How Can Missouri Support Students with Special Needs? Find Out.

Posted on by James V. Shuls

In November, the Show-Me Institute will host two events on Bryce’s Law.

Haven’t heard of it? Don’t worry, few have—and even fewer have benefitted from it.

Bryce’s Law was passed in 2013. It was intended to provide scholarships to students with special needs so they could get the educational services they need from specialized private institutions such as the Judevine Center for Autism. As Mike McShane, Susan Pendergrass, and I point out in our recent essay, “Bryce’s Law Revisited: Serving Missouri’s Neediest Students through Targeted Scholarships,” not a single student has benefited from Bryce’s Law.

Join Mike on November 13 in Kansas City or Susan in St. Louis on November 15 as they share how Bryce’s Law could be revised to do what it was meant to do—serve students with special needs.

If you have a child with special needs or know someone who does, or even if you just want to find out more, I highly recommend you attend one of these events. Unlike some political issues that generate millions of dollars in backing from organized interest groups, scholarships for students with special needs are not likely to receive that kind of substantial support. You won’t see any television adds. You won’t see yard signs. And if people are not educated on this issue, we won’t see any special needs students benefitting from Bryce’s Law.

The Tax Burden in Kansas City Is High

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

On Ruckus the other day, panelist Woody Cozad mentioned that taxes in Kansas City are high. He’s right. My colleague Patrick Ishmael has made the point repeatedly. But a study of taxation out of Washington, D.C., underscores just how bad things have gotten here relative to other U.S. cities.

The study, issued by the government of the District of Columbia in December 2017, “aims to calculate the combined state and local tax burdens that would apply to a hypothetical family at five different income levels living in D.C. as well as the largest city in each state.” Kansas City is included and St. Louis is not, and neither are some cities that we’ve identified as peers. But the data are valuable nonetheless.

The estimated tax burden for a family earning $50,000 in Kansas City—the median income is $47,000—is $5,444. That’s 10.9 percent of income and includes income, property, sales, and auto taxes. This places us 8th in the country, ahead of places well-known as expensive such as Boston, New York, Portland, Seattle, Denver, and Los Angeles.

Dave Helling of The Kansas City Star has pointed out that taxes in Kansas City are also regressive. This report supports that conclusion regarding auto sales taxes, stating that “Providence, Rhode Island; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Kansas City, Missouri are the cities with the highest automobile tax burdens across all income levels.” Combined with all other taxes, a Kansas City family earning $25,000 pays a combined tax burden of 12.6 percent; 8th highest of the cities measured. For a family earning $100,000, the burden is lower at 11.2 percent, placing us 12th.

What’s worse, the sales tax estimates are low for Kansas City. On page 39, the study lists Kansas City’s sales tax rate to be 8.475 percent, but anyone living here knows it goes much higher due to the proliferation of special taxing districts across the city.

Individuals can determine for themselves if City Hall is providing a return worthy of the investment, but the debate over whether taxes are high is settled. Kansas City is a high-tax city. Our taxes are regressive, too, but they are certainly high.

Food Deserts and Demand

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

The Kansas City Star published a 2,500 word front page story on Sunday that asked, “Why do so many stores east of Troost lack healthy food?” It wasn’t until the 11th paragraph that we got the answer: demand. This answer shouldn’t surprise anyone—we’ve known it for years.

The story also makes clear that it’s not that stores east of Troost Avenue “lack healthy food,” as the headline suggests. It’s that nutritious food isn’t presented immediately as one enters the store. We’re told, “Customers must walk back 100 feet before they encounter the produce section.” 100 feet.

There’s no bad guy in the story, either. Grocers admit to stocking what people want.

“You can pick apart any store that you want to on what they have or don’t have, but it’s about if people request these things or not,” [Sun Fresh store director Kim] Nagel says. “We’re going to give our customers what they want. Not just what looks good.”

Grocers aren’t fools. They’ll quickly learn what the community wants and work hard to provide it. All the fresh and brightly colored produce goes to waste if no one buys it, which is exactly the problem. Kansas City seems to think that building a new supermarket will address the problem. It won’t, as was addressed directly in recent USDA research. In fact, the Star’s own reporting echoes the research findings on food deserts: People do not necessarily drive to their closest grocery store. If they want something that isn’t available, they travel to where it is available.

