There is a lot of ongoing discussion about eliminating personal property taxes. There have been bills introduced to eliminate them. It’s a major topic of debate around the state, particularly in St. Charles County.

Personal property taxes are the taxes levied on your car, boat, livestock, business equipment, farm equipment, and more. (Thanks to data centers, the business equipment part has become much more important in the past year or so.) Missouri indeed taxes personal property more than most other states. I am perfectly fine with eliminating the tax. But people should understand that if personal property taxes were eliminated, the Hancock Amendment would allow local governments to then raise real property taxes by the amount lost in personal property taxes.

So, if the state eliminated all personal property taxes statewide, it would likely end up as a revenue-neutral switch where we taxed land and buildings slightly more and taxed mobile assets not at all while removing a tax that most people find particularly annoying. I think that would be a modestly beneficial switch; I just don’t want to sell it as a tax cut.

But could counties on their own eliminate personal property taxes? Yes, every county and taxing district in the state could eliminate personal property taxes if they wanted to. They just don’t want to and I understand why.

Currently, St. Louis County is the only county that is required to set different tax rates for different classes of property. RSMo §137.073 requires every local government within St. Louis County (including cities, school districts, streetlight districts, etc.) to set a property tax rate for each subclass of property. This means that there are different tax rates for residential, commercial, agricultural, manufacturing, and personal property. The requirement to break down the tax rate by subclass was originally intended for the entire state, but eventually the rest of the state was given the opportunity to opt out if their county commission chose to, which every county in the state did. As a result, the rule currently only applies within St. Louis County and (for an unknown reason) the city of Gladstone in Clay County.

In the rest of Missouri, every government with property tax authority sets one tax rate, which is then applied to all subclasses of real and personal property. There are a few exceptions to this (primarily cities that have never taxed personal property, such as Independence), but almost all governments outside of St. Louis County set the same rate for all real and personal property. But here is the key: Any county in Missouri can adopt different tax rates for different property classifications whenever it wants to.

County officials could require all the taxing entities within their county to set different rates, and then county officials could set the county rate for personal property at zero. But county officials could not tell other taxing districts within the county to apply those new, variable rates. Would any of them choose to set the personal property tax rate at zero? Well, let’s just say that since this switch was made in St. Louis County, I know of no taxing entity that has voluntarily set the personal property tax rate at zero (other than some municipalities that don’t have property taxes at all, such as Chesterfield, or had never set a personal property tax, such as Westwood).

What would happen if a county set its personal property tax rate at zero and no other governments followed? In St. Louis County, the county portion of the tax bill is about five percent. It is a largely similar percentage around Missouri (varying slightly, of course). If St. Louis County government set its personal property tax rate to zero tomorrow, the average car and boat owner would see a five percent reduction in their annual car or boat tax bill. That assumes no other local taxing districts got approval from voters to raise their rates at the same time, which would more than offset it.

The fact is that unless school districts agree to also lower personal property tax rates, any attempt by counties to end personal property taxes will produce underwhelming results. I still think it would be a good thing. We should tax fixed assets like land and buildings instead of mobile ones like cars. It would be a general improvement in tax policy and remove a minor annoyance for most people (i.e., their annual car tax payment).

Let’s just not pretend it would be a large tax cut.

The post What If You Eliminated Personal Property Taxes and Nobody Noticed? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Doug Burris, retired Justice Services Director and Chief United States Probation Officer, about criminal justice reform in Missouri and St. Louis. They discuss Missouri’s risk-based approach to sentencing and supervision; why building more prisons may not reduce crime; low violent-crime clearance rates in St. Louis; the case for bail reform and expanded electronic monitoring; the Safer Supervision Act before Congress; and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Welcome to the podcast, Doug Burris, who has been in and around criminal justice reform. I know you’ve been making a lot of pushes nationally, and you’ve worked within Missouri. What I want to talk about today is that in St. Louis city and county, folks are really celebrating this reduction in crime. Murders are down, and therefore we are on the verge of solving this issue. But it doesn’t feel that way to people who live there. I know you ran the county jail for a while and you’ve been closely involved in what’s going on there. What is your perspective on the St. Louis region in terms of where things stand today, in the middle of 2026, when it comes to criminal justice reform and identifying and clearing crimes?

Doug Burris (00:57):
Well, first of all, Susan, thank you for having me as a guest on your show. It’s greatly appreciated. I’m such a fan of the Show-Me Institute. To answer your question, there has been some progress, but I think what we have done is taken baby steps and we still need to walk and then run. There’s much work that needs to be done. I think the state of Missouri as a whole has been a great example of what can happen when criminal justice reform is done correctly. What was done with the Department of Corrections with prior work, including House Bill 1525, allowed for focusing on more high-risk cases and moving low-risk cases through the system quicker, getting them productive and out once they are. That’s what should be done more at the federal level, following what the state of Missouri did, and also at the local levels in the city of St. Louis. I think that’s exactly where we’re headed.

Susan Pendergrass (02:00):
So what did happen at the state level in Missouri? How did they shift their focus? It sounds kind of strange, but to make this system more effective and efficient, you need to find and lock up violent criminals, but people who are not violent criminals who commit a crime could be dealt with differently. What did Missouri do specifically?

Doug Burris (02:01):
Well, Missouri led the way for the rest of the country, as did Texas, where they implemented various reforms. One was making sentencing decisions and supervision decisions based on a risk level, where they had risk assessments that followed the science of criminal justice on who needs to be the most supervised and frankly the longest incarcerated, as opposed to the exact opposite. I’ll give two extremes of the situation. At the federal level, we have a grandmother who continues to cash her dead husband’s Social Security check, and that person ends up on federal supervision on the same caseload as a violent child predator. It’s really not necessary to have that woman on supervision when the real focus should be on the violent person. There is the Safer Supervision Act that’s before Congress right now, and we’re really hoping that gets passed so there will be more emphasis on supervising the people who are at highest risk, using risk assessments as a tool to determine that.

Susan Pendergrass (03:45):
And how long has Missouri been doing this? Do we know anything about how it has impacted the size of the prison population?

Doug Burris (03:53):
That’s a fantastic question. It’s been in play for about five years now. What has happened is the population of both the prisons in Missouri and the people on supervision has decreased, but the crime rates have not gone up. The same thing has held in Texas, which has done it for just a little bit longer than Missouri. So following the science really does work. And it’s at a considerable expense. It’s about thirty thousand dollars to house someone in a Missouri prison, and in a federal prison it’s over forty-two thousand dollars. It might be cheaper to send these people to college than to send them to jail or prison. And of course there might be more good done too, because there have been all kinds of studies showing that people who get an education or vocational training have drastically lower recidivism rates. That’s what we really need to be focusing on, and not the grandmother I talked about earlier.

Susan Pendergrass (04:58):
Well, it seems to me that a lot of states, including red states, are moving toward the idea of just building more and bigger prisons and locking everybody up, because if you want to show that you really care about crime, you demonstrate that you are ready to lock everybody up. But that’s not effective or efficient, right?

Doug Burris (05:21):
No, that’s exactly right. And unfortunately we’re seeing that in our neighboring state of Arkansas, where they’re constructing a new prison expected to cost one billion dollars to open the doors. One billion dollars. And then to operate it, if their annual rate of housing someone in prison equals Missouri’s, it will cost about a hundred million dollars a year to operate. And again, we’re going to have people in there who could be supervised in the community or given opportunities like drug treatment, job training, and education, things that will have people contributing to the tax base rather than taking from it.

Susan Pendergrass (06:03):
How do you convince people that a risk assessment is going to work when they want all the criminals off the streets?

Doug Burris (06:10):
Well, it’s twofold. One is we have to educate people that putting someone in prison is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars every year, and in the end they may come out more angry and less able to adapt to the community. The other thing is to follow the science. Look at what Missouri has done and what Texas has done, where they have lowered the prison population and crime has actually gone down. This is something other states should be following as well. We can’t keep everyone in prison forever. We just can’t afford it. And not only that, but it’s also inhumane. The cost would be astronomical if we start keeping people in prison for low-risk crimes that in some cases have no victims.

