The Light Rail Line Less Traveled

Posted on by David Stokes

If anyone has taken Robert Frost’s words to heart and taken the road less traveled, it is Metro, the St. Louis transit authority. If it knows how to do one thing, it is how to build a new MetroLink line nobody is going to ride.

But now we have good news out of St. Louis County regarding transit. County government has rejected all of the various options for MetroLink expansion into St. Louis County. (This is different from the proposed MetroLink expansion in St. Louis City, which unfortunately has been approved locally. The East-West Gateway Council of Governments is currently seeking federal funding for this project, which I hope it won’t get.)

The problem for the various proposals to expand into St. Louis County is that there is no dedicated way to pay for them, at least not yet. The route starts in the city but the expansion primarily serves the county—so is the city or the county going to pay for the first few miles of the expansion? Would the county pay for light rail inside the city? Would the city pay for part of a light rail expansion that mostly “benefits” residents of the county? (Note the use of quotation marks as there is no overall benefit.) Who knows?

This doesn’t mean that light rail expansion in St. Louis County isn’t going to happen, but anything that puts it in doubt is good news in my book.

The other good news in the story is that St. Louis County is now considering bus rapid transit (BRT) as an alternative to MetroLink:

AECOM [the county’s consulting firm] also has been asked to study the use of rapid bus lines, either using new rights-of-way just for buses or designated lanes on existing roads. Those could be deployed instead of MetroLink expansion or in conjunction with it.

BRT has been used in Kansas City with success, and it is something that Metro should consider for St. Louis. BRT moves people effectively at a fraction of the cost of light rail, streetcars, or trolleys. Unfortunately, it seems spending enormous amounts of money is a good thing from Metro’s point of view, no matter how much of it is wasted.

Increased use of BRT could be the transit option St. Louis has been looking for.

Trust but Verify: CITY SC’s Claims Deserve Scrutiny

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

On May 23, KMOV TV in St. Louis, a CBS affiliate, aired a report about an “independent planning firm” that issued an economic impact study on the effect the CITY SC soccer club had on the St. Louis region in 2023. The segment featured Carolyn Kindle, the club’s CEO.

The report made a number of claims, according to the graphics presented during the interview. The print version of the story on the website included the following bullet points:

  • The construction of CITYPARK and its 32-acre campus created an additional $1.4 billion in economic impact since 2020.
  • The direct cost of the privately owned stadium campus—which includes the stadium, team training facility and practice fields, team store, parking garage, and corporate headquarters—was $667 million.
  • The overall impact includes approximately $122 million in incremental tax revenue, including $33 million in local and state tax revenue, and $15 million in infrastructure upgrades to lighting, sidewalks, bike paths and streets in the surrounding area.

Those bullet points come directly from the news story.

Kindle said in the interview “We were all very, very, very surprised” by the results of the study. I would be too. The vast research on the impact of professional sports teams indicates they generate no such economic impact. The Journal of Economic Surveys concluded in 2022 that “nearly all empirical studies find little to no tangible impacts of sports teams and facilities on local economic activity, and the level of venue subsidies typically provided far exceeds any observed economic benefits.”

Kindle added of the research, “We’re very excited, when the time is right, to share it.” When might that be? I emailed CITY SC on May 23 asking for an electronic copy of the report and heard nothing. I emailed again on May 30 and was told the next day, “We haven’t yet released the full study results, just the highlights. It is something we will likely do in the future but timing is TBD.” I asked what event they were waiting on to release the report. It has been over a week and I’ve received no response.

It’s more than fair to wonder if this report contains the flaws of other similar analyses that count only spending at the venue and discount any losses in spending elsewhere. But we don’t know, because CITY SC hasn’t shared it yet.

Does that mean KMOV ran the segment without independently verifying the information?

At the bottom of the KMOV article is an invitation to readers: “For more information on the study, click here.” That link only takes you to a page of news releases for CITY SC, in which the club makes the exact same claims that appeared in the story, word for word. My advice to news outlets is to trust but verify. When it comes to claims of economic impact such as these, the claims are often overblown and based on significantly flawed analyses. Until the full report is available, we won’t know the rest of the story.

Are Missouri Students in School Enough?

