This dashboard is a companion to our report, Missouri’s 21st Century Public School Personnel Boom, which examines the growth in Missouri’s teaching and administrative staff relative to student enrollment since 2000.
Government Intervention in the Energy Market
A few weeks ago, the City of St. Louis issued a proposal that would require new data center developments to use renewable energy for their operations, among many other requirements. There is now a conditional waiver process to sidestep the renewable requirement if the developer can prove they and Ameren can’t meet it, which is a slight improvement.
From a free-market perspective, the flaws of the proposal are clear. The city would be selecting certain types of energy (in this case solar and wind) in the name of “clean air” while excluding from consideration not only energy from coal and natural gas, but even nuclear energy, which also has zero emissions. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that officials said the goal was to push Ameren to build more solar and wind power.
In February of this year I wrote about my concerns with Missouri’s renewable portfolio standard, which also excludes nuclear energy. The same concerns apply to the city’s proposed renewable requirement, which should be rejected.
Bizarre Charter School Funding in St. Louis and Kansas City
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The Fordham Institute released a new report on charter school funding in St. Louis and Kansas City. The report examines House Bill (HB) 1552, a Missouri law enacted in 2022 to equalize funding between public charter schools and traditional public schools in these cities.
The law addressed a real problem. Traditional public schools were receiving substantially more funding per student than public charter schools, despite charter schools being significantly more effective at educating students. In the year before HB 1552 went into effect, charter schools in these cities received approximately 30 percent less funding per student—a gap of $7,000 to $8,000.
The objective of the policy was noble. We should provide at least as much funding to public charter schools as we provide to traditional public schools. Indeed, if funding followed productivity, charter schools would receive more funding because they generate more student learning per dollar invested. Only in government would we systematically provide the most resources to the least efficient providers.
But while HB 1552 was well-intentioned, it has gone off the rails. The Fordham report provides the gory details; below I provide a short summary of what happened.
Here’s how the law works: Under HB 1552, the state calculates the state and local revenue per pupil received by each host district—Kansas City or St. Louis—and then provides additional state funding to charter schools to make up the difference between their funding and the host district’s funding.
At first glance, this sounds sensible. And the law did substantially increase charter school funding. But it hasn’t closed the funding gap because funding for the traditional public school districts has risen even faster, and the catch-up funds are calculated based on lagged data.
The fundamental flaw is that HB 1552 does not fix the underlying inequity in the distribution of local revenue. Charter and traditional public schools still do not share local revenue equally. Instead, the traditional districts retain nearly all local property tax revenue, and the state is responsible for backfilling the resulting gap for charter schools.
This creates a perverse feedback loop.
Suppose a student leaves a traditional public school to attend a charter school. The traditional district loses the student but retains nearly all of its local property tax revenue. With the same local revenue spread across fewer students, the traditional district’s local revenue per pupil rises. HB 1552 then uses that higher per-pupil figure to determine how much funding charter schools should receive, forcing the state to spend more to keep up.
This mechanism is especially problematic because enrollment in the traditional city school districts has been declining for decades, while local property tax revenues have been increasing lately. As enrollment falls, district revenue per pupil rises. As district revenue per pupil rises, the state owes charter schools more. As the funding gap continues to move, the state keeps chasing it.
The result is a bizarre upward funding spiral with no obvious end. The cost of HB 1552 has already far outstripped the estimate in the original fiscal note. The Fordham authors project expenditures under the law into the future and conclude that it is unlikely to be fiscally sustainable. They identify the primary driver as the “relentless increase in host districts’ local revenues per pupil.”
The lesson here is that policy design matters. HB 1552 started with the right objective: Charter schools, which substantially outperform traditional public schools, should receive at least as many resources. But instead of fixing the underlying inequity in how local revenue is distributed, lawmakers created an open-ended state obligation tied to an ever-moving target.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Missouri’s budget is in dire straits. We cannot afford unforced errors like HB 1552.
Heeding Luminary Park’s Incandescent Warnings
Roy Blunt Luminary Park, the much-discussed plan to build a park over four blocks of I-670 in downtown Kansas City, just missed another federal grant application, according to the Kansas City Business Journal. The city’s request for $25 million was not included in the federal Department of Transportation’s recent round of $1.73 billion in handouts.