I can’t get ground veal at the two grocery stores nearest me. I must travel to a third, more distant store. Am I the victim of a veal desert? Of course not.

The challenge of poor nutrition is very real, and addressing it will require a lot of work. That work should be focused on increasing demand rather than on counting kale and measuring miles. As the Star editorialized a few years ago about the announcement of the taxpayer subsidized Sun Fresh on Prospect:

[Kansas City Mayor Sly] James said building the Sun Fresh Market would be the “beginning of the revitalization of this entire corridor.” In truth, that’s been said before. For example, the current forlorn Linwood Shopping Center opened to rave reviews almost 30 years ago on the site of the demolished St. Joseph Hospital.

Yet the old grocery store there closed almost a decade ago. The center today is a reminder that investing in the East Side must overcome hurdles that don’t exist in other parts of the area. History shows that a lone project can’t really lift up an entire community. It takes a much bigger effort to do that.

The current “rave reviews” over some offerings at the new location will likely end if the demand does not keep up. And there are hurdles specific to the East Side when it comes to nutrition. Pretending otherwise is not just bad public policy; it is a disservice to residents.

Kansas City’s Unrelenting and Unaddressed Homicide Problem

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

Four years ago, when Kansas City’s homicide rate was down, City leaders were eager to let people know.

“There is still work to do because even one homicide is too many,” [Mayor] James said. “But I have faith in the collaborative and strategic approach of KC NoVa. This year’s data tells us that so far we are making great strides in the right direction.”

Fast forward to today—after years of a nation-leading spike in homicides (currently #5 in the nation with 108 in 2018 as of this writing)—and those same people seem to want to deny any affiliation with policing. The mayor, whose role as a member of the police board was highlighted in 2014, seems to shrug off any role in policing today. In a KCPT panel discussion about the 50th anniversary of the Kansas City Race Riots, moderator Nick Haines raises a question about minority hiring in the police department, “Mayor, you’re on the police commission.” James responds, “Yes . . . and…?” to laughs from the audience. (Starts at 35:32.)

In a more recent press conference, Mayor James complained bitterly about lack of gun control legislation and political ideology in the state legislature. But as a recent KSHB report on homicides made clear, there is no evidence that Jackson County, Missouri, has significantly more gun ownership than, say, Johnson County, Kansas, or that gun ownership in Kansas City has increased over the same time frame that homicides have spiked. It’s not the guns.

There is research, however, that indicates that increasing the number of police officers does reduce crime. KSHB’s Andy Alcock makes that point in his report, too. In fact, according to FBI statistics, Kansas City has fewer police officers per capita than all other cities with high homicide rates. What’s worse, since 2011, the number of uniformed police officers in Kansas City has declined.

As I laid out in a Kansas City Star guest column, no one in Missouri has more power over policing in Kansas City than the mayor’s office. What is lacking is not power, but will. And until Kansas City leaders get serious about adopting policies and policing methods that actually contribute to reductions in violent crime, we are figuratively whistling past an ever-growing graveyard.

How Do Rental Scooters Fit into the Transit Paradigm?

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Late last month I made the fateful choice to join the gig economy (after hours, naturally) by collecting and charging some of those rideshare electric scooters “all the kids are talking about.” I put the “kids” bit in quotes because I have been surprised at how wide the age and demographic spread has been among the riders I’ve seen, from businesswomen to construction workers to kids to just about everyone in between.

It’s gotten me thinking: Could this “Uber, but for scooters” thing catch on? And if it does, how would it fit into our short-term, or even long-term, public transit future?

For Kansas Citians and St. Louisans, whether scooters catch on is an important question in light of the rail plans that both cities have pursued in recent years and may yet continue to pursue. As we know, streetcar lines are fixed, stop often, and can be dramatically impacted by traffic. Scooters are much more tailored to the user’s needs, though heaven help you if it rains.

But that said, during my Nightcrawler-esque scooter-gathering pursuits it has been fascinating to see so many people using rental scooters zip past Kansas City’s streetcar as the publicly financed, free-to-ride trains trundle on their tracks, from stop to stop, at roughly the same speed. And, according to the Dallas News, it seems the scooters are catching on just about everywhere they’ve been introduced:

Only last week The Atlantic ran a piece about [micro-scooter inventor Wim] Ouboter that said scooters aren’t the future, but only because they were the present long ago. They might have been sold and marketed as kids’ toys—even winning, in 2001, the award for “best toy designed for outdoor play.” But as The Atlantic’s Sarah Holder just wrote, the scooters were always intended “to fundamentally change urban transportation.”