Posted on by Avery Frank

Recently, I came across a fascinating paper from Matthew Kraft of Brown University and Sarah Novicoff of Stanford University about the relationship between instructional time and learning. The authors, based on their own study and literature review, found that additional total time in school and instructional time had a clear positive effect on student achievement.

The authors note that how time is used matters, as it can be difficult to convert total scheduled hours into actual instructional hours. The amount of time at recess, the use of substitute teachers, snow days, etc., all can have an impact on student learning and diminish instructional time.

In their case study of the Providence Public School District in Rhode Island, Kraft and Novicoff estimate that elementary school students lose 16 percent of their instructional time, middle school students lose 21 percent, and high school students lose 25 percent. They observe that unexcused student absences account for the largest portion of the lost time (Missouri has a serious chronic absenteeism problem), but outside interruptions and teacher absences also have an impact.

The authors note that “most school systems which (sic) substantially increase total time are able to convert this additional time into at least small gains in academic achievement.” Essentially, even if the time is used poorly, there are gains to be made just by scheduling more hours in school.

In the paper, which uses national 2017–2018 statistics, Missouri ranked 46th in average number of instructional days and 24th in average number of instructional hours. It must be noted that these were our rankings prior to the passage of Senate Bill 743 in 2018, which removed the requirement for a minimum number of school days starting in the 2019–2020 school year. That was the same year the COVID-19 pandemic broke out—leaving in its wake an immense loss in instructional time, and a need to catch up.

Rather than increasing time to make up for the lost hours, Missouri schools have decreased hours—between 20-30 fewer hours per year on average. This is a small decrease, but it’s a puzzling decision given how much COVID set students back.

Test scores have been decreasing over the last three years as well. In 2019, 39% of Missouri 4th graders scored proficient or higher on the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and 34% scored proficient or higher in reading. In 2022, these numbers dropped to 34% and 30%, respectively. Missouri 8th graders fared no better, dropping from 32% in math and 33% in reading to 24% and 28%.

Similarly, on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), Missouri 4th and 8th graders have failed to bounce back from the pandemic drop. In fact, English/language arts scores are actually lower than the post-COVID year (2020-2021). In the 2021–2022 school year, 46% and 49% of Missouri 4th and 8th graders, respectively, scored above proficient. In the 2022–2023 school year, those scores fell to 43% for 4th graders and 46% for 8th graders.

Missouri students are losing out on instructional time, and our test scores are falling. There may be several reasons why scores are declining, but less time learning seems to be at least part of it. The evidence from scholars such as Kraft and Novicoff—along with common sense—makes it clear that kids are going to learn less if they have less instructional time.

Our students should be going to school more, not less.

What about the Nurses?

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

Missouri’s general assembly dropped the ball on a lot of policy priorities during the 2024 legislative session, but one of the most impactful may be the failure to address the state’s healthcare access issues. One unfortunate byproduct of inaction is that our state, which is already suffering from a shortage of nurses, will have to withstand another year of losing nurses to surrounding states as they leave for better opportunities.

It’s no secret that many Missourians struggle with healthcare access. For large parts of the state, there simply aren’t enough doctors. In those areas, nurses have often been tasked with filling the void. Advanced practice registered nurses (ARPNs), who are trained to treat many of the things people would normally visit the doctor for, are particularly well suited to help address doctor shortages. Unfortunately, the law that governs what nurses licensed in Missouri can do is unnecessarily restrictive.

My colleagues have written about the need to expand nurse’s scope of practice for years. In Missouri, APRNs are required to enter what are called collaborative practice agreements with doctors before they can treat any patients. These agreements can come with a variety of stipulations including the number of patients the APRN can see, how frequently they have to meet with the doctor and have their charts reviewed, and even mandating that they cannot be more than a certain number of miles away from the doctor to practice independently. In 2023, Missouri’s legislature scaled back some of the collaborative practice agreement requirements, including the ability to waive the geographic proximity requirements in some circumstances, but there’s still a long way to go to make Missouri’s licensing laws for nurses competitive with other states.

Most states don’t have any geographic proximity requirements, and it’s easy to see why. Imagine you’re a nurse who is treating patients outside of Cape Girardeau in southeast Missouri. There likely aren’t many doctors in the region. There are significantly more doctors around St. Louis, but they’d be too far away to comply with Missouri’s geographic proximity requirement.

