Data center headlines have been filling newspapers each and every week. Among the myriad proposed developments across the state, one project in Ferguson stood out.

Ferguson officials recently rejected a tax subsidy proposal that would have granted substantial incentives for a data center project at the former Emerson campus. Specifically, the package included up to 15 years of tax abatements on real estate, personal property, and sales taxes.

Rejecting this tax subsidy for the development was the right decision. I want to stress that the Ferguson City Council did not reject the data center; it rejected the requested tax subsidy only.

For years, Show-Me Institute writers have been noting the problems with economic development subsidies. Governments should not be picking winners and losers, and data centers are no different.

However, many ignore these arguments and think that using incentives to attract a project could bring substantial jobs, invite tourism, and boost public morale. While maybe (strong emphasis on maybe) some could argue this about other projects, these arguments don’t apply to data centers.

The Emerson Campus formerly employed more than a thousand workers manufacturing automation products and providing engineering services. Modern data centers simply do not require that scale of employment.

At the same time, the concerns over electricity, water, and sound from data centers are well-known.

However, despite this, data centers can still provide a major benefit: significant tax revenue. They can provide so much revenue that local residents could see property tax cuts.

That is precisely why offering large tax abatements for these projects is especially misguided. Along with the cyber and electronic services we all use, tax revenue is the core benefit a data center can bring to a community. If local governments dramatically reduce those revenues through incentives, they are asking residents to absorb a lot of costs with little benefit.

A data center project at the Emerson campus could still be successful and economically beneficial without requiring massive local tax incentives. But too often, Missouri communities negotiate as though they have little to offer unless subsidies are attached.

They should think bigger than that. I wrote a recent op-ed on this very topic.

As debates around data centers continue across Missouri, policymakers should carefully weigh both the benefits and drawbacks these projects bring. Local governments should not rush to give away the primary benefit data centers can provide: tax revenue. Ferguson made the right decision.

The post Ferguson Denies Incentives for Data Center Project appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I’ve argued for years that Kansas City’s lavish subsidies distort the market while failing to deliver on economic promises. New reporting from the Kansas City Business Journal suggests the process itself may be just as broken.

Reporter Thomas Friestad reconstructed negotiations among Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS), PortKC, and Gillon Property Group over incentives tied to Country Club Plaza. The emails, obtained through an open-records request, depict a rushed and opaque decision-making process worthy of public distrust.

The original proposal reportedly included roughly $309 million in incentives over 30 years. KCPS officials objected not only to the size of the package, but also to shifting valuation methods that obscured the true public cost. The district also sought protection for voter-approved bond revenues and more time to evaluate major revisions before approval by PortKC.

That timeline is the real story.

The emails show negotiations continuing until the night before a scheduled PortKC meeting. KCPS officials argued they were being asked to evaluate a substantially revised proposal in just two business days. One consultant for the district described the timeline as “concerning even with the highest level of independent analysis.”

This is a recurring problem in Kansas City’s incentive culture. Complex tax arrangements are negotiated behind closed doors and then presented to affected taxing jurisdictions with little time for meaningful scrutiny. The result is confusion over the true public cost and distrust among taxpayers expected to finance these deals.

Kansas City has seen this pattern before. Similar concerns surrounded the Power & Light District and continue to emerge in discussions over a proposed downtown ballpark. Political machinations routinely take precedence over transparency and accountability.

Notably, KCPS did not oppose subsidies outright. District officials simply asked for clear terms, accurate projections, and adequate time to evaluate a deal that could affect school finances for decades. The fact that negotiators appeared unwilling to provide sufficient time to evaluate the deal speaks volumes.

Kansas Citians have grown understandably skeptical of these taxpayer-funded deals. Too many projects promised economic transformation and delivered little beyond long-term public cost. The Country Club Plaza negotiations are, at best, an example of rushed incompetence. At worst, they suggest an effort to push a massive subsidy package through before taxpayers and public schools could fully evaluate it.

The post Country Club Plaza Subsidy Deal Reveals What’s Broken in Kansas City appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Avery Frank, Elias Tsapelas, and David Stokes join Zach Lawhorn to break down the final week of the 2026 Missouri legislative session. They discuss the constitutional amendment heading to voters that would begin the process of eliminating Missouri’s state income tax, where property tax reform efforts stand heading into the final days, the early literacy bill’s uncertain path through the Senate, the legislature’s approach to A through F school report cards, what the state budget does and does not get right, the Ferguson city council’s rejection of a major data center tax subsidy, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Zach Lawhorn (00:00): Welcome to the Show-Me Institute podcast. I’m Zach Lawhorn from Show-Me Opportunity. Today I’m joined by Avery Frank, Elias Tsapelas, and David Stokes from the Show-Me Institute. It is the last week of the 2026 Missouri legislative session. Today we’re going to go through what has crossed the finish line, mostly what has not crossed the finish line, and see what these guys think about the possibility of that happening here in the home stretch. Elias, we’ll begin with something that has crossed the finish line, and that is the start of a discussion about phasing out Missouri’s state income tax. Legislation did pass. It goes to the governor, and he gets to decide when it goes on the ballot. So what do we know right now, what passed, and what are Missouri voters going to be asked sometime in the fall?

Elias Tsapelas (00:50): By May 22nd, the governor needs to decide whether this constitutional amendment will go on the August or November ballot. What it says, essentially, is to Missouri voters: do you want to start the process of getting rid of Missouri’s income tax? It comes with three main components. The first piece is the legislature will be required to enact legislation that would get rid of the state’s income tax based on revenue growth. Once that income tax is gone, it cannot be reinstituted. Previous versions of this bill had some details lined out about how the income tax rate would be cut based on revenue growth, but in later versions this was stripped back to just the legislature will decide this later. The other two pieces say you will also be authorizing the legislature to expand the state sales tax base, meaning the things the state sales tax applies to. This could also involve changing the rate, because right now Missouri’s constitution does not allow the state legislature to expand the sales tax to anything that was not taxed in 2015. But this does come with a guardrail: if the legislature does change the state sales tax, it has to be done in a revenue neutral fashion. So expanding the sales tax base or raising the rate to bring in additional tax revenues has to go towards lowering the state income tax. That gives the legislature the authority to change how much revenue comes in, which would speed up the process for getting rid of the income tax. The last piece is a component for local governments. If the state changes the number of things that the sales tax applies to, this would also increase revenues to local governments. Those additional revenues would have to go towards a list of other taxes that would be lowered. In places like St. Louis and Kansas City, that would go towards lowering the earnings tax. For other local governments, they get to choose whether it goes towards lowering the sales tax, property tax, personal property taxes, or real property taxes. The key piece being revenue neutral. This is not going to be a windfall for anyone. It is basically the start of a discussion, because they don’t say what the rate might need to go to, what the sales tax could be expanded to, or what revenues would trigger income tax elimination or cuts. This is just the start of the discussion, giving the legislature the authority to keep moving in the direction we started around 2014.

Zach Lawhorn (03:57): Taking those a piece at a time: the first one, if it passes and the income tax is eliminated at some point, it cannot come back. That seems pretty straightforward. The next two seem like responses to opposition that we hear on a regular basis. The first being the revenue triggers, which seem designed to prevent what we often hear about with Kansas, where they cut the income tax without cutting spending, leading to revenue shortfalls. And the expansion of the sales tax base seems like protection against having to raise the sales tax rate on goods. Do I have that right?

Elias Tsapelas (04:40): Yes. The revenue trigger piece is basically what Missouri has been doing for a while, waiting to see how much revenue we have before lowering the income tax by that amount. We’ve been doing that for over a decade now and have lowered the top individual income tax rate from 6% to 4.7%. We’re just continuing down that path to be sure we don’t create some enormous budget hole. Now, when you look at the sales tax, Missouri has a very complicated, out-of-date sales tax system. The state sales tax rate is 4.225%, but when you go to the store you’re paying something significantly higher, largely due to local governments and a lot of special taxing districts. Missouri also has a lot of sales tax exemptions. Missouri really needs a full look at its entire sales tax system. But economically, when thinking about switching a state from being primarily funded by income taxes to something closer to sales taxes, the best way to fund a state is to tax as broad a base as possible so you can have the lowest rate possible. You want to be taxing final consumption, not business inputs. As we start the idea of transferring to more of a consumption tax in Missouri, the goal is to make sure it doesn’t become a tax increase for some people while things change elsewhere. It’s trying to keep it level the whole way, and at least right now it seems like a pretty neutral proposal going forward.

Zach Lawhorn (06:24): David, for people who don’t think about taxes as a corresponding tax system, can you explain the idea of local governments rolling back certain taxes and how people might experience that on their property tax bills or personal property tax bills?

