Once again, several bills have been filed that would drastically improve Missouri’s telemedicine laws. As I’ve written before, Missouri was one of the best places in the country for telemedicine a few short years ago. Patients and providers were given a plethora of options for how they communicated, which greatly expanded access to health services across Missouri. But after the emergency declaration for COVID-19 ended, Missouri reinstated a variety of measures that needlessly restrict telemedicine access.

According to a report from the Cicero Institute, Missouri’s telemedicine laws are lacking in three key areas. First, our state is not what Cicero calls “modality neutral.” What this means is that Missouri’s telemedicine laws don’t allow for several modes of communication that have shown to be successful in other states. At least one bill filed this year attempts to move our laws closer to modality neutral by allowing telemedicine services to be provided via audio-only (not video) technologies. This is something mental health providers are very interested in.

Second, Missouri restricts telemedicine access across state lines. If you’re in St. Louis and need a doctor, why shouldn’t you be able to see a provider over telemedicine who practices in Illinois? With so many Missourians struggling to find the healthcare they need, expanding telemedicine access to any licensed provider who’s willing to treat Missourians seems like it should be a no-brainer.

Finally, Missouri makes it unnecessarily difficult for providers to write prescriptions for their patients, especially if they’ve only ever seen them over telemedicine. The process is even more cumbersome if the provider is an advanced practice registered nurse (ARPN). Clarifying the prescribing process and making it easier for APRNs to treat patients via telemedicine should be a benefit to both patients and providers. Fortunately, there are several bills filed this year that tackle these issues.

It’s time for Missouri’s elected officials to recognize that it’s not 2019 anymore. Telemedicine has come an incredibly long way in recent years, yet Missouri’s laws still treat the service as if things are the same as they were pre-COVID-19. Hopefully, this is the year Missouri’s policymakers take notice and take the actions necessary to expand telemedicine access.

The post On Hold for Telemedicine appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In the April 6th election, voters in the Boonville R-1 School District approved Proposition 2. Proposition 2 allows the district to borrow $4 million to repair and improve the area’s schools; it passed by a more than 50-point margin. The overwhelming support for the proposal serves as a reminder of how important the Boonville community views sufficient funding for public schools. But if so many residents of the district believe schools deserve millions in new funding, why would the city’s elected officials consider using TIF to divert future tax dollars away from schools and into the pockets of a private developer?

Cities across Missouri are finally catching on to how bad of a deal TIFs can be for local schools. In fact, the Boonville R-1 Board of Education recently joined the ranks of the St. Louis and Kansas City school districts by formally opposing the use of TIF.

The reasoning behind the school’s opposition is simple: When a home is built within a TIF district, the families that live there will pay the same property (real estate) taxes as everyone else in the community, but instead of their tax dollars funding schools as they normally would, some of those funds go to the developer. In effect, this means that children could be attending public schools without the necessary funding.

The support for protecting local taxing districts (schools, public health, etc.) has become so widespread that the issue is finally receiving attention in Jefferson City. Over the past few weeks, Missouri’s legislature has moved closer to passing much-needed reforms to the state’s TIF laws. The bill being considered, SB 22, would make it harder to unnecessarily use TIF to the detriment of local taxing districts, and would represent a significant improvement for all of Missouri.

While we’re still waiting to see the final TIF proposal for Boonville and whether SB 22 gains final passage, it’s easy to see which way the winds are blowing. It’s time for Boonville’s elected officials to protect local funding for the Boonville R-1 School District by saying no to TIF.

The post Tides Turning Against TIF? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But education reform is just one iteration of a bigger idea: that the state has an obligation to step in to protect the rights of Missourians when local government bodies fail to do so. Yesterday the House Special Committee on Small Business held hearings on a wide array of COVID-related legislation. These bills would limit what local government could do in picking winners and losers among Missouri businesses, whether by shutting them down or dramatically limiting their operations for public health reasons. As we’ve said before, living in Chiefs Kingdom doesn’t make you Kansas City’s peasant, and having a small business in Missouri doesn’t make you a second-class citizen to big box stores and casinos.