Susan Pendergrass (07:10):
A couple of things came up in the last legislative session. Governor Kehoe passed a violent crime clearance rate grant program, but the legislature hasn’t funded it. What are your thoughts on that?

Doug Burris (07:27):
When it comes to violent crime, I’m all in favor of keeping the most violent people in as long as possible and perhaps even for life. The question is where can we find ways to save money with those who aren’t violent? That’s what we really need to be focusing on. When you’re supervising a violent person but you also have nonviolent people on your caseload, it really just doesn’t make sense.

Susan Pendergrass (08:01):
Well, I was just thinking specifically about trying to direct some funds toward clearing crimes, because even though murders are down, clearance rates on murders are still pretty low in St. Louis, in the thirty to forty percent range. I would think that the same people who are interested in locking everybody up would like to clear more of these crimes. If you look at carjackings, most of those go unsolved. Maybe one in ten is cleared. While we focus on risk assessment, which is a great idea, there are other things we could be doing, like working harder to clear the crimes that are committed.

Doug Burris (08:39):
Absolutely. That makes complete and total sense, because when you’re talking about the worst of the worst, they don’t commit one crime and then never do it again. This is an excellent idea for putting resources toward making the community safer.

Susan Pendergrass (08:56):
Another thing that came up in the last legislative session was DNA testing people who are arrested, running their DNA and then disposing of it if they don’t match anything. I don’t think that went anywhere. I know there are a number of bills that have moved through trying to make Missouri a safer place. It wasn’t a really productive legislative session in 2026 in Jefferson City. A lot of things didn’t happen, but things are being attempted. What about St. Louis specifically? Having run the jail in the county, what do you think needs to be done there to improve residents’ feeling of safety?

Doug Burris (09:38):
I think more resources need to be directed at the court level, first of all, and at the investigative level like you talked about. But there are people in jail awaiting trial who have not been found guilty for three to five years. Can you imagine what it would be like to be in a place where you don’t see the sun for three to five years? You don’t feel the sun on your face or the hug of a loved one. I saw some of those cases where people were headed to trial and after three to five years the case just goes away. I think we need to really focus on giving the courts resources, and that includes both prosecutors and public defenders. Public defenders have some of the highest caseloads in the nation here in Missouri. If someone is innocent or can be dealt with quickly and given a path to become a productive citizen, that’s what we really should be focusing on.

Susan Pendergrass (10:37):
What about the bail system? Does that need reforming?

Doug Burris (10:41):
Yes, I really think so. That’s one of the things some other states have done that has shown incredible results: using a risk assessment at bail. The federal system does that currently, and I think it’s still underutilized. There are things that can be done with that risk assessment in terms of supervision strategies, but I think the judge needs to know the absolute risk of that person and what can be done to address it when making a decision on bail.

Susan Pendergrass (11:14):
Can’t we put more people on monitoring? I hate to suggest everyone gets an ankle monitor, but can’t we monitor more people while they’re awaiting trial rather than having to house and feed them?

Doug Burris (11:31):
Yes, absolutely. That’s an area that needs to be expanded. In the St. Louis County jail, for example, which is the largest jail in Missouri, there are three hundred people in custody right now who are low risk. We’re spending about a hundred and twenty dollars a day to keep them in jail, potentially for years. Low-risk people, if you follow the science, can typically be supervised in the community.

Susan Pendergrass (12:06):
So do you think that if we were to implement all of these reforms, do a risk assessment on every person charged, only lock up the violent criminals, and let people await their trial at home, that St. Louis would feel more safe or less safe?

Doug Burris (12:07):
Well, I think with proper supervision you’d have to do it right. You just can’t let everyone out. Utilizing the risk assessment would really be the key, because someone may be charged with a low-risk crime this time, but they could be on parole for a prior murder or rape or something along those lines. That’s why you really need to look at the risk assessment to determine the appropriate strategies for releasing people.

Susan Pendergrass (12:42):
Yeah. This just seems to be a growing sector of our economy and a growing slice of the budget pie. Missouri has budget problems. We’re putting so much money toward this idea of reducing crime, and for some reason people still just don’t want to walk to their car alone at night. I know there’s a lot of general public disorder in St. Louis, graffiti, homelessness, panhandlers, that also contribute to it. I wish I could understand a reasonable, cost-effective approach to

Doug Burris (13:26):
Yes.

Susan Pendergrass (13:37):
improving those conditions, because I know other cities have and I believe St. Louis can do it, but we have this reputation of being a crime-ridden city, and I think that’s so unfortunate.

Doug Burris (13:47):
Right. I completely agree with you. The truth is the answer isn’t to lock everybody up. The United States has the second highest rate of incarceration on the planet, only behind North Korea. The Department of Justice reports that if incarceration rates remain the same, one out of every fifteen adults in the United States will serve a prison term. One out of every fifteen. And that’s a prison term for a felony conviction, not a jail term for a DUI or a bad check. The costs are astronomical: thirty thousand dollars a year to house someone in a Missouri prison, paid for by the taxpayers. There have been proven strategies for getting people in and out of the criminal justice system. Ninety-three percent of those who remain employed on supervision successfully complete supervision. Those who remain unemployed throughout their supervision have a more than fifty percent failure rate. Getting people a decent job where they can care for others and find meaning is really one of the keys to lowering crime.

Susan Pendergrass (14:45):
Yeah. And there are public-private partnerships, and partnerships through religious organizations and other programs that have been shown to work, if we would free them up.

Doug Burris (15:13):
That is so true. Chuck Colson’s old organization, Prison Fellowship, is one of the best with the programs they offer in prisons and to people when they get out. It has proven, particularly in Iowa, to show drastic reductions in recidivism.

Susan Pendergrass (15:25):
Wow, that’s great. So I’m surprised to hear that Missouri has led the way on prison populations. I thought there was consideration about building a new prison, but I believe it’s not happening. Is that right?

Doug Burris (15:55):
Yes, that’s exactly right. Our prison population has actually decreased in the last few years.

Susan Pendergrass (16:03):
Wow, that’s really surprising to me. But good to hear. So what are you looking for the governor or the state legislature to do in the coming years?

Doug Burris (16:12):
I think they should build on the reforms that have already been proven to be successful. The one thing you mentioned that I think is frankly brilliant is the idea of working to close open violent crime cases, because on the violent cases, the chances are it’s not one crime they committed and then they go to work the next day and never commit another crime. I think that would be something fantastic for the state legislature to do.

Susan Pendergrass (16:37):
And at the federal level, what are you hoping to see done?

Doug Burris (16:46):
The Safer Supervision Act, as I mentioned before, is actually a bipartisan act, but it’s being led by the right right now. The conservatives are the ones who have introduced it into Congress. The Department of Justice is in favor of it. It would make the assessments we talked about more prominent, and it would also give people incentives to do things right, like getting a college education or a good-paying job and paying off restitution, where they can get off supervision earlier. That makes complete sense. But also, almost everyone convicted of a federal crime now is given supervision, like the grandmother I mentioned earlier who cashed her dead husband’s Social Security checks after he passed. This would allow for a more

Susan Pendergrass (17:33):
Mm-hmm.

Doug Burris (17:42):
thorough assessment at the time of sentencing, for the judge to not put people on supervision who don’t need it. That would clear up resources so more time could be spent on the people who really need to be supervised, as opposed to those who don’t.

Susan Pendergrass (18:01):
Yeah. A lot of the sentencing reform we hear about involves mandatory minimums, which force judges into incarcerating people whether they want to or not. I assume that’s not something you would support.