David Stokes (06:44): It’s trickier than you might think, but it’s vital that it be done right. If you expand the sales tax base at the state level, as Elias discussed, you don’t want local governments to start collecting significantly more sales tax revenue for no reason. At the state level we’ll do something good with that and phase out the income tax, but at the local government level we don’t want just more revenue with nothing to spend it on. You need tax relief for citizens, which is why they’re going to require rollbacks. They’ve given local governments some options in how you roll that rate back, which is a good thing, but they need to give them a few more options. For example, they said you could roll back property taxes, real property taxes, personal property taxes, or sales taxes. A few things that need to be considered: many municipalities don’t have a property tax, so they won’t be able to roll back the property tax. And it’s trickier to roll back sales taxes than you might think. Unlike property taxes and income taxes, which can be reduced in small increments, sales taxes have to be done in set increments. You can’t go from a 1% sales tax to a 0.92% sales tax. It’s just not allowed and would be incredibly difficult for retailers to implement. So local governments need even more flexibility in how they roll back taxes. I would say the utility tax, which just about every county imposes, is a great option to add to the choice mix for rollbacks. These are the sales taxes that can be placed on utilities, which unlike other sales taxes can be rolled back in small increments. That’s a very good option. The biggest challenge of all, though, is the special taxing districts that Elias mentioned earlier, such as transportation development districts and community improvement districts. These usually only have sales taxes and nothing else. You have to address what they do if their sales tax collections go up 30% and they have no legal way to roll it back by that same amount. So we need to adjust that. I would also hope that part of this whole deal would be a substantial cap on how these special taxing districts like TDDs and CIDs operate in the first place, to really restrict their continued expansion in Missouri, which has been very harmful. Those are just a few ideas out of many in how local governments are going to have to address this.

Zach Lawhorn (09:59): Finally, Elias, as you said, it’ll be on the ballot sometime in the fall. But between now and either August or November, people interested in this topic are going to see a lot of data, modeling, estimates, and projections. We want to be honest about what we can know and what we cannot know. With the legislation that has passed now, what should people keep in mind when they see some of these estimates or models or projections this summer?

Elias Tsapelas (10:39): The first thing is, if you see anything claiming this is going to generate a tremendous budget shortfall or major harm to local governments, this thing is set up to be revenue neutral. This is not something that is going to create enormous holes. Most of the time, estimates that reach that conclusion assume this would work in an entirely different way than what is allowed. So that is something you don’t necessarily need to worry about. What people are more reasonably worried about is: if you empower the legislature to expand or raise the sales tax, how is that going to impact everyone? Missouri’s state and local combined sales tax rates are relatively high already. The state’s portion is pretty low, but combined it’s relatively high. So what the state decides to do in terms of how much it expands the sales tax base, whether that involves more services versus goods, will impact different people differently, in different parts of the state and at different income levels. Anything right now that says this is definitely going to be bad for X person, we just can’t know that, because there’s not enough information out there. Everyone should keep an open mind and also recognize that the reason for this amendment and this proposal is that Missouri’s economy is falling behind. We are falling behind our neighbors in terms of tax competitiveness, and the only way to change that is to improve Missouri’s tax standing. Our sales tax system is incredibly broken, so this is something that is going to need to be fixed. At least right now we are at the point of asking: do we want to go down this path? Let’s hope the legislature does a good job. We’ll be shining a light on whatever they do, but we can’t know some of the things that people are warning about right now.

Zach Lawhorn (12:50): David, after the legislature got the income tax bills out the door, they shifted to talking about property taxes, which is something we hear a lot about. People want property tax reform. With only a few days left in the session, where do those efforts stand and what are your thoughts?

David Stokes (13:11): Unlike a lot of the property tax changes of the past few years, I actually like the property tax changes being proposed this year. At least one property tax bill is in conference committee being debated between the House and Senate right now. Another major bill has passed out of the Senate but hasn’t made it through the House yet. I’m told there are going to have to be some compromises on both sides to get a bill across the finish line, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The biggest change this year, which seems very much in the weeds but is significant, would take the way property taxes are imposed in St. Louis County and apply it to the rest of the state. St. Louis County has different tax rates for all the different types of property: residential, agricultural, commercial, and personal property, which includes your car, boat, farm equipment, livestock, and the like. Those rates adjust differently as assessments go up and down each year. This approach was originally intended to be extended to the rest of the state about 20 years ago when they did it in St. Louis County, but the following year they came back and said the rest of the state didn’t have to do it. It’s a good idea. It might sound strange to some people, but a good example of why it would be beneficial came from stories in the St. Louis Business Journal about the real decline in commercial property values in the city of St. Louis over the past year. Because they set one tax rate measured under one unified property value, residential homeowners in St. Louis end up making up with their taxes for the decline in commercial property. In St. Louis County, with the siloed tax rates, if commercial property goes down, the commercial property tax rate will go up to offset that instead of passing it on to homeowners. In rural Missouri, which has so much agricultural property, this would allow agricultural property tax rates to increase to fund goods in rural areas without as dramatically impacting commercial and residential property. I think this is a good idea and I hope it passes. There are also some good amendments that would put taxpayer protections in place to avoid the temptation of local officials to target commercial property with these new different tax rates. It’s in the weeds, but I think these are good changes this year.

Zach Lawhorn (16:24): That sounds like the other side of the coin from what’s happened in Jackson County, where over the last few years people have been very upset that their assessments have gone up by more than 20% and residential homeowners have seen gigantic leaps in their property taxes. Is this kind of like having to turn one knob one way and another knob the other way?

David Stokes (16:55): Sort of. The tricky part is that the situation in Jackson County for the past 10 years has been so bad, it’s hard to compare it to other counties. It’s been uniquely horrible for the people of Jackson County. But it does start with one basic truth: 15 to 20 years ago, Jackson County was under-assessed. The assessor was ordered to increase the valuations because they were improperly low, and probably artificially and intentionally low. The right approach would have been to raise those assessed valuations to more accurate totals while lowering the rates at the same time to avoid crushing people with higher taxes. But Jackson County’s taxing entities have not really done that, starting with the Kansas City 33 school district, a very large school district in Kansas City, which is the only taxing body in Missouri exempt from rolling back rates as values increase. So you’ve seen these giant increases within that school district and they don’t even have to roll back rates. They just get to keep their same rates, as they have frequently over the past 10 years. So people are getting walloped. And then you throw in the fact that the Kansas City Assessor’s Office has done a terrible job managing the process year after year, not hitting deadlines for notifying people about changes and not properly running the appeals process. It’s just been a terrible system in Jackson County, and almost uniquely so.

Zach Lawhorn (18:30): All right. Before we have Elias read the budget line by line, Avery, I want to get an update on the education items here in the last week of the session. Early literacy, the reading bill, we’ve been talking about it all session long. How’s it looking?

Avery Frank (18:47): When it first passed out of the House before spring break, 131 to 10, I was genuinely excited. It wasn’t necessarily that it passed so early; it was that it passed with such little resistance and such bipartisan support on both sides of the aisle. Teaching our students how to read, giving every student the best chance to become a confident, capable reader, that seems like common sense and a goal that everyone wants to work toward to help our state improve and perhaps become the next Mississippi. It looked that way before spring break, but the Senate version of the early literacy bill got filibustered and set aside. The House bill has made it through the process and is on the informal calendar for third reading, so it could be taken up at any time. If it does pass the Senate, I anticipate it would easily pass the House again. But that is the problem with a lot of education legislation: can it pass the Senate? There have been different concerns about the early literacy bills. Some people are concerned that the MAP test, or the Missouri Assessment Program, which we use to test all of our students, is not a good measure and we shouldn’t be basing anything on it. Some are concerned with third-grade retention and whether it actually helps, looking at states like Mississippi and noting that while fourth-grade scores are great, eighth-grade scores have only improved a little. Those are the main pushbacks we’re seeing. I would still say this is something we really need to do. The early literacy bill is built on two different pillars. The first is a mandatory third-grade retention policy. Missouri already tests all K through third-grade students with a reading screener to see how they’re doing with reading. What this bill would do is set a passing score for those screeners. If students don’t meet that score, they would be retained in third grade, because reading is such a foundational skill. If you don’t know how to read, that’s something worth holding back for, to make sure students get it down before moving on for the rest of their educational career. Students would still have the opportunity to retake the screener, and there would be good-cause exemptions for students with disabilities, for students who have been held back previously, and for English language learners. The second main pillar is reforming our teacher preparation programs. In 2023, the National Council on Teacher Quality conducted a survey of all of our universities and teacher preparation programs and found that half of them received an F in teaching the science of reading, which is the best evidence-based way to teach students to read. The early literacy bill would align our teacher prep programs with those best practices. If they don’t do it, they can’t certify teachers. You can see how there could be pushback and reason why people would filibuster or not want it to come to the floor. That’s where it stands right now. I’m hoping people set aside their objections and recognize that this is a great first step to get Missouri back on track. Our reading scores have been really poor, especially after the pandemic. They continue to decrease and have not bounced back at all. They’re lower now than they were the first year after the pandemic, and we have to turn things around. These early literacy bills, I hope people see the common sense in them.

Zach Lawhorn (22:30): It’s not even the perfect being the enemy of the good. It’s just people being afraid to push back against the status quo. Missouri has fallen back in reading test scores, and other states, most notably Mississippi, have found ways to improve. I don’t think it’s helpful to frame this as some kind of radical moonshot. In the final days of the session, the urgency cannot be overstated. The other thing we’ve talked about a lot this session is A through F report cards, a transparency measure. Governor Kehoe issued an executive order before the session started. What’s the status of the legislature trying to adhere to the governor’s executive order?