Now many local administrators are crying “local control!” to defend their policy decisions from last year and to push back on these proposals as they pick up steam. Yet, shouting that “local control” is important doesn’t change what state subdivisions really are: managerial conveniences to the state. And when managers fail, the boss—here, the state—has to step in.

Local government exists not because it is categorically more efficient and effective in carrying out state priorities. It exists because there is a reasonable expectation that on most issues it will be. After all, local knowledge often has benefits to administration, but sometimes that just means more bureaucracy as we’ve seen in the explosion of administrators in both health care and education. “More administrators” sometimes just means “more administrators” and not “better administration.”

And that’s what mayors, county commissions, and a host of other local government jobs are: administrators. Where the state hasn’t spoken clearly, their role is to execute policies that don’t undermine the rights provided to Missourians who happen to be within the borders they administrate.

To fail to uphold state rights and adequately manage local privileges isn’t just some opportunity for a natural experiment, with local administrators ruling as they will. When a failure of local administration is identified, the state is duty-bound to consider intervention, and perhaps even intervene, to protect the rights and interests of Missourians in those districts.

That’s why I have to smile when I read about big Missouri cities and counties that intermittently extol the virtues of “local government” as a defense against state reform.

When Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas pumps up the importance of local control to defend his COVID shutdowns and then advocates not only for a statewide mask mandate but for a national one (!) too, his local control argument is actually about his preferred ends of “local control” in a specific instance, not the means of “local control” as a general rule. Legislators should learn this well in the months ahead because local officials will be using “local control” as an argument to fight reform.

One final note:

The relationship between local governments and the states is not the same as the relationship between the states and the national government. States create or enable the creation of local governments as subsidiaries to their control. States created the national government as a co-sovereign. “Local control” is not the same as a “state’s rights” argument, nor should anyone conflate the two.

I’m thankful that the legislature is already queueing up a round of legislation to curb the excesses and rights violations that happened last year in Missouri. I hope legislators ensure local government is properly restrained in the future.

The post Local Government Is a Managerial Convenience to the State, Not a Blank Check appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But is there something for reformers to work with here? I think so.

The amended bill includes in the definition of blight certain impoverished census tracts in St. Louis, which forms the kernel of a good idea. Well-maintained parking lots in wealthy neighborhoods hardly meet a rational definition for “blight,” and yet, public officials regularly tumble through the usual legal gymnastics to provide taxpayer support for such projects. Instead, binding “blight” to some objective definition of local poverty would return the state’s TIF programs to their original purpose—aiding areas faced with intractable poverty and enormous barriers to development.

Herein lies the opportunity: Make “blight” contingent on two factors. The first factor would be based on the common definition of blight, including unsafe and unsanitary buildings. The second factor, however, would require the property to be in an impoverished census tract. A “blighted” parking lot in the Central West End doesn’t need a tax benefit to see redevelopment, but a blighted block in the poorest sections of North St. Louis very well might. If tax benefits are going to be meted out, they should be helping poor areas pull themselves up by their bootstraps, not helping wealthy areas polish their wingtips.

Whether SB 570 makes it into law is anyone’s guess; its rapid progress this early in the session would seem to bode well for it. But if TIF reform is going to pass this year, it really should include changes in where TIF support is legally proper. Fix “blight,” and you are taking an important step in the direction of fixing TIF. Hopefully, the political will exists to do that before the end of the legislative session.

The post Serious TIF Reform May Be in the Cards in 2020, With A Tweak appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

[The bill proposes that] the state law be repealed that requires vehicles of five years or older to be inspected every other year. Rep. J. Eggleston, R-Maysville, said the bill would put the responsibility of having vehicle inspections in the hands of drivers.

“I have no doubt that problems are detected in the inspections and are corrected,” Eggleston said. “The point I was making though, is these problems would, by and large, be detected and corrected anyways even without the inspections.”