Doug Burris (18:16):
No. I worked in the federal system for twenty-three years and saw the damage that mandatory minimums have done. For instance, with crack cases, I saw a judge sentence someone who was selling five grams of crack. A gram is equal to about a sugar packet you put into your coffee, and five grams carried a mandatory five years. And then you would have people with no mandatory minimums who robbed a bank and did a shooting receive lower sentences than drug cases. Thankfully there were two reductions in the crack mandatory minimums, applied retroactively. Over 23,000 people had a resentencing, and when they were released, they did not offend at higher levels than those who served their full terms. That was money well saved. The judge has a better idea on sentencing someone when they have all the facts of the case before them, rather than relying on a statistical report done ten years prior that says, because he was convicted of this crime, he gets this sentence.

Susan Pendergrass (19:17):
Yeah. Right. Well, I’m relatively new to this area, but I think it’s all pretty fascinating. We struggle enough to get people to live in our cities, and if they don’t feel safe, that’s not going to help. I look forward to learning more about this area of policy and following more closely what Missouri and St. Louis specifically are doing. I would like to have you come back and talk about it again when there are real policies being considered, because it’s not going away and there’s a lot to learn.

Doug Burris (20:11):
Well, I appreciate it. I enjoyed my forty-year career in the criminal justice system, and hopefully I’ll be the only guy you’ve ever met who has been in more prisons than John Gotti.

Susan Pendergrass (20:16):
Hopefully. Thank you so much, Doug. I really appreciate it.

Doug Burris (20:27):
Thank you, Susan. It was a real honor.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Risk, Reform, and Public Safety in Missouri with Doug Burris appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Cory Koedel, director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, about Missouri education policy following the 2026 legislative session. They discuss the governor’s A to F letter grade executive order, why literacy legislation failed to pass, leadership turmoil at DESE, Show-Me’s latest Report on the effects of open enrollment, the case for expanding charter schools in Missouri, and more.

The post Missouri’s Stalled Education Reforms with Cory Koedel 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.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Aaron Renn, author and consultant, and David Stokes, Director of Municipal Policy at the Show-Me Institute, about the recurring debate over whether the city of St. Louis should rejoin St. Louis County. They explore what city county mergers have actually accomplished in places like Indianapolis, Louisville, Nashville, and Lexington, why a full merger in St. Louis would be extraordinarily difficult to pull off, and whether the benefits would even outweigh the costs. They also discuss St. Louis’s demographic challenges, what the Pittsburgh model might offer as a path forward, the cultural barriers that make it hard to attract and retain people from outside the region, and more.

You can find Aaron’s work here.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:05): Welcome back, Aaron Renn, to the podcast. So happy to have you and David Stokes, our own expert on cities and counties and all things municipal. I appreciate you coming on, Aaron. There have been murmurings around St. Louis again on a topic that we have revisited for probably a hundred years: should the city of St. Louis be a separate county from St. Louis County?

Before we get to that, I want to ask you something because I was reading the news this morning, and I know that you’ve written about city county mergers before, like cities that are kind of dying and then either pulling in parts of their closest suburbs to sort of make everything look better, broaden their tax base, make their crime numbers look better. I was reading something you wrote a year or two ago about that, and you said that Louisville is a failed example of that. Is that right, basically?

Aaron Renn (01:01): Yeah, I’m a little skeptical of how these things have worked out in practice.

Susan Pendergrass (01:05): Yeah, in terms of losing the flavor and the coolness of the city. Literally this morning I saw an article about how Louisville is having a renaissance and these young professionals are all moving there because they didn’t tear down all their beautiful old Victorian homes, so you can still get one for close to a million dollars. They’ve got a cool art scene and a bourbon scene. So it sounds like maybe Louisville did not lose its personal flavor in the merger. I would be curious to know what you think of that.

Aaron Renn (01:33): Well, I like to put St. Louis in context. I’m glad you mentioned Louisville because many of these river cities have similar characteristics. I like to look at St. Louis as well as three cities in the Ohio Valley: Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. All of them heavily German Catholic in their demographics. All of them are very geopolitically fragmented with many small tiny suburbs throughout. They all have very fragmented neighborhood systems as well, where everybody has a strong sense of neighborhood identity. Where you go to high school is a big social marker. They all have phenomenal collections of urban assets and great historic buildings. They all still have their own unique character in a country where that has sort of bled away.

Aaron Renn (02:31): And they also have curiously underperformed demographically and economically in terms of growth. They’re slow growth places. So one thing I always encourage people is to pan back the lens and don’t just look at St. Louis in isolation. Look at it in comparison or dialogue with some of these other places and see what you can learn from them.

Louisville is actually a quite troubled city in important ways. From a white collar employment perspective it’s doing well, from a blue collar perspective less so. It’s one of the 10 least educated major metros in the country. I don’t want to spend too much time on Louisville, but I want to talk about the city county merger, which is distinct from recombining the city and the county. This has been considered urban planning best practice for 30 or 40 years. There was a book written by David Rusk called Cities Without Suburbs. The idea is that cities that were able to expand their boundaries through either annexation or city county mergers were prospering, whilst cities that did not, like the Clevelands, the Cincinnatis, and the St. Louises, were struggling. So the idea is we need big box government.

Indianapolis, where I live now, had a city county merger in 1970. Louisville did a city county merger, I grew up near Louisville. Jacksonville, Florida, Lexington, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee did as well. What I would say is a few things. Merger is not necessarily bad. For Indianapolis, merger did prevent the city from essentially going down the tubes in important ways. So it really was a win in important ways.

But it did not prevent the historic city from going into the exact same demographic decline as St. Louis. The historic city of Indianapolis has lost almost exactly the same share of its population since 1970 as St. Louis has. Secondly, these are very politically difficult to pull off. They take enormous effort. They often fail multiple times. Louisville had multiple failures.

The most precious resource is always management time and attention. Is this where you want to put all your political chips? And in order to get it passed politically, what happens invariably is that most entities are actually not consolidated. In Louisville, none of the existing incorporated suburban governments were in fact merged. In Indianapolis, the school districts weren’t merged.

This means you don’t necessarily get all of the benefits you think from consolidation, because many things are excluded. And then unlike a corporate merger, where there’s typically a lot of downsizing and cost rationalization, in city county mergers nobody ever loses their job and salaries and benefits might even be harmonized upward to the high watermark. So don’t expect it to save any money. Personally, city county merger might have some benefits for St. Louis. I’m not saying it would have no benefits, but in my opinion it’s not going to be a needle mover and most likely it would be extraordinarily politically difficult and uncertain to pull off.

Susan Pendergrass (06:00): Yeah, no question. It’s been very politically difficult. People don’t want to do it. However, we do have these little tiny school districts and police districts. We have, I don’t know, 28 911 systems. We have a lot of what looks like bureaucratic waste and red tape. To the extent that doesn’t get resolved in a merger, then what’s the point? But I do think, you know, we’ve been talking about the demographics of St. Louis. There were over 800,000 people in the city once. Now there are maybe 280,000 and declining, and we’re in the death spiral of more people dying than being born. We’ve been in that for a while. And I guess it brings up the question of what is St. Louis to do if we are in this death spiral? We’re not having the babies. We’re having fewer babies than we did 15 years ago. So school enrollment is only declining. What is the prescription in that situation?

I’ve been to Cincinnati quite a bit. They’re trying to get people downtown with sports stadiums. It doesn’t really work. Louisville has sports stadiums downtown. I don’t know if people really want to move down there. I don’t see it working in St. Louis. So what is a city in that situation to do?

Aaron Renn (07:18): It’s going to be challenging in a sense because your problems are a little over determined. St. Louis was once a regional capital city, much like a Dallas or an Atlanta or a Denver or a Minneapolis. And it lost a lot of those functions. Many of its headquarters have left. It used to have a lot of professional services firms like ad agencies that did business all over the country, not just for the local market. Now St. Louis, although it’s still bigger than Indianapolis, looks a lot more like an Indianapolis or a Columbus, Ohio, where you have fewer corporate headquarters and most of the service firms are just there to serve the local market. St. Louis has essentially shrunk a little bit in relative importance, and it’s hard to get that back.