Avery Frank (23:19): The legislature has tried to legislate its own way into how the executive order gets implemented, because DESE, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, could implement it in their own way. The legislature wants to determine how things are going to be scored instead of letting DESE make that decision. There’s been a lot of back and forth, and a lot of different interested parties. Not to get too in the weeds, but some districts really want academic achievement, their base score on the Missouri Assessment Program, to be weighed the most heavily because that would give them the highest score. Some want growth to be weighed the most heavily for the same reason. Some want basically no grades and a lot more qualitative information. There are a lot of different factors. The best vehicle for A through F report cards right now looks like Senate Bill 1351, which continues the long legacy of education omnibus bills used in recent years in Missouri. It combines the report card, limits on screen time for young students, and a couple of other things. I’m not sure if that’s going to make it past, to be honest. People are still concerned about whether the Missouri Assessment Program is something they want to base all of this on. Personally, I think the executive order is better than the legislation as it currently stands. They got rid of one aspect I liked as a researcher: in Governor Kehoe’s executive order, there was a penalty if districts didn’t report their data properly. In the current legislation, Senate Bill 1351, if districts don’t report sufficient data, it’s just written as an aside, basically saying they have to note on their report card that there is not sufficient data, and then they’re not included in the ranking as much. I don’t like that. It gives districts, especially poorly performing ones, an incentive not to report their data so they can have this qualifier on all of their report cards. I also don’t like it because, from all the education research I’ve been doing, we really do have a data reporting problem and we need to be a lot better about transparency. I hope we get some good report cards, because right now at the Show-Me Institute we do our best with the data we have, but we have to work with unsuppressed data, meaning we don’t have data that could potentially identify certain students. So there are some districts we have no data on because they’re so small. But DESE and the state have the best data possible. They could make a really good report card even better than we could, because they have better data than we do. That’s why I’m really hoping we get a good report card, because it would be very helpful for all the parents, legislators, and researchers across the state to see which districts are doing well and learn from them, and which ones are doing poorly and need more support.

Zach Lawhorn (26:42): Let’s talk about the budget. Elias, the legislature passed the budget a little early this year. They beat the deadline by a couple of days, right?

Elias Tsapelas (26:53): They finished early, which is a little bit different than the last few years.

Zach Lawhorn (26:56): Are we spending more or less money than last year?

Elias Tsapelas (27:01): Spending less, but I’m not throwing them a party. There’s just a lot less federal money going around. There was a lot of COVID money in recent years, and Missouri hasn’t spent all of it. The current budget this year is about $54 billion. What the legislature passed is a little bit less than $50 billion, depending on whether you count different construction items. But there was a lot of federal money in that total. At the end of the day, what we’re looking at is a budget that is still going to spend more general revenue, where our income and sales tax dollars go. It’s still going to spend more than we expect to bring in. So we’re still going to exhaust all of our surplus that we built up over those years. There were some positive things that happened this year, but ultimately part of how they got the budget done early was by spending just a little bit more, so they left some of the good on the table.

Zach Lawhorn (28:20): So we’re spending the surplus, as you’ve been warning about for several years, the federal money is drying up, and to circle back to the opening segment, I think part of the trust the legislature is going to have to build this summer is demonstrating we’re getting spending under control. You said you’re not throwing them a party. But is this reduction, whatever the reason, directionally good enough for the legislature to say they’re working on the spending side of things, or is it just not good enough?

Elias Tsapelas (29:00): I think I’ll know a lot more going into next year, because there were a lot better discussions this year, especially looking at spending incentives. As was mentioned, DESE is going to have a new funding formula, or at least the governor has a task force working on one. The way education is funded for K through 12 is going to change. There was also a big fight this year about how to fund higher education. What seemed to me like a common sense idea, essentially having the legislature fund colleges based on how many students are enrolled, turned out to be considered too radical and was pushed off for the future. But there’s talk of coming back with a performance funding measure going forward. There’s also some movement on changing how the state does its IT work. There are a lot of IT changes coming, including things affecting Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Missouri has a very bad track record with IT. Part of this budget moves some IT resources over to the Department of Social Services to support getting things going there, because most IT for the state of Missouri is currently consolidated in the Office of Administration. While that can seem efficient because every state department doesn’t need its own IT department, it also makes it a lot harder to hold people accountable. There has been a big issue recently with the state’s accounting software, where a contract is millions of dollars behind schedule and not working. The budget tries to get at that too, and it raises this major incentive question: are the people in charge of implementing new IT going to do their best at something that will ultimately try to eliminate their job? I think the legislature is finally starting to deal with that. Ultimately, if we go down the path of a more efficient government and a better tax system, that may mean fewer state employees, and that is something that hasn’t come up much but I think the legislature is finally starting to look at. Pushing toward better funding models, a better state workforce, all those type of things, is moving in the right direction as opposed to how it has been, where the budget just grows larger every year. They’re looking in the right direction. I would have liked to see more, but I think we’ll know a lot more in the next year, especially because the federal COVID funding will essentially be gone.

Zach Lawhorn (32:12): Our final topic, partly so we can put it in the title of the episode for clicks, but also because it seems like every week there’s a story from across the country or across the state about data centers and communities pushing back for a lot of reasons. The most recent one was Ferguson in the St. Louis area. David, can you catch us up on what was on the table for this data center in Ferguson and what happened?

David Stokes (32:40): The vote that the Ferguson city council took last week was strictly on a tax subsidy, I believe about $1.8 billion in tax abatements and various subsidies for the project. It was not a vote on approving the data center itself. This was a commercially zoned area, so it didn’t need any permission to put a data center there, and that’s a good thing. But the city nonetheless rejected the tax subsidy, which I thought was the right call. These data centers are very profitable and important, and I’m certainly not anti-data center. But the demand that they get enormous subsidies everywhere they seem to be going is improper. Festus was right to approve the data center operation there, but I think very much wrong to approve the enormous tax subsidy the city granted, which I believe was about a half a billion dollars. Avery can correct me if I’m wrong on that exact number. I like what Ferguson did, and I hope the data center moves into the old Emerson complex there nonetheless. We need data centers. Data centers produce so much tax revenue that they can generate their own tax cuts, and I don’t mean a special subsidy for the data center itself. I mean they go into a city or a small area, generate so much revenue, and you can cut taxes for everybody in that community, including the data center itself. I think that’s the road to follow, and hopefully that’s what we’ll have in Missouri. I also think we need to change the way data centers are taxed in an upcoming legislative session, taxing them a little more like utilities to reduce the incentive for one city or county to hand out a big subsidy and instead spread those tax benefits around a little more.

Zach Lawhorn (34:46): Avery, are you heartened by this rejection? Because as David said, we need the data centers, but we really want to avoid this new layer of corporate welfare that could pop up everywhere. So how do you feel about it?

Avery Frank (35:00): I’m actually very excited by the rejection in Ferguson. I’ve talked to a lot of people on both sides of the data center debate, those who have gone to the meetings and stayed up until 3 a.m. and protested, and those who want them. When I look at this Ferguson project specifically, the numbers David was talking about involved granting up to 15 years of tax abatements on real estate, personal property, and sales tax for a data center project. When I see something like that, it gets at what David was talking about. The only true significant benefit of a data center is the tax revenue it could bring. It doesn’t bring a lot of jobs. It takes a lot of electricity and a lot of water. It generates noise. It already makes a lot of people upset, and there are concerns about housing values and everything else. So if you’re not getting any tax revenue, there really is no strong incentive to have a data center project. That Emerson complex in Ferguson had thousands of employees. A data center does not take very many employees at all. So when you have people coming up and saying this data center project won’t succeed unless we get all these tax subsidies, I say that’s fine and I hope you don’t build a data center there, because the tax revenue is really the only benefit you’re getting from it. One of the bigger things is just something about Missouri in general. I’m from Tennessee and there are a lot of concerns there about having too much growth. Missouri sometimes feels like the opposite of Tennessee. We’re so desperate for growth that we’re willing to hand out a bunch of money. We don’t have enough pride. This Emerson complex is a good building and a good place. Ferguson has a STEM high school that produces very high test scores and graduates people who can work in the tech industry or an engineering industry. We shouldn’t waste a good building and a good workforce on a project that’s going to get all these tax subsidies and not bring a lot of jobs. The same thing happened over in Independence, where they gave out billions in subsidies for a data center project. Whenever I see that, I think we have to have a little bit of pride in Missouri. We can’t just be giving out all this money to get anyone to come. We have a good parcel of land, a good workforce, a lot of water, and a central location in the country. We can attract good projects, data centers or not, without giving out a bunch of subsidies. We need to understand what the benefits and costs of a data center are and what data center developers are actually looking for. They have a lot of money already. If you give them a good workforce, a place to build, and community support, I think they’ll come, even without a bunch of money.

Elias Tsapelas (38:28): I was really hoping this was the discussion we were going to have this year in Missouri’s legislature, because it started off so well with the discussion of how to get rid of the income tax and everything that goes with that. Talking about the income tax is really about how you make your state more desirable and how you grow faster. But Missouri for so long has just said: we want this industry or this type of business, so let’s give it an economic development tax credit. Let’s give out a billion dollars worth of those. Let’s give out sales tax exemptions. As far as I know, data centers in Missouri already get state and local sales tax exemptions. We just give those out. If we’re really going to start thinking about how to make the state the most desirable place, how to grow the fastest and be the most desirable for families and businesses, that’s really more about making the tax climate the best for everyone, not constantly picking winners and losers. Unfortunately, the budget didn’t see as many cuts as I had hoped. As we go into the last few days of the legislature, there are plenty of tax credit bills waiting to pass. The film tax credit is back and there’s talk of extending the sunset on it. There are other tax credits. We’re still going down that path. There are still more sales tax exemptions being considered. Missouri just needs to decide what direction we want to go, because ultimately if we do get rid of the income tax, a lot of these economic development incentives don’t even really work anymore. You have to look at different things. You have to look at what is really the criteria for families and businesses. States across the country are dealing with these issues, changing their economic conditions, their tax policy, and people are moving there. We know people are leaving Missouri. We know income is leaving Missouri. We need to change things. The status quo is not going to work going forward, and I was hoping that would have sunk in a little bit more this year than it did.