Eggleston said he has done a large amount of research on the subject and that states where inspections are no longer required have not seen a major increase in safety problems.

“I’ll be honest when I first heard the topic, I was against getting rid of the inspections and my investigation was to set out and prove that they were helpful,” Eggleston said. “I was trying to prove a former legislator wrong, and I ended up proving him right and proving me wrong.”

Eggleston says that putting an end to the inspections would save Missourians $30 million each year in fees alone. As Eggleston notes, this  isn’t technically a tax, but is practically speaking indistinguishable from one. Tax or not, he argues, that’s millions back in the pockets of Missourians statewide. And he’s right. The issue is already making some headway in the legislature.

The article quoted here, from the St. Joseph News-Press, is worth a full read, as it gets into some of the objections mechanics have against the change, including the fact that sometimes the inspections turn up problems that have to be fixed. I’m sure that’s sometimes the case. But is the cost of a state-mandated inspection worth the cost to Missouri consumers? Or, is its continued existence more a benefit to mechanics, who can get a fee and potentially a customer, if they find anything amiss? Expect to hear a lot of debate over this during the next couple of months.

The post Should Missouri End Some of Its Vehicle Inspections? Maybe appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Happily, legislators are considering a reform proposal that would make three important changes to how TIF projects are awarded.

• It would eliminate TIF for the use of anything other than combating blight, eliminating TIF for “conservation areas,” and “economic development areas,” ensuring that it is used in “redevelopment areas” only inasmuch as they are blighted. Regarding blight, it removes from the blight definition such considerations as “defective or inadequate street layout,” “deterioration of site improvements, improper subdivision or obsolete platting” and “morals.” We’ve suggested a completely new standard for blight, but the language in the proposal is a step in the right direction.
• Once a TIF plan is sent to a city government for final approval, that body must hold a 30-day comment period before it votes on the proposed district.
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it grants those taxing jurisdictions a 60-day period after the city council or board of aldermen approves the TIF plan to decide on whether to withhold half of their portion of the TIF taxes excluded.

Proponents of TIF have argued that school districts have no incentive to give up their property tax and with vote to exclude themselves every time. But that argument does not stand up under examination. Missouri school districts have voted to support TIF in the past when it made sense. And in Kansas, where school superintendents may withhold all of their tax funds, they rarely if ever do.

The most powerful parts of this bill are the 30-day comment period and the ability of the taxing jurisdictions to exclude half their taxes. These provisions mean more time to consider the impacts of TIF plans and give more influence over the process to those with the most to lose.

Some will undoubtedly claim that this reform will kill TIF, but that’s unlikely. What it will do it make it more likely that TIF projects are a good deal for everyone, including developers, cities, libraries, and school districts. Taxpayers will need to remain vigilant, and this bill gives them more time to comment. Who could be against that?

The post Legislative Update: TIF Reform appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One reform that might make a great deal of difference is in the state’s legislative definition of blight. For the purposes of tax-increment financing, the blight definition is so broad as to be meaningless. One library executive said that under the existing definition, the governor’s mansion could be blighted. There are opportunities for improvement, and we need not look far.

The easiest option is to look at previously considered reforms. In 2002, Missouri Senator Wayne Goode introduced a bill that would have gone a long way in curbing abuses in blight findings. Specifically, Goode’s bill would require that any area subject to a redevelopment plan could only qualify if:

1. The host municipality—or, for unincorporated areas, the host school district—has low fiscal capacity; or
2. The census block group or groups (as defined in the most recent decennial census) containing the proposed redevelopment area had high unemployment; or
3. The municipality, census block group or groups, as defined in the most recent decennial census, containing the proposed redevelopment area was characterized by moderate income.

Goode’s bill defined such terms as “low fiscal capacity,” “high unemployment,” and “moderate income” in ways that were aimed at making sure that development projects only took place in the communities requiring taxpayer assistance and that effectively placed limits on crony capitalism.