It’s the fourth rejection from the feds since 2022. Over the past four years, the city has failed to impress federal reviewers for the RAISE program in 2022 ($25 million), the Mega program in 2023 ($60 million), the Reconnecting Communities & Neighborhoods program in 2024 ($75 million), and now the BUILD program (previously called RAISE). Three different federal programs and four different reviews yielded the same answer.
Maybe, just maybe, the universe is trying to send city hall a message: Stop!
But the response from city leaders has been the same each time: Keep going. This time, they want to issue $51.6 million in new bonds, backed by convention and tourism taxes plus “any legally available” revenue, and repay it over 15 years.
The project’s own history is a warning. An HNTB study in 2017 estimated the cost at $139 million to $175 million. It ballooned to $217 million in 2023. Now the “target budget” is $315 million. Assistant City Manager Jeff Martin attributes the increases to “more refined” estimates.
Exactly how were they generating estimates before? With a Magic 8 Ball?
As the costs have climbed, the completion dates have been extended. Officials once hoped to finish before the World Cup; now they hope to open a single block by 2029, and a second phase is set to begin in 2032 with no committed completion date.
It’s setting up to be our version of Boston’s Big Dig, the project that rerouted Interstate 93 underground through downtown. Originally pitched at $2.8 billion in the mid-1980s, it climbed to $6 billion when formally approved. When it finally opened, years late, the true cost approached $15 billion.
Luminary Park is much less ambitious, but the story is the same: Cost estimates that grow every time they’re revisited, a completion date that disappears into the horizon, and a funding gap filled with more and more public borrowing.
This is a bad idea. It’s time to pull the plug.
Missouri’s Ongoing Budget Problem
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“Missouri’s budget is broken.” That’s the conclusion of Missouri State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick’s June report on the state’s fiscal outlook. While much of the report focuses on Missouri’s oft-discussed unsustainable spending trajectory, it also highlights a more fundamental problem with the state’s budget.
As I’ve written repeatedly, Missouri’s annual budget totals have been misleading in recent years. Lawmakers aren’t including a full 12 months of funding in their approved spending plans, leaving out significant known costs that will have to be paid through supplemental funding bills later in the year. To be clear, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a problem if there is enough money set aside to cover those eventual costs. Unfortunately, the auditor’s report suggests Missouri isn’t setting aside enough.
Over the past six years, the state’s supplemental funding needs have averaged about $371 million. This year, however, the state has set aside just $100 million. The issue isn’t that every supplemental request will necessarily reach the historical average. It’s that lawmakers have repeatedly budgeted far less than the state ultimately needs, despite several years of evidence that this pattern is likely to continue. So far, the state has been able to cover the difference because sufficient surplus revenues have been available.
This issue has parallels with Missouri’s recent reliance on one-time funding. Both practices allow lawmakers to put off difficult choices about how to cover the spending commitments of the years ahead. When Gov. Kehoe signed the fiscal year 2027 budget into law shortly before July 1, he vetoed and restricted millions in spending approved by the general assembly. As I wrote last month, the governor also warned about relying on one-time funding for ongoing expenses. The auditor provides a concrete example of this problem, noting that the budget uses nearly $200 million from the Capital Preservation Fund and Blind Pension Fund for ongoing purposes, even though lawmakers know those fund balances will not recur.
Missouri’s budget has nearly doubled since 2019. The auditor projects Missouri will spend around $1.7 billion more in general revenue this year than it expects to collect, while facing hundreds of millions of dollars in additional mandatory spending increases in fiscal year 2028 and beyond.
That’s a dramatic change from just a few years ago, when Missouri’s fiscal outlook was much different. The state had more than $5 billion in surplus funds, an historic influx of federal money, and an opportunity to prepare before more normal fiscal times returned. Instead, I think it’s fair to say that the opportunity to proactively right Missouri’s fiscal ship has been squandered. The surplus will be exhausted by next year, and the need for tough decisions could arrive as soon as January, when the supplemental funding requests come in.