Zach Lawhorn (40:37): We will leave it there this week. We’ll talk to everyone again after the session ends over the next few days and see how everything turned out. As always, plenty more at showmeinstitute.org. David, Avery, and Elias, thank you very much.

The post Missouri’s 2026 Legislative Session Final Week appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The newest demography newsletter from Saint Louis University delivers a jarring wake-up call that regional leaders can no longer afford to ignore. For years, the conversation around St. Louis has been one of stagnation, but the 2025 population estimates from the Census Bureau reveal we have shifted onto a much more dangerous track toward structural decline. While the national birth rate is falling, St. Louis has emerged as an epicenter of this trend, ranking first among the fifty largest metropolitan areas in the percentage decline of births since 2021 (9 percent). We are now in a state of demographic winter where deaths outnumber births, and unlike our neighbors, we do not have a steady stream of new residents moving in to offset the loss.

When we look at our peers in Indianapolis and Nashville, the contrast is stark. Indianapolis has seen a domestic migration gain of nearly 20,000 people since 2020, while Nashville has increased by 89,000. Meanwhile, St. Louis saw over 31,000 people leave for other parts of the country during that same period. St. Louis is heading into a period in which it will carry a much heavier demographic burden of older residents compared to these peer cities, which are successfully maintaining a younger and more sustainable age structure.

Both of these other regions have more childbirths annually than they did just five years ago. But this isn’t just by chance. Indianapolis has aggressively aligned its economic incentives with family needs, requiring companies that receive tax breaks to reinvest in childcare and neighborhood infrastructure. Indianapolis families can also choose between universally available private school vouchers, charter schools, or any traditional public school in the district. Nashville has used Tennessee’s lack of a state income tax to attract high-earning families and has focused on building the kind of walkable, tech-ready neighborhoods that remote-working parents prioritize. Both cities have created an environment where it is easier and more affordable to raise a family, which in turn fuels both natural growth and domestic migration numbers.

St. Louis is currently operating under the outdated assumption that we will always have 35,000 births a year to sustain our schools and workforce. The reality is that we have declined by over 7,000 births annually since 2011, and that number is still searching for a bottom. If we want to avoid a future of shrinking school districts and a hollowed-out economy, we have to stop treating these numbers as theoretical. We must move toward a strategy that makes St. Louis a destination for families again, rather than a place they leave behind.

The post A Wake-up Call for St. Louis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I wrote recently that in the lead up to the public vote, even earnings tax defenders could not defend the earnings tax. Despite urging yes votes, they conceded many, if not all, of my claims that the tax makes for bad policy.

Now we might be seeing this story repeat itself with stadium subsidies. It’s being reported that Kansas City’s package of subsidies for a downtown baseball stadium includes bonds issued by the city—and backed by them. This means that if the stadium fails to generate enough revenue to pay the bonds, city taxpayers will make up the difference. This is exactly the type of deal that requires the city to direct over $10 million each year to cover Power & Light District debts.

The Kansas City Business Journal reports city leaders are aware of that same risk with a downtown ballpark for the Royals. They concede:

. . . estimates for Power & Light District sales and economic activity tax generation proved “spectacularly wrong.” The entertainment hub’s annual bond gaps have required about $10.5 million a year from the city’s general fund and $199 million total to date.

City leaders now say they’re being more careful — even as they plan to support as much as two times the district’s original debt for a stadium at Washington Square Park.

How times have changed. Twenty years ago then-Mayor Kay Barnes told a columnist for The Kansas City Star, regarding her deal on the Power & Light District:

“We’re going to look like geniuses” in five or 10 years, Barnes said. The city is paying low interest rates for projects that are capable of paying off the debt, she added.

Barnes could not have been more wrong. (Though she was named the 2018 Kansas Citian of the Year by the Chamber of Commerce, which says more about the chamber than it does Barnes.)

Public subsidies for private interests such as a baseball stadium is still bad policy. They don’t benefit taxpayers. But it’s some comfort that at least Kansas City leaders are capable of learning from their mistakes—right?

Right?

The post Another Policy Concession from Kansas City—Kind of appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A version of the following commentary appeared in the Columbia Missourian.

As technology companies try to meet the skyrocketing demand for AI-specialized computing capacity, they are dotting the country with data centers to the dismay of some and the delight of others. As is all too often the case in Missouri, many of these companies are being offered taxpayer-supported subsidies or tax exemptions.

For example, Independence, Missouri, is giving Nebius more than $6 billion in tax breaks over the next 20 years for a “hyper-scale” data center, and Montgomery County has offered Amazon hundreds of millions in tax abatements to build a data center near New Florence. But why would subsidies be needed when it seems like data-center developers have money to burn and are desperate for suitable building locations?

Recent actions of data-center developers suggest that it is not the cost of building and operating those facilities that is the barrier; the main problems appear to be finding pathways to secure reliable energy generation and getting their centers online smoothly and quickly (speed-to-operation).

These two obstacles are so serious that the major technology companies (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.) recently met with President Trump and signed the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” to supply and pay for their own power for their AI data centers.

Why would these companies agree to take on this expense? Because their constraint is not cash. For these firms, time is money. The costs of delays in permitting and interconnection outweigh the value of a local tax incentive.

The negative effects of economic development subsidies and tax breaks are well known. When local officials offer these incentives, they diminish positive benefits that could come from a new data-center development: increased property-tax revenue to fill in the gaps for local services or be used to lower the overall tax rate of the community.

With all of this in mind, rather than just doing what most other states do (handing out checks or tax exemptions) Missouri should work on policies that actually deliver what these companies need most: pathways to secure and reliable energy generation, regulatory certainty, and speed-to-operation.

For local communities, this means they should not offer taxpayer dollars. Even with big tech agreeing to pay for their own power, many municipalities will still try to lure projects with incentives. No doubt the companies will take whatever money is offered to them, but subsidies are unlikely to significantly drive their decisions about where to locate.

Instead, local communities should offer a stable, predictable permitting environment and a suitable location to build. That would help address the greater desire for certainty and speed-to-operation.

And at the state level we should think even bigger. Policies like consumer-regulated electricity (CRE) could help make Missouri a true hub for data center development—without using unnecessary subsidies.

CRE would enable private electricity providers to serve large, energy-intensive customers independent of the existing, permission-heavy grid structure by allowing them to build their own power plants. Rather than spreading the costs for this infrastructure, CRE would create a “parallel path to energy abundance” —one financed by the large customers who demand the power.

CRE would allow these data centers to work with a private partner to meet their own energy needs, with less red tape, more certainty, more control, and more freedom to innovate. These benefits are likely to be more appealing than subsidies.

Unfortunately, offering subsidies seems to be a reflexive reaction in Missouri when there is an opportunity to attract a new business. But especially in this case, Missouri would be better off focusing on what the data center sector really needs. Efficient regulatory and permitting policies (like CRE), a predictable and stable environment in which to construct, and abundant energy would be far better suited to attracting and improving data center development than taxpayer dollars.

The post Why Hand Out Subsidies to Data-Center Developers? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A version of the following commentary appeared in the Mound City Messenger.

A bad idea doesn’t get better with age. Bad ideas aren’t wine, jeans, or your high school memories. The tax subsidies for the Post-Dispatch building redevelopment in downtown St. Louis were a bad idea back in 2019 when the development was proposed, and they are a bad idea now.

Using tax subsidies for economic development rarely benefits the public. Instead, it lowers the risk and increases the returns for private investors. Under a capitalist system, the relationship between risk and reward for investors can be a wonderful thing, but in recent decades the government has somehow decided the public should get involved in private business dealings through tax subsidies and incentives. Taxpayers in St. Louis were left holding the bag for the failed St. Louis Marketplace tax increment financing (TIF) plan, the tax subsidy package for the Renaissance Hotel that was literally sold on the courthouse steps, and numerous other failed, subsidized enterprises. Most economic development schemes are like an expensive game of musical chairs in which the taxpayer is always the one with nowhere to sit.

The tax subsidy package for the old Post-Dispatch building at 900 N. Tucker on the northern edge of downtown St. Louis was approved by the Board of Aldermen in 2019. It primarily consisted of a $12 million TIF package. The summary included with the legislation featured the normal jargon required for such bills, and it included a statement that the development “will have approximately 1,250 jobs with an average salary of $76,500.”

How has that jobs promise worked out? Well, OK at first. The most recent annual TIF report (2024) filed by the developers with the state auditor repeated the same number of 1,250 estimated jobs created. It also listed 830 jobs created so far. There are two ways to look at that number, and both are accurate. The first is that, once again, developers exaggerated their job creation in order to get the subsidies they wanted. That often happens, and it may have happened here. The second is that getting to two-thirds of the promised jobs is actually better than many other subsidized developments, and maybe the developers deserve some credit. Not enough credit to justify all the subsidies in the first place, but, you know, some.

Except that recent actions indicate that the development is highly unlikely to ever get to 1,250, and it may quickly move in the other direction. The largest tenant in the redevelopment at 900 N. Tucker is Block, formerly known as Square. As you may have read, Block recently announced that it was laying off 4,000 people companywide, almost half of its total workforce. How many of those layoffs will be in St. Louis in unknown at this time, but the company previously announced much smaller layoffs in Missouri in both 2024 and 2025, so it seems unlikely that its St. Louis office will be unscathed.