Earlier, in January 1999, the Washington University Law Review published a piece by Julie A. Goshorn titled “In a TIF: Why Missouri Needs Tax Increment Financing Reform.” At the end Goshorn advocated for a new definition of blight that, like Goode’s, incorporated requirements for unemployment and poverty. While Goshorn’s reform dealt specifically with the definition of blight—a move favored by this author—she allowed wiggle room by permitting a blight finding if a building in the area was merely unsanitary. Given the lengths that developers, economic development staffers, TIF commissions, and city leaders have gone to broaden the standards of blight, it is likely that they will continue doing so in the future. Based on Goshorn’s original suggestion, the following terms and definitions might be considered for use in statutes and regulations:

(1) “Blighted area,” is an area that satisfies both (a) and (b) below:

(a) Buildings in the area are:

1. Unsanitary, unsafe for living or working;

2. Substantially vacant; or

3. Subject to a crime rate significantly higher than that in other surrounding areas; and

(b) The area in general is characterized by:

1. Pervasive poverty, unemployment, and general distress, as evidenced by

a. At least seventy-five percent of the residents living in the area have incomes below eighty percent of the median income of all residents within the state of Missouri; and,

b. The level of unemployment of persons within the area exceeds one and one-half times the average rate of unemployment for the state of Missouri over the previous twelve months.

Legislators will undoubtedly wrangle over definitions and thresholds for income and unemployment. That debate is welcome. But legislators, whether conservative or liberal, urban or out-state, should recognize by now that the lax language in Missouri statutes regarding blight is draining municipalities of much-needed resources and providing little if any economic benefit.

The post Fixing a Blight on Missouri Statutes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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The TIF reform passed here deals primarily with St. Louis region tax incentive practices, which—while a step in the right direction—do not represent the sort of comprehensive, statewide tax incentive solution that Missouri ultimately needs. As my colleague Patrick Tuohey would remind us, TIF abuse is a problem that permeates all parts of the state, including and especially Kansas City. While restricting the geographic scope of this measure may have been the only way to ensure any TIF reform passed this year, we hope that broader changes to TIF are in the offing next year.

That said, the law's passage marks an important moment in the fight for tax incentive reform. Missouri and its localities have a long way to go to curb the cronyism embedded in the state's tax incentive culture, but it's encouraging to see progress being made on the issue.

The post Session Notes: TIF Reform Gets Approval, But More Needs To Be Done appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Let me tell you why this reform is so needed.

The main thrust of House Bill 1434 is to curb the rampant TIF abuse that residents in the Saint Louis area have seen recently, including the plan to subsidize a Stan Kroenke development only weeks after Kroenke moved the Saint Louis Rams out of town. With that incident in mind, most of the bill's language deals with three counties in particular—Saint Charles, Jefferson, and Saint Louis counties—and the manner in which TIFs can be enacted and administered. For those reasons alone, the bill has merit.

But there's another element that also deserves to be highlighted. Tucked a little deeper into the legislation is language that would make TIF committee activities more transparent to the public. More specifically:

It shall be the policy of the state [emphasis mine] that each redevelopment plan or project of a municipality be carried out with full transparency to the public. The records of the tax increment financing commission including, but not limited to, commission votes and actions, meeting minutes, summaries of witness testimony, data, and reports submitted to the commission, shall be retained by the governing body of the municipality that created the commission and shall be made available to the public in accordance with chapter 610.

For those wondering, Chapter 610 of the Missouri revised statutes contains the state's "Sunshine Law," and you'll find a parallel "policy of the state" language there as well.

It is the public policy of this state that meetings, records, votes, actions, and deliberations of public governmental bodies be open to the public unless otherwise provided by law. Sections 610.010 to 610.200 shall be liberally construed and their exceptions strictly construed to promote this public policy.