After three years of seeing this pattern play out, it’s clear that our elected officials should stop treating the gap between the budget and actual spending as a surprise. Fixing what’s broken with Missouri’s budget may not be easy, but providing an honest accounting of what government costs should be.
Why Young People Are Turning Away from Capitalism with Robert C. Enlow
Susan Pendergrass speaks with Robert C. Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, about whether Milton Friedman’s ideas still hold up seventy years after Capitalism and Freedom. They discuss why capitalism is losing favor with younger Americans, how regulatory capture rather than free markets is driving the backlash, what declining public school enrollment signals about the future of education, and more.
Episode Transcript
Susan Pendergrass (00:03): Thanks so much for joining us on the Show Me Institute podcast, Rob Enlow of EdChoice. You’ve been executive director, CEO there for how long?
Robert Enlow (00:13): Since two thousand nine.
Susan Pendergrass (00:15): That’s a long time.
Robert Enlow (00:16): Well, not as long as when I started in 1996, so thirty years this year.
Susan Pendergrass (00:21): 30 years. Yeah. Wow. Well, I don’t know how time is flying, but I wanted to have you on to talk about a couple things that are going on recently, and one thing in particular, which is, there’s poll after poll, there’s election after election, it seems to be the case that capitalism is losing favor with the American public, socialism is gaining steam with the American public. And recently I saw an editorial about the fact that JD Vance has said that Milton Friedman is essentially no longer relevant. That Milton Friedman’s ideas made sense in the 80s, but it’s no longer relevant for today. We need more of a Hamiltonian economic plan than what Milton Friedman put forth. And of course, Milton Friedman’s seminal work, Capitalism and Freedom, is now 70 years old. And well, I just realized 20 years ago you edited a volume on his work, Liberty and Learning, and certainly you worked side by side with him. You ran his foundation before he died, and you know him. I’m just curious your thoughts on whether or not Milton Friedman is still relevant.
Robert Enlow (01:40): I think we need more Milton, not less, right now. And I think we need far less Hamiltonian central banking, centralized scrutinizers, to quote the great Frank Zappa, I need no more central scrutinizers in our life, regardless of whether they come from the right or the left. There is a distrust in systems across the board, whether you’re right or left. And some people respond to that by saying we need to have a socialist system. And some people respond to that by saying we need to have a Hamiltonian sort of centralized control system. Milton Friedman’s correct solution is that we need a bottom-up system of individual liberty and enlightened self-interest. And we need far more of that than we need less.
Susan Pendergrass (02:25): So why is it out of favor now? What do you think is going on, that the idea of the government taking care of housing, healthcare, education, the basic foundations of each individual’s life, that the government should be managing that? Is it just too far in the rear-view mirror, the idea of individual liberty and individual responsibility, and folks haven’t seen it recently enough? Or maybe it’s neither of these, or is it that the particular form of capitalism folks are seeing right now, where some people are making a ton of money and a lot of people are not making much money at all, is that what’s causing this backlash against capitalism?
Robert Enlow (03:12): So what people are seeing is absolutely causing a backlash. Let’s just say that. I have a 28-year-old son, and he and I argue about this constantly, right? And I love him for that. Everyone seems to see that both government is a major problem, but also there’s a massive inequity in how our systems of competition are working. What people forget is what Milton would say about that. He would say, we do not have a free market, we do not have individual liberty, and we don’t. What’s happening in America and what’s happening around the world is Milton’s greatest fear, and it’s also beginning to happen in education reform, even among some of our allies. The idea of regulatory capture. People forget that what ends up happening, and it was chapter six in Milton’s Free to Choose, is Milton’s book story on what’s wrong with our schools. People often forget chapter seven, which is who protects the consumer. In that chapter, he talks a lot about what used to happen with the old ICC, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Railroad Commission, and how at one point everyone, all these people got together from right and left to create a change to a massive problem. That problem got changed, everyone was happy, and all the advocates went home, and the bureaucrats were left to put it in place. The bureaucrats did what? They put it in place in a self-interested way, and now all of a sudden you have to come and reform the reform. This is what’s happening, I think, both writ large in America and certainly with education. I think there’s this real challenge with regulatory capture. This is true among private schools, charter schools. The minute schools get into a choice program, sometimes they’re like, well, we don’t want any other schools in these programs. And so this regulatory capture is not a free market. Milton would be railing against that as much as he would be about anything else, in my opinion.