I am not judging the company about the layoffs. If artificial intelligence is making some employees obsolete (the company’s stated reason for the move) then those people should be let go so they can do something else with their lives. That’s the creative destruction of capitalism. But this situation is a perfect example of why cities and counties should not give subsidies to private companies based on promises of employment, growth, renewal, or whatever the vibe of the moment is.

Numerous economic studies have disproved the belief that tax subsidies lead to economic growth. If tax subsidies worked, the City of St. Louis would already be awash in riches. Tax incentives have been piled on top of tax subsidies under every acronym under the sun for decades. None of it has worked. The city should focus on keeping tax rates level and low for everyone, not high for most and low (because of special exemptions) for the politically connected. A reliance on subsidies rewards cronyism, over-promising, and political grandstanding, but it doesn’t lead to real economic success. Just ask the Block employees who may be laid off soon.

The post Tax Subsidies Are a Mistake We Can’t Seem to Learn From appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When Congress created Opportunity Zones in 2017, the goal was simple: use tax incentives to steer private investment into distressed communities. Investors could defer or eliminate capital-gains taxes if they reinvested those gains in designated census tracts.

The hope was that these incentives would spur development and expand opportunity in struggling neighborhoods. But new research suggests the program may suffer from the same problems as Tax-Increment Financing (TIF).

In a recent paper from the National Bureau of Economics, “Understanding the Employment Effects of Opportunity Zones,” the authors examine employment outcomes through 2023. They find that jobs located within Opportunity Zones did increase modestly. But most of those gains appear to come from nearby communities rather than representing new economic activity. Sound familiar?

The authors estimate that job growth inside Opportunity Zones is largely offset by job losses in adjacent low-income tracts. Their overall conclusion is that the program mainly results in a “spatial reallocation of jobs and households” rather than broad economic gains.

The distribution of those jobs also matters. Most of the new positions in Opportunity Zones are filled by workers who live outside the zones—often in more affluent neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the economic circumstances of existing residents show little improvement. Employment among residents rises slightly, but median earnings and poverty rates do not change significantly.

These results should sound familiar to longtime readers of the Show-Me Institute. I’ve argued that programs like TIF often fail to generate new economic growth. Instead, they tend to shift development across neighborhoods or municipalities. Projects still get built, but just in a different place.

The evidence on Opportunity Zones suggests something similar may be happening at the federal level.

Investment incentives can influence where development occurs. But that does not necessarily mean they create new economic opportunities for the people policymakers mean to help.

TIF is TIF is TIF, even at the federal level.

The post Are Opportunity Zones Just Federal-Level TIF? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE

Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Elias Tsapelas, and I’m the Director of State Budget and Fiscal Policy at the Show-Me Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, Missouri-based think tank that advances sensible, well-researched, free-market solutions to state and local policy issues. The ideas presented here are my own and are offered in consideration of proposals that will affect tax credits in Missouri.

Senate Bill 1079 consolidates Missouri’s existing film and series production tax credit sub-caps into a single $16 million pool for both, leaving the state’s total commitment the same. The only substantive effect of the bill would be to give the Film Office more flexibility in how the same dollars are allocated. That flexibility does not address the fundamental problem with this program.

Current and Past Tax Credit Failures

Despite the Missouri film tax credit’s recent revival, our state has a long history with this troubling incentive. Until its sunset in 2013, Missouri’s previous iteration made promises similar to what supporters are touting today. Missouri’s own Tax Credit Review Commission recommended the credit be eliminated because it served too narrow an industry and failed to provide a positive return on investment.¹

Research confirms that pattern holds nationally. Film tax credits have not resulted in job growth, have not affected market share or industry output, and have produced only short-term wage gains for those already in the industry.² Credits in many states generated just cents on the dollar. As one Tax Foundation analyst notes, “non-favored activities and businesses remain on the hook to bear the full impact of the state’s tax code.”³

The Missouri Film Office has pointed to the number of projects approved and production spending in the state as evidence the program is working, but that is not the right measure for determining whether the program is a good investment for state taxpayers.⁴ The relevant question is how much the state receives back in tax revenue and broader economic activity—and by that measure, the research is consistent: film tax credits do not generate a positive return.

The Competitiveness Argument Doesn’t Hold

Supporters of SB 1079 argue that pooling the sub-caps will make Missouri more competitive for productions. Even setting aside the ROI question, that argument doesn’t hold.

Steven Conrad, the showrunner who created a new HBO series set in St. Louis and filmed it entirely in Atlanta, recently suggested that governments may not be well-served by chasing the film industry at all.⁵ His observation reflects a structural reality: Georgia has spent two decades building the studios, crews, soundstages, and production infrastructure that make large productions possible. Missouri has not. No reallocation of $16 million changes that.

Georgia’s own state auditor found that even Georgia’s fully developed, deeply established program returned just 10 cents to the state for every dollar of credit granted, producing a net revenue loss of $602 million in a single year.⁶ If one of the most mature film-incentive programs in the country cannot generate a positive return on investment, a program at a fraction of its scale operating in a state without comparable infrastructure has no prospect of doing so.

Targeted Credits Are Poor Economic Policy

Targeted economic development tax credits are just another way for lawmakers to pick winners and losers, a job that is better left to consumers in the market. When tax breaks are given to some, other taxpayers have to make up for the lost revenue. The impulse to do something to support an industry is understandable, but tax credits are a poor substitute for the conditions that make industries thrive organically. A dollar of film tax credits reduces state revenue by exactly the same amount as a dollar of direct appropriations—the difference is that credits bypass the appropriations process and receive less scrutiny.

Prioritize Tax Relief That Benefits All Missourians

Missouri is already a national leader in state spending in the name of economic development. Over the past few decades, Missouri has forgone billions in state tax revenue in favor of a host of narrow incentives that have consistently shown poor results. In FY2025 alone, Missouri redeemed more than $961 million in tax credits—nearly double the $521 million redeemed in 2010.⁷ The General Assembly is simultaneously weighing whether to eliminate the state income tax, a reform that would deliver broad economic benefits to every Missourian. The legislature should consider whether a growing tax credit portfolio is consistent with that goal. Expanding targeted credits that erode the income-tax base works against broad-based tax relief, and Missouri would be better served by pursuing the latter.

The film tax credit is a small program, but it exemplifies the approach to tax policy that makes comprehensive reform harder to achieve. Tax credit programs have not been successful in Missouri in the past, there is little evidence to suggest the film tax credit is succeeding now, and there is no reason to believe this program will perform differently under a restructured allocation. If increasing economic opportunity is the goal, the research is clear: Instead trying to manufacture more opportunities at the expense of taxpayers, lawmakers should provide broad-based tax relief to every Missourian.

NOTES

1. “Report of the Missouri Tax Credit Review Commission.” Missouri Tax Credit Review Commission. 2010; https://www.semissourian.com/files/tcrcfinalreport113010.pdf.
2. “Lights, camera and no action: How state film subsidies fail.” USC Press Release. August 18, 2016; https://pressroom.usc.edu/lights-camera-and-no-action-how-state-film-subsidies-fail.
3. Loughead, Katherine. “Illuminating the Hidden Costs of State Tax Incentives.” Tax Foundation. 2021; https://taxfoundation.org/state-tax-incentives-costs.
4. “Made-in-Missouri Film and TV Productions Spent $40.7 Million in 2025.” Missouri Department of Economic Development. February 2026; https://ded.mo.gov/press-room/made-missouri-film-and-tv-productions-spent-407-million-2025.
5. Neman, Daniel. “HBO’s DTF St. Louis has a dream cast, but it wasn’t shot here.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. February 26, 2026; https://www.stltoday.com/life-entertainment/local/movies-tv/article_cfa2d34c-435a-40fd-9fa5-75933d716915.html.
6. “Impact of the Georgia Film Tax Credit.” Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, Performance Audit Division. Report No. 18-03B. January 2020; https://www.audits.ga.gov/ReportSearch/download/23536.
7. “Fourth Quarter Tax Credit Report, Fiscal Year 2025.” Missouri Department of Revenue. 2025; https://dor.mo.gov/public-reports/documents/Fourth-Quarter-FY25-Tax-Credit-Report.pdf.

The post Senate Bill 1079: Film Tax Credits appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE

Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Elias Tsapelas, and I’m the Director of State Budget and Fiscal Policy at the Show-Me Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, Missouri-based think tank that advances sensible, well-researched, free-market solutions to state and local policy issues. The ideas presented here are my own and are offered in consideration of proposals that will affect tax credits in Missouri.

House Bill 2142 consolidates Missouri’s existing film and series production tax credit sub-caps into a single $16 million pool for both, leaving the state’s total commitment the same. The only substantive effect of the bill would be to give the Film Office more flexibility in how the same dollars are allocated. That flexibility does not address the fundamental problem with this program.

Current and Past Tax Credit Failures

Despite the Missouri film tax credit’s recent revival, our state has a long history with this troubling incentive. Until its sunset in 2013, Missouri’s previous iteration made promises similar to what supporters are touting today. Missouri’s own Tax Credit Review Commission recommended the credit be eliminated because it served too narrow an industry and failed to provide a positive return on investment.¹

Research confirms that pattern holds nationally. Film tax credits have not resulted in job growth, have not affected market share or industry output, and have produced only short-term wage gains for those already in the industry.² Credits in many states generated just cents on the dollar. As one Tax Foundation analyst notes, “non-favored activities and businesses remain on the hook to bear the full impact of the state’s tax code.”³

The Missouri Film Office has pointed to the number of projects approved and production spending in the state as evidence the program is working, but that is not the right measure for determining whether the program is a good investment for state taxpayers.⁴ The relevant question is how much the state receives back in tax revenue and broader economic activity—and by that measure, the research is consistent: film tax credits do not generate a positive return.