The demographics are also quite difficult and create a situation where it’s hard to attract business when you have a shrinking labor force, weak demographic growth, and a weak ability to bring people in from the outside. So it’s a very complicated situation and I don’t think there’s any silver bullet for St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (08:39): That’s what I’m asking you for. You have the answers. What’s the silver bullet?

Aaron Renn (08:43): So here are the things I would look at if I were in St. Louis. One of the clear issues that affects all of these river cities is that their wonderful, unique local cultures come with a downside, which is an extreme parochialism that has two negative effects. One, it makes it difficult for the communities to cohesively work together, which I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. City-suburb divides tend to be bigger. In Indianapolis, regional leadership is mostly all on the same page about the big issues. Same with Columbus, Ohio. Secondly, it makes it very difficult to attract people from out of town because they come there and they can’t make friends, they can’t penetrate the social networks.

Susan Pendergrass (09:15): 100%, yes.

Aaron Renn (09:40): You hear it over and over again in places like St. Louis, Cleveland, even Minneapolis, Minnesota. There are some sayings there. If you want to make friends in Minnesota, go to kindergarten, because that’s when everybody makes their friends. Or Minnesotans will give you directions anywhere but their house. They’re never going to invite you over. St. Louis has that reputation. I don’t think it’s just a reputation. And I know you just had Ness Sandoval on.

Susan Pendergrass (09:53): Yeah.

Aaron Renn (10:08): He’s talking about you need to get better on migration. Migration isn’t going to improve if migrants are not going to be able to join the social networks here. And that’s not even just international migration, that’s domestic migrants. So I think that’s a huge issue for the city. Cultural issues are hard to solve, but maybe less intractable than infrastructure.

The other thing is looking at Pittsburgh as a sort of model. Pittsburgh hasn’t solved really most of its problems by any means, but it has been able to regenerate in the city a sort of high value economy around Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. It’s done quite well. Many Silicon Valley firms have set up shop there. What’s happened in Pittsburgh, although it’s still a demographic decline story, is there’s been a demographic transition in the city. Pittsburgh went from one of the least educated cities in America to now one of the youngest and most educated. Part of it is old people moved and died off and young educated people replaced them. So the total number of people in the city was declining, but there was a churn happening underneath. And the same thing is already happening in St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (11:13): How did they do that?

Aaron Renn (11:33): College degree attainment in the city is now well north of 40%. So the people who live in the city of St. Louis are very educated. That demographic churn has raised educational attainment and thus incomes in the city a lot. Now Pittsburgh was different because it was an almost entirely white city. There’s a racial divide in St. Louis and gentrification concerns become more salient. But St. Louis is now an educated city. This is not an old post-industrial blue collar city. The city of St. Louis itself is very educated. And also being very small, it doesn’t necessarily need a massive change to move the needle. In Indianapolis we have a population of over 900,000. Moving that behemoth takes a lot. St. Louis now being smaller has a situation where there could be a big impact from lower numbers of things. So I think a knowledge economy built around Washington University and your medical centers has some possibilities, somewhat similar to Pittsburgh.

Susan Pendergrass (12:45): So much medical.

Aaron Renn (12:58): Carnegie Mellon’s engineering and computer science areas will be a little different. I might also look at Vanderbilt, what’s going on there? What are some peer schools you could watch to see what’s going on? But I think there are actually some reasons to think that the city of St. Louis, believe it or not, could be sort of turning a corner. It has now demographically renewed itself to a higher educational attainment state. Being small, it probably doesn’t have that much further to fall, and you can start building from there. Obviously there are governance challenges, but looking at the Pittsburgh model, studying similar complexes around peer schools, and addressing the culture issues is where I’d look.

David Stokes (13:33): Hopeful.

Susan Pendergrass (13:47): So as a spokesperson for St. Louis, what do you see for the future?

David Stokes (13:52): Well, I would be curious to get Aaron’s thoughts on that size question, about how the city of St. Louis has in fact gotten so small. It’s about 10% of the metro area. How does that affect the pros or cons of any type of a merger? These would not be a merger of equals. St. Louis County would almost subsume St. Louis City into it. How do you think that would affect things for better or worse?

Aaron Renn (14:28): Well, that was the critique of the Louisville merger by two academics at the University of Louisville. I mentioned the book Cities Without Suburbs. They wrote an academic paper called Suburbs Without a City, which basically said if the merger passed in Louisville, it would essentially mean the suburbs take over the city, not the city taking over the suburbs, because the old city of Louisville only had about 260,000 people and the suburbs would numerically dominate. The same thing would certainly happen in St. Louis. If there were a merger, suburban St. Louis County would control the city in essence.

Another consideration, and this is a Cincinnati issue, I interviewed about 15 years ago the mayor of Cincinnati, John Cranley. Here’s what he said, and I think this is an important point. He said, 30 years ago, city county merger was the thing because cities were in decline and you wanted to tap that suburban tax base to fund the city. But now it’s reversed. Now the cities are coming back and it’s the inner suburbs that are actually going down the tubes. And so in Cincinnati today, we have all the corporate headquarters, we have the universities and the medical centers, and we don’t have to share our tax revenue with anybody. If we were merged with the county government, we’d have to prop up all these failing suburbs. And so I think you’re in a similar situation in St. Louis, where the high value activity, not all of it is in the city of St. Louis because of Clayton and so on, but the St. Louis County suburbs are mostly places that are themselves on negative trajectories. Merging the city, which may be on the cusp of being able to bottom out and turn around, with all of these still declining inner suburban areas, might actually be an albatross around the city’s neck.

Susan Pendergrass (15:16): What would that mean?

David Stokes (16:37): I just think one of the differences between St. Louis and Cincinnati, and I don’t know the property tax base of Cincinnati, is that so much of the city of St. Louis is tax exempt right now. Between Washington University, Saint Louis University, and all the government entities, there’s just so much of it. I say that as somebody who supports property tax changes to make them pay something towards it. But I just don’t think the Cincinnati argument applies to the city of St. Louis right now. That property tax exemption part is a huge factor because the most growing, thriving part of it is the entire giant Barnes-WashU-Cortex complex, and the amount of property taxes they pay is miniscule.

Susan Pendergrass (16:38): Hmm.

Aaron Renn (17:26): Well, some of that is a planning issue. And I think the reality is, when you have a complex like that, are all these people going to move to St. Charles? Maybe not. I’ll tell you, I live in the suburb of Indianapolis named Carmel, and a lot of the hospitals and things have been opening facilities here. When these nonprofit hospitals come up here, we will not approve zoning changes for those hospitals unless they agree to make payments in lieu of taxes. You want to come up here and you want a zoning change, you’re going to have to pay. We were actually quite prescient in that one of the local hospital chains opened a for-profit hospital. As part of the approval deal, we said, if you ever convert to nonprofit status, you will continue paying property taxes. And we did that.

So I think there probably is leverage from the city over some of these entities. You don’t have a lot of leverage over a corporation deciding where to put their office, but that’s not a tax exempt situation. The stuff at Cortex is probably not going to leave if you make them pay a little money the next time they come to you for a zoning approval. I think you need to start looking at how to get more money out of these entities that are nonprofits in name only. These universities and hospitals are effectively gigantic hedge funds. Their executives are extremely well compensated and billions of dollars are flowing through there. Undoubtedly the better solution there is to figure out how to tax them rather than figure out how to tax the soon-to-be-dead mall in the suburb over the border.

David Stokes (19:24): Well, yeah, and that’s sort of the trade off, unfortunately, is that they do pay earnings tax. The employees, many of them very highly compensated, pay the earnings tax. And that’s what makes the city more dependent on local income taxes, not less, because they’re either tax exempt or in the case of Cortex, have tax abatements that make them essentially tax exempt.