Transparency is an effective disinfectant, and for that reason alone this TIF bill is important. TIF reform been a long-standing priority here at the Show-Me Institute; that the legislature may finally take a substantive step in the right direction is both exciting and gratifying. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

The post TIF Reform Legislation Races Into the Homestretch, But the Clock Is Ticking appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• Paycheck Protection: This First Amendment-supporting reform passed the Missouri legislature by veto-proof majorities earlier this year. Unionized government employees should not have to underwrite political speech that they don't support. Paycheck Protection flips the equation around, allowing employees to instead opt-in to a union's politics, or keep their hard-earned money. Unfortunately, the Governor vetoed the bill last week; fortunately, we can expect the House and Senate to return to the legislation in the next few weeks to try to override that veto. The reform is one of a raft of government union accountability measures that are long overdue in Missouri.
• Ethics reform: Ethics legislation has already cleared both chambers that would limit elected officials' ability to act as paid political consultants, but a number of other good bills remain on the table that have a solid shot of passage. Among the most important bills that I hope will build some momentum as the session continues is a bill that would enforce a "cooling off period" between the time a legislator leaves office and the time he or she becomes a lobbyist. Effectively a non-compete agreement, this cooling off period would help to ensure that taxpayers have the undivided loyalties of their elected officials while those officials are in office. 
• Tax reform: While Kansas City and St. Louis decide whether to end their earnings taxes themselves in a few weeks, the legislature has continued to debate whether to cut taxes statewide, as well. One proposal would extend the income tax cut passed in 2014, reducing the top rate to 5% over a period of years. That would be a modest cut, but it would be an important one that would signal the state was open for business. The legislative chambers may also debate whether to phase out the state's earnings taxes directly, but it is unclear whether the House and Senate will make those reforms a priority this year.
• Tax incentive reform: We've talked for years about the problems that are created when governments cut special tax breaks for cronies, and a number of bills in the legislature would make progress on the tax incentive fronts at both the state and local levels. One bill in particular would reform tax increment financing decisions in the St. Louis area by, among other things, changing what development projects can receive if a county TIF commission rejects a TIF proposal.
• Obamacare's Medicaid expansion: While it was a live issue as late as last year, it appears Obamacare's Medicaid expansion is going nowhere in Missouri in 2016. That's appropriate; Medicaid is a broken program, and rather than double-down on this broken status quo, state and national leaders should focus instead on reforming it.

The post At Session’s Midpoint, Reforms Loom Large On Legislative Agenda appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The language in the bill is admirably simple, maybe too simple. Clever lawyers will have little difficulty in getting around the caps and what I hope is the plain intent of the law. With that in mind, I hope the Missouri General Assembly strongly considers some of the language changes we suggested in the testimony. Those changes are not designed to change the bill, but simply to buttress the limits from the inevitable municipal end-runs.

The Missouri Municipal League (MML) testified against the TIF reforms, which restored order to the universe after the incident the previous week when the MML and I actually agreed on something.

The post New Strategy On TIF Reform In Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

TIF reform can be accomplished if voting from all taxing districts that the TIF affects is required, as the above linked bills propose, or if the ability for cities to override a county TIF commission is eliminated. Both would be excellent. Neither plan would eliminate TIF in Missouri, though both would heavily reduce its use, in my opinion. The overuse of TIF is empowering local governments to plan our economy, pitting city against city (willingly, too often) in a property tax base race to the bottom, increasing the use of eminent domain, and is violating tax fairness because it allows cities to decide on tax exemptions that affect all levels of government.

Of course, there are many good aspects of TIF, but our word count limit will not allow me to go into them. That is a joke. There is absolutely nothing worthwhile about how we administer TIF in Missouri. (Other states use it more wisely, mostly because they focus TIF only on property taxes and do not include sales or income/earnings taxes.)

The focus for TIF reform is on the House because it pretty clearly will pass the Senate. (Last year, a major reform bill passed 34-0 in the Senate.) I think the governor would sign a good reform bill if it makes it to his desk. I am fairly certain that a substantial majority of House members would vote in favor of reform if it makes it to the floor. I think it is imperative that key House leaders allow TIF reform to get on that floor for a vote. Otherwise, this would be a tremendous lost opportunity for important changes in Missouri.

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