The Competitiveness Argument Doesn’t Hold

Supporters of HB 2142 argue that pooling the sub-caps will make Missouri more competitive for productions. Even setting aside the ROI question, that argument doesn’t hold.

Steven Conrad, the showrunner who created a new HBO series set in St. Louis and filmed it entirely in Atlanta, recently suggested that governments may not be well-served by chasing the film industry at all.⁵ His observation reflects a structural reality: Georgia has spent two decades building the studios, crews, soundstages, and production infrastructure that make large productions possible. Missouri has not. No reallocation of $16 million changes that.

Georgia’s own state auditor found that even Georgia’s fully developed, deeply established program returned just 10 cents to the state for every dollar of credit granted, producing a net revenue loss of $602 million in a single year.⁶ If one of the most mature film-incentive programs in the country cannot generate a positive return on investment, a program at a fraction of its scale operating in a state without comparable infrastructure has no prospect of doing so.

Targeted Credits Are Poor Economic Policy

Targeted economic development tax credits are just another way for lawmakers to pick winners and losers, a job that is better left to consumers in the market. When tax breaks are given to some, other taxpayers have to make up for the lost revenue. The impulse to do something to support an industry is understandable, but tax credits are a poor substitute for the conditions that make industries thrive organically. A dollar of film tax credits reduces state revenue by exactly the same amount as a dollar of direct appropriations—the difference is that credits bypass the appropriations process and receive less scrutiny.

Prioritize Tax Relief That Benefits All Missourians

Missouri is already a national leader in state spending in the name of economic development. Over the past few decades, Missouri has forgone billions in state tax revenue in favor of a host of narrow incentives that have consistently shown poor results. In FY2025 alone, Missouri redeemed more than $961 million in tax credits—nearly double the $521 million redeemed in 2010.⁷ The General Assembly is simultaneously weighing whether to eliminate the state income tax, a reform that would deliver broad economic benefits to every Missourian. The legislature should consider whether a growing tax credit portfolio is consistent with that goal. Expanding targeted credits that erode the income-tax base works against broad-based tax relief, and Missouri would be better served by pursuing the latter.

The film tax credit is a small program, but it exemplifies the approach to tax policy that makes comprehensive reform harder to achieve. Tax credit programs have not been successful in Missouri in the past, there is little evidence to suggest the film tax credit is succeeding now, and there is no reason to believe this program will perform differently under a restructured allocation. If increasing economic opportunity is the goal, the research is clear: Instead trying to manufacture more opportunities at the expense of taxpayers, lawmakers should provide broad-based tax relief to every Missourian.

NOTES

1. “Report of the Missouri Tax Credit Review Commission.” Missouri Tax Credit Review Commission. 2010; https://www.semissourian.com/files/tcrcfinalreport113010.pdf.
2. “Lights, camera and no action: How state film subsidies fail.” USC Press Release. August 18, 2016; https://pressroom.usc.edu/lights-camera-and-no-action-how-state-film-subsidies-fail.
3. Loughead, Katherine. “Illuminating the Hidden Costs of State Tax Incentives.” Tax Foundation. 2021; https://taxfoundation.org/state-tax-incentives-costs.
4. “Made-in-Missouri Film and TV Productions Spent $40.7 Million in 2025.” Missouri Department of Economic Development. February 2026; https://ded.mo.gov/press-room/made-missouri-film-and-tv-productions-spent-407-million-2025.
5. Neman, Daniel. “HBO’s DTF St. Louis has a dream cast, but it wasn’t shot here.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. February 26, 2026; https://www.stltoday.com/life-entertainment/local/movies-tv/article_cfa2d34c-435a-40fd-9fa5-75933d716915.html.
6. “Impact of the Georgia Film Tax Credit.” Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, Performance Audit Division. Report No. 18-03B. January 2020; https://www.audits.ga.gov/ReportSearch/download/23536.
7. “Fourth Quarter Tax Credit Report, Fiscal Year 2025.” Missouri Department of Revenue. 2025; https://dor.mo.gov/public-reports/documents/Fourth-Quarter-FY25-Tax-Credit-Report.pdf.

The post House Bill 2142: Film Tax Credits appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE

Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Elias Tsapelas, and I’m the Director of State Budget and Fiscal Policy at the Show-Me Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, Missouri-based think tank that advances sensible, well-researched, free-market solutions to state and local policy issues. The ideas presented here are my own and are offered in consideration of proposals that will affect tax credits in Missouri.

House Bill 2058 consolidates Missouri’s existing film and series production tax credit sub-caps into a single $16 million pool for both, leaving the state’s total commitment the same. The only substantive effect of the bill would be to give the Film Office more flexibility in how the same dollars are allocated. That flexibility does not address the fundamental problem with this program.

Current and Past Tax Credit Failures

Despite the Missouri film tax credit’s recent revival, our state has a long history with this troubling incentive. Until its sunset in 2013, Missouri’s previous iteration made promises similar to what supporters are touting today. Missouri’s own Tax Credit Review Commission recommended the credit be eliminated because it served too narrow an industry and failed to provide a positive return on investment.¹

Research confirms that pattern holds nationally. Film tax credits have not resulted in job growth, have not affected market share or industry output, and have produced only short-term wage gains for those already in the industry.² Credits in many states generated just cents on the dollar. As one Tax Foundation analyst notes, “non-favored activities and businesses remain on the hook to bear the full impact of the state’s tax code.”³

The Missouri Film Office has pointed to the number of projects approved and production spending in the state as evidence the program is working, but that is not the right measure for determining whether the program is a good investment for state taxpayers.⁴ The relevant question is how much the state receives back in tax revenue and broader economic activity—and by that measure, the research is consistent: film tax credits do not generate a positive return.

The Competitiveness Argument Doesn’t Hold

Supporters of HB 2058 argue that pooling the sub-caps will make Missouri more competitive for productions. Even setting aside the ROI question, that argument doesn’t hold.

Steven Conrad, the showrunner who created a new HBO series set in St. Louis and filmed it entirely in Atlanta, recently suggested that governments may not be well-served by chasing the film industry at all.⁵ His observation reflects a structural reality: Georgia has spent two decades building the studios, crews, soundstages, and production infrastructure that make large productions possible. Missouri has not. No reallocation of $16 million changes that.

Georgia’s own state auditor found that even Georgia’s fully developed, deeply established program returned just 10 cents to the state for every dollar of credit granted, producing a net revenue loss of $602 million in a single year.⁶ If one of the most mature film-incentive programs in the country cannot generate a positive return on investment, a program at a fraction of its scale operating in a state without comparable infrastructure has no prospect of doing so.

Targeted Credits Are Poor Economic Policy

Targeted economic development tax credits are just another way for lawmakers to pick winners and losers, a job that is better left to consumers in the market. When tax breaks are given to some, other taxpayers have to make up for the lost revenue. The impulse to do something to support an industry is understandable, but tax credits are a poor substitute for the conditions that make industries thrive organically. A dollar of film tax credits reduces state revenue by exactly the same amount as a dollar of direct appropriations—the difference is that credits bypass the appropriations process and receive less scrutiny.

Prioritize Tax Relief That Benefits All Missourians

Missouri is already a national leader in state spending in the name of economic development. Over the past few decades, Missouri has forgone billions in state tax revenue in favor of a host of narrow incentives that have consistently shown poor results. In FY2025 alone, Missouri redeemed more than $961 million in tax credits—nearly double the $521 million redeemed in 2010.⁷ The General Assembly is simultaneously weighing whether to eliminate the state income tax, a reform that would deliver broad economic benefits to every Missourian. The legislature should consider whether a growing tax credit portfolio is consistent with that goal. Expanding targeted credits that erode the income-tax base works against broad-based tax relief, and Missouri would be better served by pursuing the latter.

The film tax credit is a small program, but it exemplifies the approach to tax policy that makes comprehensive reform harder to achieve. Tax credit programs have not been successful in Missouri in the past, there is little evidence to suggest the film tax credit is succeeding now, and there is no reason to believe this program will perform differently under a restructured allocation. If increasing economic opportunity is the goal, the research is clear: Instead trying to manufacture more opportunities at the expense of taxpayers, lawmakers should provide broad-based tax relief to every Missourian.

NOTES

1. “Report of the Missouri Tax Credit Review Commission.” Missouri Tax Credit Review Commission. 2010; https://www.semissourian.com/files/tcrcfinalreport113010.pdf.
2. “Lights, camera and no action: How state film subsidies fail.” USC Press Release. August 18, 2016; https://pressroom.usc.edu/lights-camera-and-no-action-how-state-film-subsidies-fail.
3. Loughead, Katherine. “Illuminating the Hidden Costs of State Tax Incentives.” Tax Foundation. 2021; https://taxfoundation.org/state-tax-incentives-costs.
4. “Made-in-Missouri Film and TV Productions Spent $40.7 Million in 2025.” Missouri Department of Economic Development. February 2026; https://ded.mo.gov/press-room/made-missouri-film-and-tv-productions-spent-407-million-2025.
5. Neman, Daniel. “HBO’s DTF St. Louis has a dream cast, but it wasn’t shot here.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. February 26, 2026; https://www.stltoday.com/life-entertainment/local/movies-tv/article_cfa2d34c-435a-40fd-9fa5-75933d716915.html.
6. “Impact of the Georgia Film Tax Credit.” Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, Performance Audit Division. Report No. 18-03B. January 2020; https://www.audits.ga.gov/ReportSearch/download/23536.
7. “Fourth Quarter Tax Credit Report, Fiscal Year 2025.” Missouri Department of Revenue. 2025; https://dor.mo.gov/public-reports/documents/Fourth-Quarter-FY25-Tax-Credit-Report.pdf.