In 2024, it’s hard to imagine how geographic proximity rules are still necessary. Maybe they made sense in 1970, but with today’s advancements in technology, it’s hard to see them as much more than an unnecessary hurdle that limits the number of healthcare providers across Missouri.

It’s time for Missouri’s elected officials to start taking the state’s healthcare access problems seriously because they aren’t going to fix themselves. Until action is taken, no one should be surprised when more and more nurses leave the state, further exacerbating Missouri’s shortage of healthcare providers.

The War on Prices with Ryan Bourne

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

In this episode, Susan Pendergrass speaks with Ryan Bourne, the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato Institute and editor of the book The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy. They discuss the effects of price controls, recent interventions in the economy, how to remind people about free market principals, and more.

Ryan Bourne occupies the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at Cato and is the author of the recent books Economics In One Virus, and The War on Prices. He has written on numerous economic issues, including fiscal policy, inequality, minimum wages, infrastructure spending, the cost of living and rent control.

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Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

Legislature Playing with Fire

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

Missouri’s general assembly flirted with disaster on this year’s budget. Not only did state lawmakers barely pass the budget before the constitutional deadline, but they also failed to reckon with the serious budgetary woes that lie ahead for our state. Instead, they chose to continue the trend of spending too much money. How much longer can this recklessness continue?

After passing the enormous budget, lawmakers declared mission accomplished. While it is true that the approved total budget will be the first in a decade that is smaller than the previous year’s, that is less of an accomplishment than one might initially think. Missouri’s budget has almost doubled over the past five years, from approximately $27 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2019 to nearly $53 billion today. Going into next year, the federal funds that helped make this budgetary growth possible are drying up, and state tax revenues are expected to stagnate or decline. In other words, due to Missouri’s balanced budget requirement, a smaller budget was all but assured before our elected officials took any action.

What is surprising about the budget is the way state tax dollars are spent. The approved budget calls for approximately $15.3 billion in general revenue spending (the fund where state tax dollars go). To put this number in context, in FY 2019, Missouri only spent $10.8 billion in general revenue, and we’re on track to spend about $15.8 billion this current fiscal year. To make matters worse, we’re only expecting to collect about $13.2 billion in net state tax dollars next year. To put it plainly, we’re planning to spend more than we take in. See the table below.

To spend more than we take in, the legislature will have to pull from reserves to make ends meet. Fortunately, the state does have some money set aside that could be used for this purpose, but using those funds may not be the best idea. The current year’s budget relies on spending down the state’s surplus. Doing so again would leave little excess funds left for future years, which is worrisome considering the financial headwinds our state is facing.

All told, Missouri’s budget for FY 2025, which begins on July 1, 2024, plans to spend about 90% more than the state government did in 2019. This level of spending should not be celebrated and is simply unsustainable. It’s time Missouri’s elected officials stop playing with fire, because it’s state taxpayers who are going to be the ones who ultimately get burned.

New Policy Playbook May Help Cities Realize More and Better Housing

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

My colleague David Stokes recently testified that housing in Kansas City and St. Louis is pretty affordable:

St. Louis was ranked as the fourth-most affordable housing market in the country in one survey, and Kansas City ranked 13th. Another study ranked St. Louis as the third and Kansas City as the 11th-most-affordable metro area out of 94 major metros internationally.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of things those cities—and all cities across Missouri—can do to keep costs low and encourage housing construction. The Housing Supply Accelerator Playbook, a collaborative effort by the American Planning Association (APA) and the National League of Cities (NLC), provides some solutions. It is designed to support local governments and community planners in developing effective strategies to increase the quantity and quality of housing.

Key recommendations (with some of my own thoughts) include:

Model Practices and Ordinances: The playbook provides detailed policies that support housing construction. These include zoning reforms, land use policies, and development regulations aimed at reducing barriers to development.

Innovative Financing Solutions: The playbook encourages public–private partnerships for using federal funds to finance housing projects. Any approach like this would need to be well defined and limited—too often we’ve seen these so-called public–private partnerships devolve into either crony capitalism or operate in a way that protects developers from market forces.

Regulatory Reform: Existing regulations impede housing development and drive up costs. The playbook recommends removing barriers through reforms such as streamlining permitting processes and revising outdated ordinances.

Collaboration and Partnership: The authors place a significant emphasis on the importance of collaboration among local governments, community planners, builders, financial institutions, and housing policy associations. Of course, collaborations should not undermine market forces.

