What’s in a Name?
A prefiled bill that is only 49 words long may go a long way to deter politicians from spending public funds on personal legacy projects.
House Bill 1235 simply adds the following language to Missouri statutes:
No state land or building shall be designated in honor of an individual unless such person has been deceased for more than two years. This section shall not apply if money is donated to a state entity in exchange for the right to name state land or buildings.
If former U.S. Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond wants to give his own money to Missouri to build a bridge, or former Governor Jay Nixon wants to reach into his own pocket to build a state park, that’s fine. But spending taxpayer dollars is different, and rewarding individual politicians for doing their official duties by naming public assets after them—at least while they’re still alive—seems a questionable practice at best.
In fact, why not extend the same restriction on all political subdivisions. To me, Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard is just . . . tacky. Shouldn’t taxpayers be confident that those who spend their money are not seeking fame and self-aggrandizement? House Bill 1235 helps get us there.
This is a revised version of the original post.
Christmas 2017
In Arkansas, 80,000 Ineligible Medicaid Recipients Removed from Rolls
Since as far back as 2015, we have talked about the idea of performing regular audits of the state’s Medicaid rolls. The purpose of such audits is several-fold: not only to ensure that taxpayer money is going to qualified beneficiaries and to detect malfeasance, but above all else to ensure that the state’s limited resources are making it to the most vulnerable members of our society.
Arkansas has an auditing program similar to the one we’ve talked about, and it appears the state just turned up a lot of ineligible beneficiaries.
Nearly one-third of those cases involved people who did not report changes of address as required by the state. More than 25,000 people were removed from the program because they were receiving public benefits from more than one state. [Emphasis mine]
DHS says more than 16,000 people were removed because of unreported employment. Others were removed from the program because they were eligible for Medicare, while another 4,100 cases involved inmates who still had Medicaid coverage.
In all, about 80,000 Arkansans ineligible for Medicaid were removed from the program’s rolls.
As we’ve noted before, there are lots of non-nefarious reasons that someone may be on Medicaid but ineligible for it, including unfamiliarity with its rules and regular fluctuations in their own income. But whatever the reason for that ineligibility, the more efficiently the state can steward funds and direct them to needy beneficiaries who actually qualify for the program, the better the results will be for the program, its beneficiaries, and the taxpayers who fund those benefits.
Patrick Tuohey Discusses Airport-and Sidewalks-on KCPT’s Ruckus
On Thursday, December 21, the Show-Me Institute’s Patrick Tuohey appeared on KCPT’s Ruckus to discuss the latest twist in the Kansas City International Airport plan, the Kansas gubernatorial race and the controversial push to privatize sidewalks in Westport which has set up a debate over public safety and civil rights.
Brenda Talent Discusses Saint Louis County Budget on KETC’s Donnybrook
On December 21, Show-Me Institute CEO Brenda Talent appeared on Saint Louis Public Television’s Donnybrook to discuss cuts to Saint Louis County’s budget, the selection process for a new Saint Louis City police chief, state government transparency, a complete smoking ban in Saint Louis County, and other state and local issues.
More Research on Food Deserts
I’ve written here before, skeptically, of the plans to address the so-called food desert on Kansas City’s East Side. Specifically, the plan to spend millions of dollars to subsidize a SunFresh grocery store is unwarranted and a waste of taxpayer funds. I’ve documented research that shows that nutritional inequality is not a function of distance from a grocery store. New research is bearing this out.
A study released this month from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines food inequality with an eye toward quantifying the impact of grocery store location. The paper concludes:
We find that equalizing supply would close the gap in healthy eating between low- and high-income households by less than ten percent. After separating out supply variation, the descriptive correlations in our final section show that education and nutrition knowledge predict healthy grocery demand and explain non-negligible shares of the relationship between income and healthy grocery demand. For a policymaker who wants to help low-income families to eat more healthfully, the analyses in this paper suggest that improving health education—if possible through effective interventions—might be more effective than efforts to improve local supply.
There are several nonprofit organizations in Kansas City working to address the issues of nutrition in the urban core, including Rollin’ Grocer and Kanbe’s Markets. If there is a market for healthy food, these efficient, private efforts are much more likely to succeed than a single, multi-million-dollar box store.