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Thomas Friestad at the Kansas City Business Journal wrote recently that an engineering firm (Gannett Fleming TranSystems, formerly GFT) is moving its offices to the H&R Block building in downtown Kansas City.

Longtime Show-Me Institute readers will recognize H&R Block as a poster child for the false claims that economic development subsidies drive job creation. But this latest news only makes the point more relevant.

The TIF project was adopted in July 2006 and will last for 23 years, through 2029. For the duration of that time, all the additional property taxes and half the increase in sales and income (earnings) tax generated at the site are returned to the developer to offset the costs of developing the site. According to the latest report from the Missouri Auditor’s office, as of April 2023, this subsidy has redirected $23.5 million in property taxes and another $73.4 million in sales and earnings taxes away from the basic services they would have otherwise supported (schools, roads, libraries, etc.), instead sending the money back to the developer.

GFT moving into the H&R Block building means that a portion of the taxes it pays, most notably the 1% earnings taxes levied on each employee, will now also be redirected away from basic services to the developer to pay down the cost of the H&R Block building.

A lot of time is spent talking about how Kansas City loses revenue when businesses leave the city. We need to remember that due to our generous subsidy culture, we often lose revenue even when companies remain.

Side note: One can immediately imagine a scenario wherein developer landlords in TIF districts lower their rents because they know they will capture the additional tax revenue, thus undercutting properties that actually pay taxes. These deals are no way to run a city.

The post The TIF that Keeps Taking appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

How has the project worked out? Did the promises of redevelopment of this part of the city and a great return on the public tax investment pan out? Or did the warnings and concerns of people like Institute analyst Audrey Spalding prove correct?

Of course, Northside has been a total failure, and Audrey and others were correct.

The latest update on almost 20 years of policy failure is that a batch of McKee’s properties (which taxpayers bought for him) is being seized by the city via eminent domain. More of his properties may face the same fate soon. In this particular case, the properties are needed for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) project, so the eminent domain seizures are for legitimate public use. The city tried to buy these properties from McKee, but no agreement could be reached on price, so the city is taking them. The final price paid for them will almost certainly be determined by a court.

Everything you need to know about why economic development using subsidies is a road to failure is wrapped up in this story. The entire project began not based on market forces, but on the forces of lobbyists, lawyers, and politicians. It was sold as a way to save parts of north St. Louis from decades of poverty and blight—conditions that were created in part by government policy in the first place. The entire Northside redevelopment project has been a colossal failure from the start, and the city and state should never have authorized tax subsidies for it. In the state’s case, it created a brand new law just for McKee to do this.

I would hope the city and state would learn a lesson from the failures of tax incentives and subsidies from this project. I doubt very much that they will. As Orwell said, to see the things in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle—a struggle that politicians rarely have any incentive to engage in.

The post Live By the Sword, Die By the Sword appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I remember when Game of Thrones was at the height of its popularity and its catchphrase seemed to be plastered everywhere I looked: “Winter is coming.” Today a similarly ominous refrain is echoing across the energy sector: Data centers are coming.

A data center is a physical location that houses servers and related hardware that process, store, and transmit digital information. As artificial intelligence use expands, demand for computing power is also rising at a feverish pace, driving the need for more and more energy-intensive data centers.

As in Game of Thrones, there is a certain mystery surrounding how dire the situation truly is.

In April 2024, Goldman Sachs forecast that data centers would rise from 2.5% to 8% of all U.S. electricity usage by 2030. However, Google recently reported a 33-fold reduction in their energy usage for AI text prompts in a single year. It is difficult to predict how much more energy will be needed in the coming years.

Current Missouri law protects average ratepayers from “any unjust or unreasonable costs from service to such customers [such as data centers].” However, this does not mean none of the burden of building new generation capacity will fall on ratepayers, and an overbuild based on overly aggressive demand projections could leave them paying for unused assets.

On the other hand, failure to build sufficient power supply (whether due to demand miscalculation or delays in constructing multiple plants) could cause Missouri to miss out on significant investment in the state. Worse, an underbuild could create real reliability concerns. There is real tension here, and a great deal of pressure to predict and build effectively.

Fortunately, there is a policy that could help alleviate some of this pressure: consumer regulated electricity (CRE).

The premise of CRE is fairly straightforward: allow consumer-regulated electricity utilities (CREUs) that are disconnected from the ratepayer-supported grid to create “private energy islands” for the largest new customers (such as data centers). This approach makes sense for two reasons:

1. The anticipated surge in demand is expected to be fueled by a small number of users. By isolating the electricity supply of these customers from the ratepayer-supported grid, CRE can help shield everyday customers from spikes in energy prices.
2. The increase in demand is predicted, but it isn’t certain. CRE ties both the risk and the possible rewards of building new power plants to the companies that will use the resulting energy.

This year, New Hampshire passed a law to allow CREUs to generate, transmit, distribute, and sell electricity as long as they operate independently from existing utilities and do not serve the general public (CREUs are still subject to appropriate oversight, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for nuclear plants). Missouri could do something similar, and there are many reasons to do so.

#1: Protecting Ratepayers from Risk

If the projected surge in electricity demand materializes, CRE could help lessen the severity of rate increases by allowing some large customers to be served by independent CREUs. Because these facilities are privately financed and serve only their customers, their costs would not be spread across all ratepayers. If electricity demand falls short of projections, then the excess capacity will have been a poor investment.

#2: Accelerating Capacity Buildout and Investment

 Missouri needs to build new generation capacity. In a permission-first, regulated environment, that process can be slow. Letting CREUs build and operate their own generation facilities could help keep economic development from being constrained by red tape.

Further, CREUs could offer more tailored payment structures and allow companies to align their energy sources with their own environmental or strategic goals—without forcing all ratepayers to work toward those same goals.

#3: Alleviating Pressure

Not only does Missouri face new demand growth, but our two largest electric utilities are dealing with coal-plant retirements. This transition would be challenging even without a new surge in demand. CREUs would allow utilities to focus more on serving their current customers.

CRE could be an ideal response to an abrupt surge in energy demand driven by a narrow set of customers. It would provide price security to everyday ratepayers, give data centers control over their power supply, and decrease the need for governments to predict future energy demand. Data centers are coming, and CRE is worth exploring as a way for Missouri to prepare for them.

The post Data Centers Will Require Innovation in Missouri’s Energy Sector appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In Kansas, Sales Tax and Revenue (STAR) bonds are a state-level form of tax-increment financing, similar to taxing districts created by municipalities in Missouri. The state issues bonds to pay for development costs and then repays that debt using only the additional state sales taxes generated inside the project district. The claim is that the project’s shoppers—not general taxpayers—will cover the cost.

The sheer size of the STAR bond being considered for the Chiefs is staggering, and Kansas leaders will likely need to be creative to satisfy the risk being taken by potential bond buyers. I don’t envy them in that task.

The tax question is another issue. The STAR bond will determine the base year of sales tax revenue. You might assume that the base year would be 2025 or 2026, but it could conceivably be 2020 or 2015. But whatever the year, once that dollar figure is determined, everything collected anywhere in the approximately 300-mile district in excess of that dollar figure will be dedicated to pay for the Chiefs’ projects for 30 years. Mind you, the cost of delivering public services will continue to rise due to inflation or, say, due to huge infrastructure projects developed to support the stadium. But the sales tax revenue to pay for those needs is frozen at the base year level.

What then happens?

In Missouri we got the answer in 2016. Due to Kansas City’s profligate subsidy culture, property tax revenue, which libraries depend on, was flat. And so the Mid-Continent Library system sought an increase in property taxes. In doing so, the library observed:

[T]ax incentives and abatements by local government have impacted the revenue that would generally result from the growth of the Library’s tax base. The Library’s budget has been essentially flat for the past 8 years.

Advocates of subsidies often argue that they are free, because they are paid for with funds that wouldn’t exist anyway. This is exactly the argument Kansas Governor Laura Kelly makes ad nauseam. But as we learned in Missouri, that just isn’t true.

Kansans might not see tax increases going to the Chiefs’ project, but they are very likely to see tax increases because of the Chiefs’ project.

The post Kansas’s Coming STAR Bond Tax appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“We have gone from about 80 properties to about 480 properties,” Hulshof explained. “My cup runneth over.”

Like supporters of government-managed economic development programs everywhere, backers of the plan in Charleston think that if the government approves the right plan here, with the right subsidy there, with the right government agency approval soon, that government plans can magically turn a struggling city into a boomtown. As economist Dick Netzer once mocked these eco devo officials, “Who needs oil wells, when a state can be another Kuwait just by increasing the budget of a tiny agency?”

A Chapter 353 plan with mass property tax abatements would not help Charleston. It would, in fact, almost certainly hurt it more. If property taxes are too high for businesses in Charleston (which I doubt, to be honest), then the city, school district, county, etc. should lower the rate for everyone, not give some property owners in downtown Charleston a big tax abatement that will almost certainly force tax increases on everyone else to make up the difference.