Susan Pendergrass (05:06): And I always go back to this very simple explanation of the four ways to spend money, right? And clearly the least careful way is when you spend other people’s money on other people. And the idea that folks want to expand that exponentially right now concerns me, because we’re just going to be burning more money for worse results.
Robert Enlow (05:29): This is why ideas like ESAs are so important, and directing direct funding to families where they have to pay something and have the actual act of paying, I think that puts skin in the game. For your listeners, maybe they don’t remember the four ways Milton said you spend money, but I think it’s important. Well, you know it, but I always use this with you. If I spend my money on you, I am super careful about how much I spend, I don’t care what I buy. If I spend your money on me, I’m super careful about what I get, but I don’t care how much I spend. And if you spend someone else’s money on someone else, you don’t care how much you spend or how much you buy. And I think that is our problem right now. And you mix that with companies, associations, unions that all make it harder for others to enter the marketplace. This is the real challenge of barriers to entry, right? We’re seeing this in K-12 education now, where a bad story creates a desire to have a regulatory impulse. This is not the right way to go. We should be going toward more freedom. And I think this is what young people are reacting to, Susan. In my opinion, people like my son and others are reacting to the basic, obvious problem that government is not capable of doing it, but the current structure of entering a marketplace is impossible and only advantages some.
Susan Pendergrass (06:54): Yeah. Right. Clearly the idea of parents choosing where their kids go to school is an extremely popular idea. You guys poll it every month. I think as long as those polls have existed, it’s been 70% plus, parents want to do this. And yet that’s one that’s being strongly resisted by the same folks who are leaning towards socialism. They want to really lock the doors on letting kids out of the worst schools.
Robert Enlow (07:26): So, you know me and my background. For those of you who don’t know, I actually did liberation theology work back in the day before I got to Milton Friedman’s organization. And then I got to meet Milton Friedman, which, by the way, in about 12 seconds I felt like a minuscule intellect, because he’s so incredibly smart. But I call my transition from liberation to liberty, and part of that is because I think Dr. Friedman, and I think the radical left, the socialist left, identify the problem. The problem is ineffective government and systems that do not work for people. So whether it’s an oppressive government or a fascist government or a dictatorial government, it is not working for people. Now the socialists and those who will argue, well, then the best solution is my view of government because I’m better, so, in a very sort of old George H. W. Bush way, it’s a kinder, gentler kind of socialism, my way, better than others. Milton’s argument was, no, the solution to this government problem is to give individuals more ability and autonomy. This is common sense that I don’t think a lot of our younger folks understand anymore. But the interesting thing is, it’s a difference, I think, between their public and private life. Publicly, they say this is a problem, we’ve got to solve this problem. Privately, they use choice and competition and individualization and customization more than any generation ever before. This is their entire life, and it’s called a cell phone. And every app leads them to individual customization.
Susan Pendergrass (09:04): Thank God that’s not my problem.
Robert Enlow (09:06): You mean scrolling, doom scrolling?
Susan Pendergrass (09:09): Yeah. Thank God I never scroll. But I just feel like there is a disconnect. You’re exactly right, of course they want more choice in everything. And I don’t want to say “they,” but I think this is also sort of crossing generational lines, this idea that capitalism is evil and bad and is creating, I think we see a lot of crony capitalism right now. We see our elected officials making billions of dollars and buying up parts of companies. We see this weird form of capitalism. And then we have the vice president himself saying it’s not relevant anymore. It’s for the 80s and it’s not relevant anymore. And maybe people are just buying that. Maybe there’s like, okay, I guess capitalism is on the way out, what’s the next thing? And socialism is being sold in a pretty neat package.
Robert Enlow (09:58): Right. Yeah, but you know who’s not buying it anymore? This is, I think, the hope for the future. Communities of color. Communities of color are seeing the importance of unleashing rampant individual capitalism and rampant opportunity. You see this with micro schools and homeschooling. The fastest growth of homeschooling is in the Black community. The same thing is often true in the micro school community. It is communities who are most challenged, often and sometimes most oppressed,
Susan Pendergrass (10:04): Yeah.