Susan Pendergrass (19:25): We do have earnings taxes, right? So the folks who work there have to pay an earnings tax.

Aaron Renn (19:53): Yeah. Again, I don’t know exactly the fiscal architecture there. But I would say you don’t want to do a merger simply to do a tax dollar grab. The lesson of Indianapolis is we did that. We grabbed suburban tax dollars and we used it to rebuild our downtown successfully. But here we are 50 years later, and now we have enormous tracts of decayed suburbia that are an enormous problem. Our entire core county is now in a sense the inner city. We have big challenges because we were not able to invest in ways that allow those suburban areas to retain their allure over the long term.

And I’m not saying that’s impossible, but any short term juice you get, cities always rise and fall. Core cities have proven more resilient and more able to regenerate themselves than suburbs. Part of it is because state governments cannot afford to let their state’s largest city or major urban center go down the tubes.

Susan Pendergrass (21:06): Yeah.

Aaron Renn (21:16): Missouri cannot let St. Louis and Kansas City implode. Michigan cannot just write off Detroit and say who cares. But these suburban areas have proven a lot tougher to save. We don’t have a good model. We’ve spent decades thinking about how to rebuild cities and build districts. There are certain things you can pull off in a city around conventions, civic events, gathering spaces, museums, and government that are very hard to translate to suburban settings. So there’s not a great playbook, especially in declining markets, for renewing suburbs. The playbook for suburban renewal, if you want to call it that, is places like Carmel, Indiana, which are growing and affluent, and therefore can build large mixed use centers, new urbanist developments, trails, and parks. The suburbs of St. Louis County are probably tremendously deficient in infrastructure as we would understand it today.

So again, there may actually be some benefits in having St. Louis City rejoin the county in a sense, because then the county functions are spread and amortized across a larger population.

Susan Pendergrass (22:45): It would immediately improve our murder rate because we would be mixing it in.

Aaron Renn (22:48): Yeah, there is some of that. The murder rate is an artifact of the size of the city more than anything. There are places in Chicago with higher murder rates. A former colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute, Rafael Mangual, did an analysis of Chicago. He said there are areas on the South Side of Chicago that are larger and have more people than St. Louis with far higher murder rates than St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (22:56): We get called out because of the small denominator.

Aaron Renn (23:17): And so there is that. The other thing is Chicago is a good example. New York City was essentially a city county merger. In 1898, the five counties that are the five boroughs of New York were consolidated into one city. Philadelphia was also a city county consolidation from the 19th century. But what happens when you create a very large city of say a million people or more is you really have to scale up your government. You have to have a government that operates at that scale.

What happened with Indianapolis was we merged city and county government, but we didn’t really have a government that could effectively manage this new larger territory. It never built out the infrastructure in the suburbs. In New York, the Bronx has subways, great parks, everything built out with proper infrastructure, because it was part of New York and New York had to expand governance to become a city of eight million. Chicago got big in the 19th century and built a city government that could run a city of three million people. And some of the stuff that gets critiqued there, for example, is a lot of city services were organized by ward or city council district. There are 50 city council districts and every city councilor is sort of a little mini mayor of their district. The alderman essentially has veto power over any zoning changes. It’s called aldermanic privilege. So there are a lot of constraints there.

But if it’s just one mayor and one city council trying to think about a huge city of 77 neighborhoods and three million people, they can’t keep that much in their head. All they can think about is downtown. And that’s what happened in Indianapolis. The mayor and city council can really only think about downtown. We should have built out structures in townships throughout the city so that you had leadership focused on that area and money focused on that area. That’s what made the suburbs work really well. A suburb like Carmel is basically township sized. We have 100,000 people, big enough to do things, but not so big that our mayor and council can’t keep the whole city in their head and plan and manage the whole city.

So if you merge with the county government, you’re going to have to create an entirely new government structure that allows you to essentially manage every sub area of the whole thing and bring it all up to a standard of services. That’s the other thing they often did in Louisville and Nashville. They merge, but they have a two tier service system where there’s an urban services district for the old city which gets more services, and then the others get less. They didn’t do that in New York. There’s one standard of service in New York, one in Philadelphia, one in Chicago. So if you can’t commit to a single standard of service, you’re basically creating a bogus merger in my opinion. If you’re going to do a merger, you need to obliterate every government and entity in St. Louis County and city, merge them all into one with one standard. That’s not going to happen.

Susan Pendergrass (26:35): That’s not going to happen. What do you think, David?

David Stokes (26:37): Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

Aaron Renn (26:43): So you end up with a lot of problems. Louisville didn’t merge any fire departments. Imagine a city that doesn’t have a consolidated fire department. Imagine a city without a single police department. That was actually Indianapolis. When we merged, the Indianapolis Police Department still patrolled the old city, but the new parts of the city that were consolidated in from the county were still controlled by the sheriff.

Susan Pendergrass (27:13): That is 100% what would happen in St. Louis. Everyone would retain their school system and their police department and their fire department. I lived for a long time in Fairfax County, Virginia, which is a single county government. It’s massive, 150,000 students in their school system. It seems to function with a single police department and fire department. But I don’t think you can backwards engineer that into a place that for hundreds of years has been operating as it has been operating.

Aaron Renn (27:43): Lexington, Kentucky worked pretty well because one, the schools were already consolidated, as in the South it’s typically county school districts. Secondly, there were no other government entities, no township governments, no other incorporated municipalities. So it merged everything. And they were sort of able to solve the urban services district issue because the outer areas of Fayette County were horse farms. They actually put in a kind of green belt rule, you can’t develop out there, because they wanted to protect these scenic landscapes. So there was actually a good reason to treat that differently, because it was a very unique American landscape. Lexington, I think, was pretty successful.

Susan Pendergrass (28:15): They are. I appreciate it when I drive across Route 64.

Aaron Renn (28:39): Lexington was pretty successful and wasn’t especially controversial when they did it, in part because there weren’t all these entrenched interests like there are in other places. If you look at places that did the mergers, they weren’t the Cincinnatis and Pittsburghs. They’ve been talking about consolidation in Pittsburgh forever. It was very hard. And Louisville did it, but it was one of the least consolidated so-called consolidated governments. What the Louisville merger functionally did was dissolve the city of Louisville and reorganize county government. The county government now has a mayor and a council instead of the old fiscal court with the judge executive and all that.

Susan Pendergrass (29:21): That’s kind of what would happen in St. Louis, right?

Aaron Renn (29:36): That’s essentially what they did. They basically dissolved the city and the county government was reorganized, but nothing was merged.

Susan Pendergrass (29:43): Did you have a question?

David Stokes (29:45): I want to get back to the fire district point. We’re talking about why this would be so hard. There’s actually a law in St. Louis that only applies in St. Louis County that makes it impossible to consolidate fire districts. Even if a modest mid-sized suburb annexes an unincorporated part of town, they’re not allowed to provide fire services to that new annexed area, or they can, but they have to pay so much to the old unincorporated fire district that it makes it impossible to do so. That’s just one example of how even if you wanted a full scale merger, it would just be impossible to actually carry through.

Susan Pendergrass (30:34): Why do you think people float this idea, David? Why does it come back every couple of years?

David Stokes (30:38): You know, it’s the old line. I remember a study I read about Pittsburgh and St. Louis many years ago. The question was, are the St. Louis and Pittsburgh areas really inefficient with all the fragmented government? And the conclusion was, well, you would never design a metro area like this, but they’ve both made it work over the last century better than you would think. The conclusion was that St. Louis and Pittsburgh aren’t actually as inefficient as you might assume when you run the numbers.

I think people have trouble accepting that. People look at so many small municipalities, many of them dysfunctional, many of them until recent times funded themselves primarily with traffic tickets, which is a terrible way to fund local government, and that’s not even an exaggeration. And there’s just this fundamental belief that if you can just plan it better you’ll create a better place. I just think it fails.