City leaders may get to point to a new, revived grocery store and shopping center as a result of their political largesse. But a subsidized grocery store won’t create much new interest in eating healthy—it is more likely to merely draw traffic away from other businesses that contribute to the local tax base. It will also consume public funds that would otherwise go to support infrastructure and, ironically, education. If food deserts are real, they are psychological, not geographical. A taxpayer-funded Sun Fresh won’t do much but get in the way.
The Airport and Transparency
In the lead-up to the November vote on tearing down Kansas City International Airport’s terminals and building a new $1.2 billion single terminal, we editorialized on KMBC:
Important details of the new terminal remain unknown. We don’t know the final costs. We don’t know the financing details, or how building contracts will be awarded. All those things are being reevaluated now. Voters should vote no on Question 1 until they know exactly what is being asked of them. This is too important to get wrong.
Voters approved the measure by a wide margin, with three-fourths voting yes. It was a clear mandate to move forward. But the details remain murky even to insiders. Just last week, the City Council voted 9 to 4 against a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate. Following the vote, Mayor James described the vote as an “ambush” and excoriated his colleagues, saying “you can’t lead people you can’t trust. . . You can’t lead people who sneak.” But Councilman Quinton Lucas, who supported a yes vote on Question 1, told The Kansas City Star,
There’s a reimbursement agreement that obligates the city to potentially millions of dollars, a number of those costs incurred before the election. There was absolutely no detail on financing. I know we want flexibility, but we also want to know what we are binding the city to, potentially for years to come.
Lucas was not alone. Councilman Scott Wagner, who also supported approval of Question 1, issued a statement about his concerns on Facebook in which he detailed important matters that appear to be unresolved in the MOU. He indicated that he had been raising these concerns for quite some time. Just before the vote, Kansas City’s Black Chamber of Commerce said that the MOU before the Council lacked transparency and were “weak for minority participation.” As David Hudnall at The Pitch writes in an excellent overview of the debacle, the astonishing part is the failure of the MOU to protect the city’s interests.
These were all the same concerns I detailed before the public vote, and it is a shame that they were not addressed before the Council vote. Given all this, it’s surprising that Mayor James did not know that 9 of his colleagues were going to vote against the MOU. But in an effort “marked by distrust, misinformation, unnecessary secrecy and conflict,” maybe it should be no surprise at all.
NoMORedTape Respondents Seek Hundreds of Regulatory Reforms
In contrast to this Columbia Missourian story about the NoMORedTape regulatory reform project, I take a much rosier view of how the state’s regulatory outreach project is doing. So far, hundreds of sections of regulation are explicitly cited in the NoMORedTape data as needing reform, and while it would be accurate to say that a lot of people want no change on one issue — puppy mills — it is also true, and enormously important to note, that a lot of people want a lot of change on a lot of other regulatory issues.
I was a little disappointed that the Missourian also went out of its way to portray many NoMORedTape respondents as somehow not grasping the purpose of the site, incharitably citing some of the least informed comments in its article while omitting serious responses. Indeed, I’ve found the vast majority of the comments to be enlightening.
Comments like:
I did not renew my minority women status because they made it so difficult. Faxes are no longer acceptable and the instructions were in a format that I could not open. When I used the password given me it was not acceptable. I gave up because I had no more time to spend on it.
And:
“Certificate of Need” process makes developing critically needed Senior Living buildings a political instead of market-based process. It is costing Missouri many millions of dollars of development. Our $35,000,000 development was just denied Monday in Jefferson City by anti-competition, anti-market political forces. Eliminate the “Certificate of Need” process entirely like almost ALL other states in our Union.
And:
Currently the Missouri Dept. of Elementary & Secondary Education has too strict of rules for teacher and administrator certification, specifically for CTE professionals. In a time when we need more qualified candidates, they are often discouraged by the process.
And:
The University requires vendors to have Liability insurance that covers the University Curators. We print t-shirts, when has anybody sued over a t-shirt? 4 million dollars of liability insurance! This increases our costs and limits the smaller players or unnecessarily burdens the smaller players.
And so on.
Point being, regulatory reform is a serious issue that many serious people take seriously. I hope that public colloquy projects, like NoMORedTape, become more common, not less so, and I appreciate the public policy dividends NoMORedTape has already realized by engaging the public as it has.