Robert Enlow (10:25): that understand the benefits of opportunity in free markets in a way that you might argue “bougie” suburbanites who go to Columbia don’t get. And that is, of course, I think a problem of privilege more than anything. And so I think that’s a challenge for our society. But I’m watching communities of color embrace competition and individual liberty in a way I’ve never seen before in education. And I think we’ll get there again, but I think right now there’s a real disillusionment. And I think part of it has to do with our current government and with our previous government. We’ve not had a really good go of it the last two times.
Susan Pendergrass (11:06): Yeah, and I’ve met many parents from communities of color, like Black parents, Black moms, who will do anything to make sure their kids get the same opportunities, particularly if they’re economically disadvantaged, to make sure their kids get the same educational opportunities. And they are the ones who are pressing. In Missouri, there are groups of parents pressing for open enrollment, pressing to expand our ESA program, going to Jefferson City, learning how to be politically active, and they’re putting pressure on these folks also to get their kids out of unsafe schools and to stop being told, yeah, I’m sorry, I know only three percent of the kids are proficient in math in your school, but we can’t let you out of it. They’ve had it with that argument, and they’re the ones who are really pressing it. I don’t know if it’s landing, because we’ve made some progress, but we haven’t really
Robert Enlow (12:01): Where it’s landing, Susan, here’s where you’ve got to remember it’s landing. What is the enrollment in our traditional schools looking like right now? Down dramatically, right? What is the enrollment and effort in what I would call, what Vela, my dear friends at Vela, call “indie education”? It’s dramatically increasing. And this is the proof of the positive. Milton used to say the readiness for a true free market can be seen
Susan Pendergrass (12:08): Down.
Robert Enlow (12:28): in the prior years by an underground marketplace. And in many ways we have an underground marketplace of education happening, which is fantastic. It’s leading to so many opportunities. You’ve done the research in Arizona and other places. The massive growth of new vendors, the massive growth of opportunity, is really amazing.
Susan Pendergrass (12:47): Yeah, it’s only limited by what parents can think up. And they just keep thinking up new stuff.
Robert Enlow (12:52): Yeah, it’s shocking. Milton’s quote is always true: there’s not been another way heretofore discovered to raise the masses out of poverty than what happens when you unleash the free market and capitalism. And I think the challenges we’re seeing with capitalism and with liberty and with the view of liberty now are problems related to government and cronyism and regulatory capture. I don’t think people realize, when a legislator says, how do I know if someone’s learning? Well, you know what doesn’t tell them if someone’s learning? A test they have to take once a year after a certain period of time. That does not really tell you. All that gives you is a mark in the day in the life of a kid. And by the way, those aren’t doing very well, right? Not anywhere. So I don’t want to rely on that system to tell me how kids are doing. And I think people see
Susan Pendergrass (13:38): Not in Missouri.
Robert Enlow (13:47): this huge disconnect between what they’re told and what they’re seeing in real life. And they want to do it themselves. Young kids want to do it themselves.
Susan Pendergrass (13:54): That’s right. And parents know when their kids can’t read. And they know when their kids are watching too many movies at school and don’t want to get on the bus. Parents know all of that. And if they don’t have any options,
Robert Enlow (14:07): And what’s exciting?
Susan Pendergrass (14:09): certainly work to expand options for parents. I know we’re up to a million and a half, maybe, in private school choice programs, maybe closer to two.
Robert Enlow (14:18): Yeah, I think it’s more important to look at what’s happening in some states. So it’s a million and a half across the country. That’s tripled in seven years, which is amazing in terms of publicly funded private school choice. You’ve got to look at what’s happened in places like Florida and Arizona and Arkansas. Florida has gone, since two thousand and one to today, from eighty-nine percent of kids in their assigned public schools to barely fifty percent. You’re seeing diversity of choice. And the future of education, and I think therefore the growth of liberty in educational marketplaces, is in the following three things: there are fewer kids, there are dramatically more options, and there’s no money. So that will lead to, in my opinion, a free market system of education far faster than any kind of top-down socialist idea.