One of the reasons it would fail, going back to what Aaron led this conversation off with, is that if St. Louis County and St. Louis City joined together, they’re not actually going to lay any government employees off to save any money. St. Louis City government is not going to fire city employees. It’s never going to happen. So you’re not going to save any money and it’s all just going to collapse.

Aaron Renn (32:12): Yeah, New York City and large governments are not more efficient.

I look at it and say, look, I think merger is a solution for failed states, if you want to call them that, in the St. Louis suburbs. Take some micro-suburb that’s a complete scam or is bankrupt and merge it in with its neighbor. Do some consolidation like that, that probably needs to be led by state government, almost like a receivership sort of thing. That’s just kind of good government as you work through it. But I just don’t think the benefits you would gain from trying to do a complete governmental merger of St. Louis City with St. Louis County would outweigh the opportunity cost of how much time and effort you spend on it, when you could be spending that on other things that I think will actually move the needle more.

The downsides are arguably as high as the upsides. There’s no guarantee it’s even net positive in this environment. The time to have merged was when Indianapolis did it in 1970, not in 2026. Nashville did it in the 60s. Jacksonville did it a long time ago.

And then I think it doesn’t fix the fundamental issues around the culture. You’ve got to take a hard look at that and say, it’s maybe very difficult to change. The idea that people who aren’t from here have to be able to move here and get connected and feel like they belong in the city. There’s a couple we know who lived in St. Louis. The wife taught in St. Louis public schools. They’re big urban people. The husband was from St. Louis, and they moved here to Carmel, Indiana.

Susan Pendergrass (33:47): Tell me more about that.

Aaron Renn (34:10): Basically they said, man, people are just so much friendlier here. They make better eye contact, they engage more. It’s just so much more welcoming than it was in St. Louis, even though they were actually in a sense connected because the husband was from there.

So when even people who lived in St. Louis and liked it notice a difference when they leave, that is a killer when you’re already struggling demographically. I had a guy who owned a business in Cleveland who said to me one time, I learned the hard way never to recruit anyone from out of town to work for my company unless that person or their spouse is from Cleveland, because otherwise they will never stay. When that’s where you are as a place, that is just rough. I think that is one of the killers for these river cities.

Susan Pendergrass (35:16): Yeah, what’s the fix for that? I don’t know what the fix is.

Aaron Renn (35:38): I think the optimistic case for St. Louis, and I actually tweeted this a year or two ago, is that St. Louis City educational attainment is really high now. In a sense, it’s a small, highly educated city that is probably going to continue growing more educated. So I think the Pittsburgh option looks viable in St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (36:00): And certainly great medical care. I know that the average age is getting older in St. Louis. I think within 10 years, one in four people will be over the age of 65. But we also have an Alzheimer’s research center and access to medical care, which as you get older gets more important. I do think there’s an opportunity to lean in to the medical services that are available, as the country as a whole gets older. I think St. Louis looks more attractive for that reason. So I think you’re right that with universities and medical centers, there’s an opportunity.

Aaron Renn (36:35): Yeah, I think if America’s demographics keep on this trend, a lot of other places are going to get to where St. Louis is. And the thing to be careful of is that when you’re in a declining market, that often prompts centralization of activity and population. What happened with Japan is that once Japan’s population started falling, everybody started moving to Tokyo. It’s Tokyo and a handful of other cities where everything is concentrated, and they literally have ghost towns there.

I don’t think it’s any accident that Indianapolis’ growth really took off once the Rust Belt era and deindustrialization hit the state. Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio have grown in large measure through drawing people out of the rest of the state as those states declined. Huge numbers of people move from Cleveland to Columbus every year.

Missouri is a little different than that. One of your challenges is that St. Louis does not draw people from rural Missouri. When I looked at the data, it’s not like there’s a massive flow into St. Louis from the rest of the state. So you don’t have that siphon bringing people in.

Susan Pendergrass (37:55): There are public safety issues around that, but yes.

Aaron Renn (38:00): And the issue we have is that we’ve now eaten our seed corn. There’s not going to be next generations of children in the towns I grew up in in rural Indiana to move to Indianapolis anymore. The cohort sizes are going to be smaller. So that pump, even Tokyo is declining now in population. That siphon is draining the water table. We can only rely on that so long.

But I think this is the risk for St. Louis in that kind of environment. People with opportunity might avoid or flee St. Louis and go to Austin, Texas or Nashville. They go to the handful of places in America that are really still growing. That’s a threat even for Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio. In a declining market, it’s very hard to get people to want to come to a shrinking city because the opportunity space is shrinking. St. Louis’s opportunity space has been shrinking because you’re losing corporate headquarters and your working age population is declining. That dynamic is really going to be a challenge. But within that, the city of St. Louis might end up doing okay. Again, being small actually helps it here.

Susan Pendergrass (39:25): Any closing thoughts on that, David?

David Stokes (39:27): Just that the part of Missouri that is definitely still growing, and that probably is attracting those young rural people who are moving to a city, is going into southwest Missouri, the Springfield-Branson area. That’s absolutely the growing part of the state. And even Kansas City is growing certainly more than St. Louis is.

Aaron Renn (39:48): Yeah, it’s not a culturally cohesive state. Springfield and that area are definitely growing, and growing despite the fact that they have nowhere close to the urban assets of a St. Louis. It’s interesting to watch, and we’ll just have to see what happens.

Susan Pendergrass (40:05): It is. I think about it a lot. I’ve been talking about this in terms of school enrollment for years and years, where you could see the biggest kindergarten cohort was after the Great Recession of 2009. You know that that’s the biggest kindergarten cohort for the last 15, 16, 17 years. We do nothing but build schools and hire teachers. We are slow to catch on to these things happening. But I think your perspective is certainly very interesting. On the question of the merger, it’s not worth the cost for whatever benefits there might be. But it still gets talked about, so I appreciate you coming and giving us your thoughts on it. Maybe we’ll have to have you back to talk about it again.

David Stokes (41:02): And Aaron, I want you to come back. I want to find out how we get more roundabouts in Missouri. I love roundabouts. I go to Carmel it seems like once a year for these gigantic youth sports tournaments up at Westfield, just a little bit north of you. My kids’ sports take me there. And I love the roundabouts. You cannot get enough of them.

Aaron Renn (41:09): I’d love to talk about that. My favorite topic.

Aaron Renn (41:24): Yeah, it’s great. We hardly ever have to stop. There are barely any stoplights or stop signs left in our city. It’s amazing. We’re one of the few growing places in America where traffic is better today than it was 20 years ago.

Susan Pendergrass (41:32): They’re awesome.

David Stokes (41:45): People don’t realize how good that is for air quality and everything. You just keep moving along, not stop and start. We need 100 times more roundabouts in this area.

Susan Pendergrass (41:55): Are you pretending that people stop at stop signs in St. Louis? Because let’s be honest, people don’t stop at stop signs.

David Stokes (42:00): Well, they roll them, but it’s still wrong when they roll them. Maybe all the people blowing red lights on Kings Highway at 50 miles an hour are just being environmentally conscious. I need to give them more of the benefit of the doubt, I guess.

Susan Pendergrass (42:12): That’s exactly right. All right, thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

Aaron Renn (42:19): Thank you.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The St. Louis City-County Merger with Aaron Renn and David Stokes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with J.S. Onésimo “Ness” Sandoval, demographer and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Saint Louis University, about what the data says about the future of the St. Louis region. They discuss record low birth rates and what they mean for school enrollment, why St. Louis is among the top regions in the country for deaths outnumbering births, how the region compares to Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and why suburbs like Chesterfield and St. Charles are aging faster than most people realize. They also discuss the role of housing supply, school choice, crime, and domestic migration in whether St. Louis can attract and retain young families, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Well, certainly not the first time we’ve spoken, Dr. Sandoval. At St. Louis University, you are such a fascinating demographer of the region, and I’ve been following your work as new census data has been released. You’ve been writing about it and creating what I think are really cool mapping tools that folks can look at to see how the St. Louis region is impacted. Thanks for coming on to talk about that. But first I want to sort of expand our view, because pretty sure that I read within the last week that the number of babies born in the United States was at an all-time low. Is that right?

