of affordable housing options. But the poorest (<30% AMI) face a shortage of approximately 35,000 units, which is why St. Louis received an “F” for this group. To put this in context, affordable housing for the family described above would mean a 2–3-bedroom residence that costs (with utilities) less than $560 per month, which is understandably hard to find. Given the limitations of the income figures provided above, it’s hard to tell whether this estimated shortage is under or overestimating the housing affordability situation in St. Louis.

Perhaps the toughest question is what should be done given all this information. At the very least, before our elected officials start talking about solutions, they should get a better grip on the extent of the problem.

Milton Friedman’s Theory Casts Doubt on Responsible Stimulus Spending

Posted on by Corianna Baier

Governments across the country have been given the responsibility of spending trillions of federal stimulus dollars. In his book “Free to Choose,” Milton Friedman outlined the four ways to spend money, differentiated by whose money is spent and on whom money is spent. Unfortunately, this theory doesn’t bode well for spending stimulus dollars.

The image below outlines the four spending options and how they all change behavior.

Spending your money on yourself is when you economize (reduce expenses) and seek the highest value, as you are both the one losing the money and receiving the product. The exact opposite is spending someone else’s money on someone else. You don’t economize or seek high value because it is neither your money nor do you receive the product; you have very little invested in the decision.

Unfortunately, that’s the scenario that most closely resembles lawmakers spending stimulus money; it’s someone else’s money that they are spending on someone else. Of course, lawmakers are always spending someone else’s money in the form of tax dollars, but stimulus money is even farther removed because it doesn’t just come from their constituents.

This theory doesn’t paint a promising picture for spending the billions of stimulus dollars that Missouri received. Taxpayers do not want billions of dollars being spent in a way that is inefficient and wasteful. Lawmakers will need to be mindful of this incentive structure when deciding both what to spend these one-time funds on and whether to spend some of these funds at all.

Podcast: School Choice and The Culture War with Jay P. Greene

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Jay P. Greene about whether education reform organizations should embrace cultural debates or not.

Jay P. Greene is a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. At Heritage, Jay conducts and disseminates research on the key issues facing education today, including the cultural, civic, and economic implications of how education systems are designed and implemented.

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Municipal Contracting Is What Missouri Needs More Of

Posted on by David Stokes

Greendale, Missouri (population: small) is a St. Louis suburb. Like many cities within St. Louis County, it is very small. It is a nice little place nestled in between cemeteries, parks, a golf course, and a university. Did I mention it has a small population?

The key to successfully operating a small city, town, or village (Greendale is a village) is to not try to do everything yourself. Small towns need to contract out, share services, or privatize as many services as they can. These are valuable strategies for all cities, but they are vital for microcities such as Greendale, Champ, Lichtenstein, or Sealand.

Greendale is reopening its police contract for a nearby department to bid on providing police and court services for the village’s people. I understand those services are currently being provided by Normandy, but best practices are to rebid contracts like this at regular intervals. The most important thing is that Greendale is not attempting to provide its own police services. Whether a neighboring city such as Normandy, the St. Louis County police department, or the new North County police cooperative win the bid is not the point. The point is that Greendale deserves credit for this municipal policing strategy. There are plenty of other towns in Missouri that bid out services, but even more should.

Many people in Warson Woods went nuts when the city proposed merging police services with neighboring Glendale, even though the two towns had shared fire services for decades. That very modest proposal to share services failed. Hopefully, the Greendale plan is the future for St. Louis County instead of the Warson Woods reaction.

March 17: Russia, Ukraine, and the Impact on the United States Virtual Event

Posted on by Zach Lawhorn
Join us on March 17 for a virtual event with Senator Jim Talent and Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano as they discuss the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the United States.
Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions via a Q&A session following the discussion. You can submit questions ahead of the event to [email protected]

Register Here

About the Speakers

Senator Jim Talent

Senator Jim Talent brings over 30 years of government and political experience including service in both chambers of Congress. He is a nationally-recognized leader on military affairs whose counsel is frequently sought by administrations and members of the House and Senate on both sides of the political aisle. During his service in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, Senator Talent served on each chamber’s Armed Services Committee where he worked to advance a strong national defense and military readiness. In the U.S. House, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, he was a vocal opponent of cuts in the size and strength of the military On the Senate Armed Services Committee, he fought to rebuild the force, which even then was too small, too stressed and desperately in need of recapitalization. An advocate for expanding the U.S. Navy’s fleet to project American power abroad and keep the peace, he chaired the committee’s Naval Power Subcommittee.

James Jay Carafano

James Jay Carafano, a leading expert in national security and foreign policy challenges, is the vice president of Heritage’s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy and the E. W. Richardson Fellow. Carafano is an accomplished historian and teacher as well as a prolific writer and researcher. His most recent publication is “Brutal War” (Lynne Reinner, 2021), a study of combat in the Southwest Pacific. He also authored “Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World” (Texas A&M University Press, 2012), a survey of the revolutionary impact of the Internet age on national security. He was selected from thousands to speak on cyber warfare at the 2014 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas, the nation’s premier tech and social media conference.

Brody Corners TIF—It’s Back

Posted on by Corianna Baier

The previously delayed Brody Corners incentive package is back in front of the Springfield City Council. The plan would redirect $3.4 million to the developer of this multi-use project through tax-increment financing (TIF) and a community improvement district (CID). As always, giving away tax dollars to developers is not a good deal for taxpayers.

Apparently, the problems that led to the initial postponement of the project have been overcome as the plan for the $27 million development with retail, restaurant, and office space is moving forward. The land for the proposed development was only annexed into the City of Springfield in June 2021.

The obvious question is: Why would the city annex an area only to spend millions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing the development of the land?

I’ll admit that the area seems to be in pretty bad shape, so it may legitimately be considered “blight,” a designation that would qualify the project for TIF. (Blight designations for TIF projects are frequently not legitimate.) But there are other programs intended for environmental remediation that the land’s private owners could pursue that are much less harmful to taxpayers.

Economic development incentives such as TIF put taxpayers on the hook to increase private business profits. While passing this TIF proposal may make Springfield lawmakers look like they are “fixing” this eyesore, it’s at the expense of taxpayers. Lawmakers should focus on keeping tax rates low for everyone instead of playing favorites and artificially lowering them for a chosen few.

Missouri Parents’ Bill of Rights Moves to the House Floor

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Missouri parents have a right to play a central role in their kids’ education. A critical piece of legislation that would help to guarantee that right advanced out of committee last week. HJR 110, the Missouri Parents’ Bill of Rights (MPBR), was passed out of the House Rules Committee last Thursday, meaning its next stop is the Missouri House for debate and a vote. Among other things, the resolution would require curriculum transparency and impose meaningful grading of schools and districts so parents can see how their schools and districts stack up to their peers.

One notable thing about this MPBR legislation is that it’s being advanced as a “resolution” rather than just a “bill.” What makes a House Joint Resolution (HJR) different than a bill is that in contrast to a bill that would change state law and requires a governor’s signature, a joint resolution—if agreed to with the Senate —does not require a signature by the governor and is instead sent to the public. If approved by the public, the joint resolution’s language is then added to the state constitution. If approved by the House and Senate, a vote on the MPBR would happen either this summer or fall.

Although HJR 110 has advanced to debate in the House, when that debate will happen remains to be seen. It may get its vote in the next week, or it may get its vote in the next month; House leadership will determine the timeline from here. But given the friction in the Senate, I hope this resolution gets out of the House fairly quickly to provide some breathing room for a vote before the end of the session, should the Senate continue its slow grind. We’ll keep you posted.

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