Susan Pendergrass (15:08): And then they’re all going to come back and blame you, right? The idea that school choice is the reason, I mean Missouri enrollment is down, it’s projected to go down more. I looked at kindergarten cohorts, it’s absolutely going down. They continue to hire teachers. And when they have to start laying off teachers and closing school buildings, they’re going to say it’s because of school choice. And of course it isn’t because of school choice. But when parents can have school choice, they take it.
Robert Enlow (15:32): It’s the only system where I’ve seen you blame the customer for a failure of your product. I’ve just never seen anything like it in the country. We literally blame education failures on parents who don’t want to go to educational failures. It’s crazy.
Susan Pendergrass (15:53): And then in Missouri they lock the door on them. It’s like, well, too bad, you can’t leave. So maybe it’s just a matter of not needing to refer to any of this as capitalism, because when it comes down to it, parents don’t really care what it’s called, as long as they can pick their kids’ school. They don’t really care.
Robert Enlow (16:08): Look, the reality is parents don’t know if it’s a charter school, private school, or public school most of the time. And that’s okay with me. But the reality is, do they have power and control over how the money is spent and where their kids go? And the best thing we know about it, in my opinion, from the data we’ve seen, and we continue to see this, is families who make choices make better choices over time. This is one of the most amazing things. You start and say, hey, I want a good school for my kid, I think this is better. And then they get in there, and three years later they’re like, what’s the test scores, and how’s it working, and what’s your pedagogy? Because, shockingly, the more options you have, the better customer you become, because you care more. I use this story all the time. When I was a kid, I asked my mother for a ten-speed. I got it for Christmas and proceeded to leave it outside. By the fall it was all rusted and nasty. And I said, hey Mom, I need another ten-speed. And she said, no, but if you earn half of it, I’ll buy the other half. Well, I earned half of it and she bought it for me. Guess how well taken care of that ten-speed was.
Susan Pendergrass (17:14): Leave it outside.
Robert Enlow (17:16): Right, what happens? So when you put some skin in the game and allow free markets to work, this is what families benefit from.
Susan Pendergrass (17:24): So Milton Friedman’s still relevant?
Robert Enlow (17:27): I think Milton Friedman will become
Susan Pendergrass (17:29): Me too, even hearing it said, but yes, go.
Robert Enlow (17:31): Well, no, so actually I think what’s really interesting, I think Milton Friedman, if you read Michael Kanudi’s Wall Street Journal piece, which is amazing, the other day about Milton and this whole conversation, I think Milton is the countercultural revolution that’s coming. I think Milton is both, I mean, one of the things about knowing him and getting to know him over the last decade of his life was he was an equal opportunity challenger.
Susan Pendergrass (17:46): Okay.
Robert Enlow (18:00): If he was a right-leaning guy who didn’t like free markets, he would immediately call out a right-leaning guy who didn’t like free markets. If it was a left-leaning guy, he would do the same thing. Milton was about true individual liberty. I think we’re going to get back to that kind of countercultural revolution. Just like it was seen in Eastern Europe and Latin America. I think that’s the next thing, in America you’ll see communities who are poor reading Milton Friedman in the basement.
Susan Pendergrass (18:27): Love it. Well, you heard it here first. Maybe you can come back and talk to us more about it.
Robert Enlow (18:32): I’m happy. Thanks so much for having me.
Susan Pendergrass (18:34): Appreciate it.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
Utilities Want More Control to Meet Growing Energy Demand
Recently KBIA reported on a new coalition in the energy sector:
Electric companies in the Midwest say new large scale power lines are needed to get more energy onto the grid to serve big power consumers such as artificial intelligence data centers. Now, the utilities argue reducing competition is the fastest way to [build transmission infrastructure].
Specifically, utilities want to reduce competition by halting competitive bidding for multi-state transmission projects, as the bidding process can take 16 to 20 months. If approved, the utilities would be the default developers of those projects, with no competition involved. In Missouri, both Ameren and Evergy, our state’s largest utilities, operate in multiple states and would gain that right of first refusal.
For starters, it’s worth acknowledging that 16 to 20 months is a long time to select a developer, and these companies are right that we quickly need more energy to serve big new customers.