Ness Sandoval (00:35): Yeah, so every year the United States will probably be breaking records. The data coming out for 2025 is a record low, and the data coming out for 2026 is even lower. The first few months of 2026, the provisional data that’s out shows even fewer. And this is what we expected. We call this a demographic shock, because in 2026, whenever you create an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, rational people do not have children until they understand that their job is safe, there’s not a recession coming, and we’re not at war. When you create this sense of fear, young people do the rational thing and don’t have children. We saw this in 2020 with COVID. We saw this in 2008 with the Great Recession. Anytime there is uncertainty, young people will postpone births. And that’s what we’re seeing. This started in November. We started to see the decline in births, and it’s continued from November, December, January, February. And so this is what we’re going to see.

Susan Pendergrass (01:51): So next year is going to be lower. And when you look at the state of Missouri, I’ve been saying this ad nauseum for years that our K-12 school enrollment is declining and will decline because of that sort of peak in 2008, just before the Great Recession. So our biggest kindergarten class was around 2012, and our kindergarten classes have by and large declined ever since. And so those kids are moving through the system. You can project that we will just have fewer and fewer kids enrolled in our K-12 system in the state of Missouri.

Ness Sandoval (02:06): No, we peaked in 2008.

Susan Pendergrass (02:11): By and large declined ever since 2012. And so those kids are moving through the system. So you can project that we will just have fewer and fewer kids enrolled in our K-12 system in the state of Missouri.

Ness Sandoval (02:24): Yeah, this is true, and we have a pretty good chart. We make these for every city. We’re replacing very large cohorts of children who were born. I have a son who was born in 2007, just before the recession. That cohort that graduated in St. Louis was 40,000 students. The baby birth cohort is now 27,000 students. So that’s just in that one year a 13,000 decline. And it’s going to decline every year for the next 15 to 18 years, because we don’t know what the bottom is yet. It has not reached the bottom.

Susan Pendergrass (03:01): Right. People say where are the kids going? I’m like, they’re not going anywhere. They weren’t born. The St. Louis region, like Clayton is declining, Ladue was, I mean, all of these school districts, I think almost everyone in the county has fewer kids today than they had 10 years ago.

Ness Sandoval (03:07): They weren’t born. Yes, and it’s not just St. Louis County. St. Charles County is experiencing this. There are some parts that are growing, in the Wentzville area, O’Fallon, but if you look at the old St. Charles areas, they’re experiencing decline. Families with children are declining in those areas. We had made an interactive map that I think shocked a lot of people, of seniors outnumbering youth. People could not comprehend this. Like, my gosh, this is not 2000 where youth were dominating these neighborhoods. I live out here in Chesterfield. The entire Route 64 corridor is senior citizens dominating the youth in Chesterfield. People are shocked. More seniors lived in Chesterfield than youth in 2010, and that’s only grown since. This is happening throughout West County.

Susan Pendergrass (04:14): Wow. And your maps actually go down to the zip code, right? You have very granular data.

Ness Sandoval (04:27): Across into Illinois, yes. The only way you can turn this around is young people from across the United States deciding that they want to make St. Louis their home, have a family there, create a business there. This is what I promote. We have to get younger. We really should have a preferential option for families with children. And that’s a hard message for a lot of people because they’re like, wait a minute, we grew from 1970 to 2020. And I’m like, but all of that growth was driven by babies born. Over 1.8 million babies were born. And I tell people, just do the math. 27,000 babies per year times 50. That’s the back of the envelope for what’s coming over the next 50 years. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s going to come. It’s going to be a lot lower than that. People are starting to get it. We’re not going to have 1.8 million babies born over the next 50 years.

Susan Pendergrass (05:33): Yeah, and I think about things like individual school systems building new elementary schools when there have got to be a lot of buildings that are empty. And also, won’t there be more competition for public resources between children and older people?

Ness Sandoval (05:49): Yeah. At my previous job at Northwestern, we did a project on this in one of the suburbs because we were studying seniors. There was a debate about how to spend public money. Was it for transit for seniors or transit for children? This was 2006, and this was the debate happening in Chicago. How do you provide paratransit for senior citizens when that number is increasing? We’re just having this discussion because St. Louis is leading. We’re in the top three of regions. Pittsburgh leads the country, Cleveland is second, and St. Louis is third, tied with Tampa. More people dying than babies born. We simply don’t have the number of babies born for the size of our population. And it’s because we’re a very old region. We’re the ninth oldest region in the country.

Susan Pendergrass (06:58): Yeah, I mean, we used to have 800,000 people in the city of St. Louis, right? And now we’re 280,000 or something.

Ness Sandoval (07:05): Yeah, and I was just looking at the numbers. It is very possible within two years that Kansas City will have more babies born in absolute numbers than the St. Louis metro region. That’s how few babies. I’m talking about the region. Indianapolis is about 700 babies behind St. Louis. Nashville is about 800 babies behind. All of these smaller regions are having lots of babies, and young people are moving there. Your future depends on the number of children born. And when you look at population projections, I kind of know what this looks like. When you fall below Kansas City in number of births, at some point Kansas City will be larger than St. Louis. We can project this out. We’re talking absolute births, not birth rates. We had lots of babies born 10 years ago. We were fine 10 years ago.

Susan Pendergrass (08:09): Yeah, wow.

Ness Sandoval (08:29): We can go back and talk about what happened since 2010.

Susan Pendergrass (08:35): Yeah, please. I’m curious what did happen. I know you call it the death spiral when there’s more deaths than births, but how did we get into this?

Ness Sandoval (08:41): So I moved here for the Great Recession. I moved in 2008 to start my job at SLU. And there was hope when I got here. There was some positive momentum happening. I think the region took it for granted that it didn’t have to do anything. We just have to be St. Louis. We don’t have to do anything. Unfortunately, Nashville came on the scene. Then you started to see regions change. Regions thinking we need to get young. And St. Louis absolutely did nothing. Since I’ve lived here, there’s been a lot of resistance to economic development in the region. Nashville, I think it was the popularity of being young, being pro-development. I went to Nashville to actually look at it, like why are young people there? And I went to Vanderbilt. And I saw this really interesting integration between the city and Vanderbilt University. That does not exist here in St. Louis. Making it a vibrant, cohesive, urban experience.

Susan Pendergrass (09:47): Yeah. Right. Now you step off campus at SLU and you’re in an area you don’t want to walk at night.

Ness Sandoval (10:00): Yeah, and even if it was WashU, right. And then you can talk about the Loop. It never recovered from COVID, traffic is down. I think the region has really struggled to attract young people to stay here and live here.

Susan Pendergrass (10:13): Well, we’ve been looking into the issue of crime in St. Louis quite a bit, and I know it’s down and everyone’s celebrating that fact, but I’m not sure when you survey people and ask how they feel walking alone at night, that it’s changed all that much. Even if the number of murders are down, I don’t know that people feel safer walking alone at night, and that’s got to have an impact on whether you want to stay in St. Louis after you have kids.

Ness Sandoval (10:47): Yeah. I think in the city you move out to the suburbs. The challenge is they work and you live for affordability. So many suburbs are against new development, even though they can develop. We see these debates in Chesterfield, that debate in Creve Coeur, several debates out in St. Charles. They don’t even talk about Jefferson County, because they’re celebrating voting down housing. My point is if you don’t want to build housing, Indianapolis is going to build it. Columbus is going to build it. Nashville is building it. We are no longer in the top 50 in new housing permits in the country. We’re 58th.

Susan Pendergrass (11:34): Why though? Is it because there’s not demand, or is supply being constrained?