Until now Razor has ceded that transformative micromobile marketplace to Bird, which has 3,000 scooters in Dallas, and Lime, which replaced most of its green-and-yellow rental bikes with around 2,000 rental scooters, according to docs prepared for the briefing. Clearly [scooter manufacturer] Razor grew tired of missing out on the business it essentially created—especially now that Bird is up to $1 billion in funding, making it what CNBC recently called “the burgeoning industry’s first unicorn.”

Lime and Bird have already shown these things work. The companies gave the city stats that show rides span just more than a mile and take, on average, about 13 minutes. The companies say people are riding twice as far on the scooters as they did on the rental bikes—yet their rides are six minutes shorter. Nothing in those docs indicates that scooter riders are less sweaty. But I can attest, yes, you do tend to smell better after 13 minutes on a scooter than 19 minutes on a bike.

What the scooter companies will tell you is that they’re in the business of solving the “last mile” problem in urban areas—that is, replacing the walk from public transit to your home, with a scooter ride instead.

But I also wonder to what extent, at least in Kansas City, the scooter is not just replacing the last-mile walk, but also the first mile of public transit. Granted, the scooters aren’t free to use like the streetcar, but they meet a need that the streetcar doesn’t—transit flexibility over short distances. Keep in mind that in Dallas the average trip is about a mile, which makes the two-mile length (north to south) of the streetcar line in Kansas City particularly notable. And that’s to say nothing of the east-to-west flexibility that scooters provide that Kansas City’s streetcar would seem unlikely to ever satisfy.

Will private rental scooters, or something similar, end up replacing the publicly-financed streetcar? It’s a possibility that I think city leaders here in Missouri and elsewhere need to consider before starting or expanding their urban streetcar systems.

Struggling High Schools Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Posted on by Abigail Burrola

If Missouri has a workforce development problem—that is, if students are leaving high school without the skills they need to enter the workforce, a knee-jerk reaction might be to blame the high schools. But there is reason to believe that the problem starts much earlier.

The Missouri Department of Education and Secondary Education (DESE) publishes district-level data on standardized test results that we can use to track whether students are gaining or losing ground as they progress through the primary school grades. Student scores are tiered in four categories: below basic proficiency, basic proficiency, proficiency, and advanced proficiency.

Let’s look at math scores as an example. In 2017, 61 percent of Missouri districts had at least half of their third-graders achieving proficiency or above. (These districts show up as blue in the maps below.) There is plenty of room for improvement in these scores, but also plenty of time—third-graders have nine years of K-12 schooling ahead of them.

Unfortunately, the eighth-grade scores show that many students have fallen even further behind. Only 12 percent of districts had at least half of their eighth-grade students achieving proficiency in 2017. The eighth-grade map shows far fewer blue (above 50 percent proficiency) districts and many more orange and red (below 50 percent proficiency) districts than the third-grade map. It should hardly surprise us when these students struggle in high school—by the time they get there, they have been on a downward trajectory for several years. (Note: White areas on the map encompass districts that had so few students that they could not provide data due to concerns about student privacy.)

Show-Me Institute writers will be diving deeper in future blogs and publications to better understand how our state can get high-schoolers ready for the workforce (and for college) by the time they graduate. Workforce development depends on effective preparation of our students, which in turn (certainly in Missouri’s case) depends on a detailed and accurate view of school performance.

[[{“fid”:”5023″,”view_mode”:”default”,”fields”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:”3rd-grade math proficiency”,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”3rd-grade math proficiency”},”type”:”media”,”field_deltas”:{“1”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:”3rd-grade math proficiency”,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”3rd-grade math proficiency”}},”attributes”:{“alt”:”3rd-grade math proficiency”,”title”:”3rd-grade math proficiency”,”style”:”height: 454px; width: 400px;”,”class”:”media-element file-default”,”data-delta”:”1″}}]][[{“fid”:”5024″,”view_mode”:”default”,”fields”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:”8th-grade math proficiency”,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”8th-grade math proficiency”},”type”:”media”,”field_deltas”:{“2”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:”8th-grade math proficiency”,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”8th-grade math proficiency”}},”attributes”:{“alt”:”8th-grade math proficiency”,”title”:”8th-grade math proficiency”,”style”:”height: 434px; width: 400px;”,”class”:”media-element file-default”,”data-delta”:”2″}}]]