This situation illustrates why Missouri is between a rock and a hard place in its efforts to modernize our electricity grid. Do we really need to choose between (1) remaining content with the slow, bureaucratic speed at which the energy sector operates, which is unsuited for this time of rapid and unpredictable growth or (2) giving up on a competitive bidding process and simply awarding the project to the biggest utility in the region?
There has to be a better way—and fortunately, there is. Missouri instead could allow private electricity grids (also known as consumer regulated electricity, or CRE) for large customers like data centers.
With CRE, a company like Amazon could partner with a supplier that would build and possibly operate a power plant and transmission/distribution exclusively for its customer(s). Since these grids would only be serving islanded, sophisticated clients, they would not need to be regulated like a utility serving the general public—meaning less red tape and fewer delays in getting power plants up and running.
Authorizing CRE would not mean replacing the existing regulated grid. Rather, it would create parallel pathway to serve the growing number of big power customers. Allowing private companies to work directly with electricity providers also would incentivize both parties to find innovative ways to bring power to data centers and other industries. Missouri doesn’t have to sacrifice competition for speed; rather, it can create more pathways for competition simply by letting the power suppliers and the power providers negotiate the price and schedule themselves.
Small Missouri Towns Are Paying a High Price for Open Government
Between April 2021 and February 2026, the small city of Sedalia paid a single law firm, Lauber Municipal Law, just shy of $2 million—nearly one invoice per business day, according to reporting by Genevieve Smith and Annie Goldman of the Columbia Missourian. Sedalia’s population is a little over 20,000. Out of its $35 million budget for fiscal year 2026, the city set aside $500,000 for legal fees.
Residents are asking why.
The answer, at least in part, is Missouri’s Sunshine Law. Smith and Goldman’s reporting found that Belle, another small Missouri town, has seen the once-free cost of producing public records rise sharply since it began contracting with Lauber. Alderwoman Rebecca Withouse has been pushing the town toward more openness on her own, trying to make records easier for residents to get without paying attorney fees. Nathan Nickolaus, an attorney at the firm, told the Missourian that an increasing volume of open records requests is part of what’s driving the cost, and that many small towns simply lack the staff to fulfill the requests without outsourcing the work. (The dramatic increase in the number of records requests in Sedalia has been driven in part by citizen opposition to real abuses of power over the last few years. More details are provided here and here.)
This is a real tension, and Missourians who care about open government should not wave it away. The Sunshine Law exists because taxpayers have a right to see what their government is doing, and that right shouldn’t depend on the size of the city. But when a town of 20,000 people is paying half a million dollars a year in legal fees, much of it tied to records requests, something in the system is broken. The law is functioning as intended—it’s the capacity to comply with it that’s failing.
Part of the problem is structural. Missouri’s smallest cities and towns often have no in-house attorney, no records clerk, and no dedicated compliance staff. When a Sunshine Law request arrives, towns often hire whatever legal help they can afford. Firms like Lauber have built a business model around exactly this gap. The arrangement isn’t necessarily predatory—someone has to do the work—but it does mean the cost of transparency in a small Missouri town scales with legal billing rates rather than with the actual complexity of the records involved.
The Show-Me Institute has documented this problem before, and the numbers get worse than Sedalia’s. In 2018, Institute researchers sent Sunshine Law requests to cities across the state asking for basic spending records. Battlefield billed $35,000 and Hollister billed $25,000 for records that Springfield, a far larger city, and Strafford, a far smaller one, handed over for free. The ability to produce a checkbook register has nothing to do with city size. It has to do with whether a city’s leadership wants residents to see how their money is spent. Missouri courts have recognized how far this can go—Rudi Keller wrote for the Columbia Daily Tribune in 2019 that a Boone County judge ruled that the University of Missouri’s demand for more than $82,000 to fulfill a records request amounted to a de facto denial, not a fee.
Small, struggling towns deserve some benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are simply receiving more requests as residents want more visibility into local government. A town that has historically operated with little scrutiny may find that its first real exposure to the Sunshine Law is uncomfortable. But there’s a difference between a town facing legitimate scrutiny and a town being structurally unable to respond without hiring outside counsel for routine requests.