Community Engagement: The playbook stresses the importance of engaging with community members to ensure that housing policies benefit all residents. As with financing, this can be a thorny issue. Community engagement should not be used to limit anyone’s property rights or blunt the market forces that spur innovation and bring prices down.

Kansas City and St. Louis do not have many of the housing challenges other cities have, thankfully. But where barriers exist, this report can help identify opportunities to improve housing policy.

Chronic Absenteeism in Missouri

Posted on by Avery Frank

With the removal of the minimum school day requirement beginning in the 2019–2020 school year and the rapid rise of the four-day school week, Missouri schools have been scheduling fewer days of instruction. In the 2017–2018 school year, students were in school an average of 171 days. Fast forward to 2022–2023, and that average is now 162 days. It should be noted that instructional hours have not declined by as great of an amount.

Missouri students not only have fewer days of school, but they have also been missing more days of school. Chronic absenteeism has become a major problem in our schools. Students who miss more than 10% of school days in a year are considered chronically absent.

If a student was at the minimum threshold of being chronically absent—missing 11% of school days every year—by the end of their K-12 experience they will have missed well over a full year of instruction.

Below is a graph that displays attendance trends broken down by demographics in Missouri. The graph uses proportional attendance rates. Proportional attendance rates measure the number of students who attend school 90 percent of the time or more. Let’s say a district of 10 students has a school year of 100 days. Then, let’s assume that 6 of the 10 students attend more than 90 days of school, and that the other four students attend school for 82 days. The district’s proportional attendance rate would be 60 percent.

Figure 1: Missouri Proportional Attendance Rates by Student Group

Source: Department of Elementary and Secondary Education: Current and Historical Missouri State Report Card

While COVID-19 certainly hurt attendance rates, they have not bounced back in the years following. In the 2012–2013 school year, all Missouri students had a proportional attendance rate of 88 percent. Free or reduced-price lunch students were at 83 percent, White students were at 89 percent, Black students were at 82 percent, Hispanic students were at 87 percent, and Asian students were at 94 percent. Today, the gap between all students and free or reduced-price lunch students has doubled. The gap between white students and black students has tripled.

Changing the funding formula to diminish the importance of attendance could make this problem even worse. Would giving families the option to pick the school that best meets their needs increase attendance? It is clear that state officials need to do something, and fast, before too many of our students fall too far behind.

How Missouri and Other States Can Foster Entrepreneurship by Reforming Local Regulations

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

Entrepreneurship is the backbone of vibrant local economies, yet many cities unintentionally stifle this vital engine of growth through cumbersome regulations. And if Kansas City and St. Louis hinder their local economies, all of Missouri is affected. A new playbook, “Cities Work,” created by the Institute for Justice (IJ), outlines the pervasive regulatory barriers faced by entrepreneurs and provides a comprehensive guide to reform.

The playbook highlights how excessive occupational licensing, convoluted permitting processes, and outdated zoning laws create significant hurdles for small business owners. For instance, starting a barbershop often involves not only obtaining city permits but also navigating state-mandated requirements such as barbering school and licensing fees, adding unnecessary time and cost. Punitive late fees, illogical license renewal cycles, and restrictive home-based business rules further complicate the landscape for aspiring entrepreneurs.

One major recommendation is the establishment of one-stop shops for business registration, such as KC BizCare, which can streamline the process by allowing entrepreneurs to complete all necessary steps in one place. This approach reduces confusion and inefficiencies, helping business owners navigate regulatory requirements more easily. Additionally, the playbook suggests cities adopt more flexible licensing terms and graduated fee schedules to lower initial costs for new businesses, particularly those started by lower-income residents.

A separate policy report written exclusively for Kansas City, Missouri, included conversations with a number of local entrepreneurs to determine the most significant barriers facing business start-ups. The report made several recommendations—including improving the KC BizCare program—and the IJ Cities Work team pledged to remain involved in Kansas City’s efforts, including collecting feedback on the success of reforms and even drafting ordinances.

The playbook underscores the importance of reducing regulatory barriers to foster a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem. By adopting its recommendations, cities in Missouri and elsewhere can create more dynamic environments for small businesses to flourish, ultimately contributing to stronger local and state economies.

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