(Data for maps from Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education 2017 Content Area Assessment Data)

HHS Secretary Talks Up Short-Term Medical Insurance Plans

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Earlier this year I talked about a proposal in the Missouri legislature that I thought was a great idea: to expand the period of short-term medical insurance plans up to a year. Free of many of the mandates commonly seen in Obamacare-approved plans, short-term medical insurance gives customers an opportunity to purchase coverage at a cheaper price.

The excitement surrounding such a reform is not reserved to Missouri. The Trump administration itself has pushed very hard for such expansions, and central to that push is the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar. At a conference late last month, he laid out why this reform is important.

“We believe sensible state regulation of [short-term health insurance plans] is important,” Azar said. “But millions of Americans are in need of affordable insurance options, and states can help build this market outside of Obamacare’s broken regulations.”

As more Americans enter the new economic environment, they find themselves unable to purchase quality health insurance, Azar told the audience. The new policy will give states greater flexibility to create more affordable insurance options for all consumers, especially those workers who do not receive health insurance through an employer, Azar says.

“While these plans aren’t for everyone, we believe they can be an important option for many—people who have been priced out of Obamacare plans, who are between other sources of coverage, or who are independent contractors in today’s gig economy,” Azar said.

You can find out more about short-term medical insurance here. It’s my hope that Missouri makes liberalization of short-term medical insurance one of its highest priorities next year.

Kansas City Star Editorial Board Gets It Half Right

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

In a recent column, The Kansas City Star editorial board bemoaned the instinct of Mayor Sly James to be opaque and secretive in his negotiations. Specifically, the Star’s piece argued that negotiations over the construction of the new airport terminal and the related community benefit agreements should be open to the public. No one would disagree with that.

The Star’s board is correct to caution against the “troubling, recurring and unhelpful mindset that crucial details of the KCI project must be kept hidden from public view”—recall that the mayor and city manager wanted to skip the bidding process altogether and then require councilmembers to sign nondisclosure agreements. Because of such secrecy and ineptitude, we still don’t know much about the final details of the project.

Consider that the same editorial states that the $1.4 billion projected cost for the terminal is likely to go up, and that we are not sure that the airlines are on board with the project. At the time of the vote in 2017, not only did Kansas Citians not know the details of the contract with Edgemoor, we didn’t even have a basic understanding of what that contract might look like. Yet the Star’s editorial board includes this line in their piece:

It’s been nearly a year since Kansas City voters overwhelmingly approved a new terminal at the airport. That vote proved Kansas Citians are more than capable of digesting a frank conversation about an important public issue.

What exactly was that frank conversation about if it wasn’t about contracts, costs, number of gates, or community benefit agreements? There wasn’t even enough substance to guarantee the airlines were fully on board. What we got from the Star at the time were pie-in-the-sky arguments that contradicted its own journalists’ reporting.

It’s more likely that the vote proved that a well-funded public relations campaign with little to no opposition can convince voters to trust city officials to do the right thing despite those same officials’ hostility to basic transparency.

Back before the vote and even today, the Star has supported the idea of a new terminal, but it doesn’t know the details about the project in question. No one does. That sums up much of our and others’ arguments regarding why the project should not have moved forward.

It may be completely reasonable, once issues such as cost and contract and airline agreements are settled, to support a billion-and-a-half (likely more) dollar new terminal. And the editorial board is correct that cost overruns and delays are to be expected with any project of this size. But up until the point that such information is known, no one knows enough about this project to support it. Instead, the Star has chosen to give carte-blanche to the same officials they criticize for not being transparent.

Unless city officials feel that they are being held accountable—that is, that support for the project could be withdrawn should it turn into the boondoggle that many fear—Kansas Citians are unlikely to see any more transparency than they have up to this point.

Support Us

The work of the Show-Me Institute would not be possible without the generous support of people who are inspired by the vision of liberty and free enterprise. We hope you will join our efforts and become a Show-Me Institute sponsor.

Donate
Man on Horse Charging