If the goal is government transparency rather than legal billables, Missouri lawmakers and municipal associations have better tools available. The Missouri Municipal League could develop shared records-request templates and training so small towns aren’t paying attorney rates to answer routine questions. The legislature could examine whether some categories of Sunshine Law compliance could be standardized in ways that reduce the volume of one-off requests requiring individual legal review. And towns themselves should be asking whether a records clerk, even a part-time one, would cost less over a year than the current pattern of per-request legal bills.
Missourians should take seriously the problem that small towns are struggling to comply with the burdens of being open. The current model of outsourcing routine compliance to law firms billing by the hour is an expensive way to deliver necessary transparency. Sedalia’s residents are right to ask where the money is going, as are the taxpayers of a town paying outside counsel to handle a request that should take a few hours.
Missouri’s small towns didn’t create the Sunshine Law’s compliance burden, and taxpayers shouldn’t need to fund a cottage legal industry just to see what their government is doing.
Seven Sister Cities in St. Louis County Considering Merging Fire Departments for Mutual Support
If I told you that seven close-knit organizations were considering merging certain services for purposes that involve mutual support, regular sleepovers, and cost savings, would you guess I was talking about:
- The “Seven Sisters” colleges merging their women’s studies programs, or
- Seven cities in St. Louis County merging their fire departments?
You could understandably guess A, but since I am writing about it you probably know it is B.
Olivette, Clayton, Richmond Heights, Maplewood, Webster Groves, Shrewsbury, and University City have launched a study to consider whether merging their individual fire departments would be a beneficial move. (As an aside, it is worth noting that University City has four streets named after a “Seven Sisters” school.)
The economic and political science literature on local government mergers is cautious. In one major literature review of studies of municipal mergers from dozens of counties, the author came to a few primary conclusions. First, cost savings from mergers do happen, but they are usually much smaller than predicted. Second, public services may be improved through having greater municipal resources, but this often results in a larger bureaucracy that limits potential cost savings. (The third main conclusion doesn’t apply in this instance.)
One of the main reasons cost savings are smaller than predicted is because governments rarely have the willingness to fire employees in mergers, so redundancies are maintained at first. Cost savings tend to come from attrition as redundant positions are not filled over time. That is indeed what happened when several fire districts merged in Oregon in the 1990s, where all reductions in employment came through attrition. But over time, there were some cost savings.
Another reason why local government mergers don’t save as much as promised is that everybody is moved up. If City A pays trash collectors more than City B, and City B pays their clerks more than City A, both sets of employees get moved up to the higher salary spot. That could certainly happen here. For these seven cities, the lowest median fireman salary is in Shrewsbury, at $83,668. The highest median salary is in Maplewood, at $117,873. Do you think the combined department will have a median salary closer to Shrewsbury or closer to Maplewood after negotiations with the union? According to the story in the Post-Dispatch, the union certainly likes its odds here:
There’s another reason the union supports a regional fire department — bargaining power.
Instead of negotiating seven separate contracts, which has sometimes led to conflicts between firefighters unions and city administrators, the union would negotiate just one contract with the fire authority. And it would have a chance to standardize pay and benefits.
The main reason I am supportive of this effort to study the merging of fire departments is because of what it is not. It is not an attempt to merge the fire services into a new, independent fire district. That has also been proposed, and it would be a terrible idea. The various firefighters’ unions prefer fire districts because they are easier for the fire union to control, although unions are certainly influential in cities with fire departments, too. Fire districts elect their board members in April elections that get very little attention, and their board members are only concerned with managing the fire district. Union support for these obscure votes is vital. With municipal fire departments, the local races, particularly the races for mayor, get more public attention. More importantly, the revenues and costs of operating the fire department must be shared as part of the revenues and costs of operating the entire city. Elected officials in a municipality have to operate the fire department within the overall revenues and budgets of the larger city. If these cities merged into a shared fire department, the cities would still be funding the departments. That’s a good thing.
Overall, I think there is reason to be optimistic about these proposed changes. If I have to pick between a regional fire department or a new fire district, I’m going with the department.