There are a multitude of studies that demonstrate the fallacy of believing that government economic development agencies can successfully engineer economic growth through various subsidies. Here is one simple summary from two economists who have looked at the question thoroughly: “The best case is that incentives work about 10% of the time and are simply a waste of money the other 90%.”

There are other economists who wouldn’t even agree they work 10 percent of the time. As one economist said after he reviewed a similar tax-subsidy laden plan for north St. Louis:

Among the most vocal critics of the NorthSide plan was the chair of Washington University’s Department of Economics, Prof. Michele Boldrin, who testified at the trial that the benefits promised by McKee such as new jobs and increases in property value were “dreamy,” “out of thin air,” “unreasonable,” and “completely arbitrary” and further stated that “if an MBA student came up with it, I’d throw him out of my office.”

St. Louis and other cities in Missouri have been using tax incentives as a prop for politicians to claim they are “doing something” for decades. How has it worked out for St. Louis? As author Colin Gordon wrote in him study on that precise question in his book, “Mapping Decline”:

The overarching irony, in Saint Louis and elsewhere, is that efforts to save the city from such practices and patterns almost always made things worse. In setting after setting, both the diagnosis (blight) and its prescription (urban renewal) were shaped by — and compromised by — the same assumptions and expectations and prejudices that had created the condition in the first place.

If you think the results in Charleston are going to be any different, I have a bridge over the Mississippi to sell you. A Chapter 353 plan for Charleston will allow politicians and planners to claim they are doing something, it will benefit the politically connected and the lucky, and it will empower city government to get more involved in the local economy. All of these things are, by the way, bad things. What a 353 plan won’t do for Charleston is help revitalize the city or grow the economy.

The post A Chapter 353 Tax Abatement Plan is the Last Thing Charleston Needs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The first zoning example is in Des Peres, where the owners of a wellness and substance-abuse treatment center want to operate on the site of a recently closed hospital. Let’s repeat that. A healthcare-related business wants to open on the site of a former hospital. In a rational world, the City of Des Peres would do nothing more than say, “Welcome to Des Peres.” But, alas, nothing is ever easy. The Des Peres Board of Adjustment has decided that a wellness and treatment center is not a hospital and denied the application and permits to operate. Furthermore, city officials have said the company seeking the approval cannot appeal the decision, as it doesn’t own the property yet. The company can appeal once it finalizes the purchase of the property, but then it will be forced to make a very large investment in the site without having any idea if it will be allowed to use it after purchase. This is, of course, all completely insane.

I am not adamantly anti-zoning. Nobody here is trying to put a chemical factory into a neighborhood (or some similar hyperbolic example anti-growth NIMBYs usually make). This is a wellness and treatment center that will be located where a hospital was. The fact that the city can deny any part of this is absurd.

The other zoning example is nearby on the border of Chesterfield and Wildwood. Here, a small, tightly knit African-American community has lived for over a century, and the land has become very valuable over recent decades as the suburbs have expanded. The family that owns most of the land wants to sell its largely undeveloped property and build a lot of new, large homes there, which is exactly what has happened in the surrounding area for the past 40 years. Not so fast . . .

Among the many impediments the family is facing is the opposition of neighbors. Here is a great quote from the public hearing by an opponent of the zoning change to allow the redevelopment:

“This would certainly be a substantial change to the character of this entire area,” resident Chrissy Jurkiewicz told the city council at its Dec. 1 meeting. “The landscape would be forever altered.”

Come again? What does the speaker think happened 20 or so years ago when her own subdivision was built? Did her own house and all of her neighbors’ homes somehow not “forever alter the landscape?” Did Osage Indians roam the area in the early 1800s and see a bunch of empty houses in her neighborhood and wonder why nobody lived in them?

A while ago, the City of Chesterfield approved rezoning to redevelop the property, but the City of Wildwood (remember, it’s on the border) rejected the rezoning precisely because the Chesterfield change was “too permissive” and would “overdevelop” the land. The entire area has changed from farmland to subdivisions over the past 50 years, but a bunch of Wildwood officials who live in those new subdivisions get to tell this family that their sale would “overdevelop” the land. This is infuriating, and it’s denying this family the right to the prosperity it has earned.

Does this mean cities should have no say at all in these zoning changes and redevelopments? No. For instance, in the Chesterfield case, I think the nearby residents have legitimate concerns about water runoff if the higher land above them were to be developed. But that’s not a reason to deny the proposal; that simply means the cities should ensure a plan to address such possible harm is included. As for the eternal concerns about things such as increased traffic, cities (and counties) can use the increased taxes generated by the development to fund the infrastructure improvements it may necessitate. We used to allow people to build, and we used the expanded tax base to fund the improvements we needed. Now we either reject it or subsidize it. (Yes, I’m exaggerating, but the point stands.)

It’s great that we have more liberal city and county zoning rules in Missouri than the rest of the country. However, these examples show that there is additional room for improvement.

The post We Still Need Zoning Reform in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Festus is not alone in its debate. Nationwide, there have been significant disputes about whether communities should want data centers in their backyards. While data centers can bring investment to a community, there are concerns about electricity, water usage, and sound.

Of the hundreds of citizens participating in the recent Festus hearing, one gentleman’s comments captured my attention. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported:

He urged local governments to turn any revenue gain due to the new facility into lower property taxes for the general public. He also said a data center should pay for any increase in utility rates due to the extra energy usage it requires. And, he said, the city should not offer the data center any tax incentives.

I have to wonder—has this gentleman read this article I recently published?

Jokes aside, his comments convey a few key points that I think are important to keep in mind when considering a data center project in a community.

#1: Lower taxes help drive economic growth, so a reliable course of action is to return extra revenue to taxpaying citizens.

New data center revenue ought to be returned to taxpayers through lower tax rates, easing pressure on the entire tax base. Property tax abatements should not be handed out.

#2: Find innovative solutions for electricity needs.

Last year, a major energy omnibus bill, Senate Bill 4, included a provision that protects average ratepayers from “any unjust or unreasonable costs from service to such customers [such as data centers].” This should help shield average ratepayers from rate hikes to meet this new energy demand, but some burden will likely still fall on them.

While it is a state-level solution, Missouri should explore consumer-regulated electricity (CRE), which would allow new data centers and other large customers to be served by separate, independent grids. This idea could be beneficial for both ratepayers and developers. You can read more about CRE here.

#3: Remember what data center developers are prioritizing, and do not hand out subsidies.

Lastly, the actions of the biggest data center customers have made their priorities clear.

Money does not seem to be a big factor for these enormous developers. They instead seem focused on energy availability, speed to operation, and long-term stability. A clear example of this is Microsoft pouring an enormous amount of money into restarting Three Mile Island for its data centers.

Instead of handing out subsidies, a municipality could evaluate its own permitting rules. Reducing red tape could both accelerate speed to operation and signal that the community is a dependable, long-term location.

Festus will certainly not be the last community to have a heated debate about data center development. Keeping these key principles in mind, however, may help communities have productive debates on this topic.

The post The Data Center Debate Continues in Festus appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But a recent news story gave another twist to the idea of cities as romantic partners.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that NorthPoint Development called off a $120 million apartment complex of over 300 units and will soon sell the site. Why? Because the city was constantly making additional demands. What started as a yes was becoming a maybe. NorthPoint backed out.

The Post-Dispatch quoted St. Louis Development Corp. Executive Director Otis Williams as saying, “if we just stuck to whatever we said we wanted to do,” the project would have continued.

Alderman Michael Browning alleged the city wasn’t “good-faith negotiators. With all of the unpredictable things in development, the city does not need to be the thing that constantly changes.”

Yes, the city needs to be consistent. But that does not mean the city should crank the subsidy spigot to full blast.

The story notes the number of projects receiving subsidies from the St. Louis Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority (LCRA) has dropped since 2018. The chairman of the LCRA, Matt McBride, argued that because there are so few developers wanting to work with the city, “we need to be encouraging of those who are taking the risks to do so.” I suspect by “encourage” he means, “subsidize.” The folks who hand out subsidies always want more to hand out.

Perhaps there is another way. Perhaps, instead of overregulating the market, instead of demanding ever increasing concessions, instead of imposing costly application, permitting, and approval stages, the city just got out of the way of those who want to build in St. Louis?

City leaders should work to address barriers to development rather than leaving them in place and cutting checks to offset them. They’ve already shown a willingness to do so with liquor regulations and parking mandates.

Unfortunately, Megan Green, president of the board of aldermen, wants to further increase the city’s demands of developers regarding affordable housing and community benefits. But that will just increase the costs for developers and, in turn, increase the amount of taxpayer subsidies. “St. Louis,” she says, “has been a cheap date for way too long, and we should not be a cheap date.”

It calls to mind the bawdy punchline: ‘We’ve already established that, madam. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

Unfortunately, taxpayers are picking up the tab for these dalliances. Instead of seeking more expensive dates, St. Louis should make itself a more attractive partner by ditching its baggage and focusing on stable, long-term relationships.

The post St. Louis Needs to Stop Dating and Settle Down appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

-Potential reforms to the initiative petition process in Missouri
-The need for better accountability measures in our schools
-The role consultants play in creating harmful economic development policies
-Creating free-market policies in energy
-Big changes coming to welfare policy via the One Big Beautiful Bill
-Kansas City’s expensive failures are a warning, not a model

Click here to find the newsletter.

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