Ness Sandoval (11:42): Supply is being constrained. Part of it is, when I speak to people, they say it’s going to hurt my home values. People want supply down. But you understand there’s a consequence to this. And home values are always good in St. Louis. But again, we always say there’s a city that we can look to that’s our future, and that’s Pittsburgh. If you really study Pittsburgh and look at it, you’re like, wow, there’s a lot of things we can learn as a city, and say this is not what we want to be. Pittsburgh leads the country in discounted rates on home sales. When people offer their price, most people do not get the price that they want. It’s a significant discount because the demand’s not there. We are about 20 years behind Pittsburgh.

Susan Pendergrass (12:25): Wow. I think a lot, in what I do, about the educational offerings in the region. Before we were recording we were talking about Texas. Texas, number one, doesn’t have an income tax, and also you can pick your child’s school from the get-go. They have hundreds, if not thousands of charter schools. And now they have a private school choice program that I think 250,000 families apply to. And Missouri has an extremely limited private school choice program, maybe 6,000 or 7,000 kids in the state, and not even the ability within St. Louis County to go outside of these tiny little districts. You can’t even go from Clayton to Brentwood. People really feel strongly about this and fight the idea of opening up the county and letting kids go within the county to any school district, and then the legislature fights it every year. And I’m like, we are just becoming less and less competitive.

Ness Sandoval (13:36): I don’t think people understand. I do a lot of work with schools now. We’re going to lose at a minimum 100,000 children under 15 by 2045. This loss is built into the system based on 27,000 births right now. The numbers are starting to show up in kindergarten. We have a smaller kindergarten class, a smaller first grade class coming in. And so a lot of schools are like, wait a minute, what’s going on? This is just starting. You have another 20 years, because we have these large cohorts that were still born after the Great Recession that are going to be replaced by smaller cohorts coming in. And there is no significant migration of children coming into the region.

Susan Pendergrass (14:28): So there are going to be difficult staffing decisions, and people don’t want to hear it. Like, we cannot continue to hire more teachers.

Ness Sandoval (14:32): You have to close schools. You have to close schools, have to merge schools. I’m doing some work in Parkway. People should not be surprised. Parkway is having meetings this month about what Parkway looks like going forward, and people are discussing consolidation. Rockwood is talking about a 15% decline in 10 years. Go out another 10 years, Rockwood will be talking about school consolidation. St. Charles will be talking about school consolidation in the old St. Charles area, the city of St. Charles. This is coming. Everybody focuses on the city and says the city needs to close schools. But you will see a discussion, I think, between Clayton and Brentwood.

Susan Pendergrass (15:06): For sure. Clayton had 2,500 kids. Now they’ve got closer to 2,000. I mean, that’s teachers, that’s buildings. And I know in Indianapolis, I’ve talked to a superintendent in that area. All parents can pick a public school. And he was like, I had some under-enrolled elementary schools and it was great for me because I put a language immersion program in one to bring parents in. I think the resistance to this idea is all about not wanting kids who aren’t paying property taxes, but I think it’s going to flip. Then you’ll be like, we’ve got to fill these seats. We’re paying the same teacher for 18 seats that we could pay for 22 kids. At some point they’re going to have to start laying off teachers. So I think there are some very difficult decisions ahead that you can see now, and there are things that could be done now, like at least not filling open positions.

Ness Sandoval (16:16): I think universities are seeing this, because many of them are relying on tuition and those dollars are not coming in. A smart university has to make cuts because it doesn’t get any better next year or the following year. There will be fewer students coming in. So universities that want to survive are making necessary cuts to survive.

Ness Sandoval (16:45): Again, we don’t know what the bottom of the birth decline looks like. We just happen to live in a state and a region that has seen a significant decline in children. I keep saying we’re modeling the future for people, either as a good or bad thing. They’re like, we want to be like St. Louis, or we don’t want to do what they did.

Ness Sandoval (17:13): I think a lot of people are starting to understand this. It’s like, we’re letting our children go, and we’re not doing a very good job of trying to keep them here. When you had 1.8 million births, you had enough to let children leave your region, leave the state. You don’t have that luxury anymore. Our models show the region should have anywhere between 1.3 million to a million births coming in over the next 50 years. We hope it’s not a million births, because that means you have an 800,000 decline in your population under 50. Or it’s 1.3 million births, which is only a 500,000 decline. But that’s coming.

Susan Pendergrass (17:43): How does immigration factor into it? Because I remember the last time we talked, you said that St. Louis is not very immigration friendly. And of course, the current national environment is not very immigration friendly.

Ness Sandoval (18:03): Missouri and St. Louis cannot rely on immigration to save it. It’s not a state that immigrants are going to come to in large numbers. They’re going to go to Florida. Miami leads the country. Even though domestic migration has people leaving, international migrants are going there as their top destination. They’re going to Philadelphia, they’re going to New York. We get immigrants who come here, but it’s a very small number, like 6,000 a year. We’re not even in the top tier as a top 25 metropolitan region. And Missouri is not either. So Missouri has to rely on domestic migration.

The data will show that probably for the decade, there will be more people dying than babies born in Missouri. Missouri will start to have from a natural perspective more people dying than babies born. And 91 counties across the whole state will have more people dying than babies born. So Missouri will become dependent for growth on domestic migration.

Susan Pendergrass (19:29): Or do we just accept that we’re not going to grow anymore? What’s the impact of that?

Ness Sandoval (19:33): Again, it’s going to be specific. I do think the Springfield area is going to grow, the Branson area, there’s growth. Part of this is retirement, I think. Kansas City is growing.

Susan Pendergrass (19:42): Why Kansas City more than St. Louis? What’s attracting younger people to Kansas City that is not happening here?

Ness Sandoval (19:49): Kansas City is a younger region. St. Louis is a fairly old region. Kansas City is a lot younger and it has a large Latino population, and that’s the largest growing population in the country, birth-rate wise. Latinos are now the second largest population in Kansas City. They surpassed the Black population, which I think even shocked me, because we thought we knew this was coming, but we thought this was going to be post-2030. The fact that it already happened shows just how many Latinos are moving there. And then you have an exodus of Black residents leaving Kansas City as well as St. Louis. I always tell people, when you have young Black families leave or young Black adults leave, those children ultimately leave too. And so that’s part of the story.

Ness Sandoval (20:48): When young people leave, the children that traditionally were born to those young people are now being born in Charlotte, Atlanta, Houston. The number one challenge for St. Louis and the state is the decline in births. If that doesn’t change, then you’re going to see that decline start to show up in five to ten years in our schools.

Ness Sandoval (21:17): And the private schools will simply go out of business because that’s dictated by the private market. Or they’ll do what many of the Catholic schools are doing. They think, we’re going to have middle school now, or we’re going to be K through 12. But then what about the parochial schools? There’s no growth. They’re just taking children out of other schools and putting them in their school system.

Ness Sandoval (21:45): And so again, I go back to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is about how do we manage population decline? The city is growing a little bit, but 100% of the growth in terms of the losses is in the suburbs. And that’s going to happen in St. Louis. When this loss starts to show up in the demographic accounting, most of the loss is going to be outside of the city of St. Louis. It’s going to be in the Chesterfield areas. It’s going to be in St. Charles.

Susan Pendergrass (22:18): So what could be done from a policy perspective? Chesterfield is trying to have this arts and entertainment district. They put in Topgolf and the concert venues. They’re trying to attract younger people there. Is it working?

Ness Sandoval (22:34): It’s not working. I mean, they have the same slight increase. I just posted this yesterday. People are shocked. The growth is in non-family households in Chesterfield. If you look at the new development, I call it downtown West Chesterfield. These are million-dollar homes, very expensive. Very few families with kids are there. These are empty nesters or dual-income, no-kids households. It’s very expensive for young families to get into Chesterfield today, when your entry-level home that was $170,000 in 1980 is $600,000 today. These are the challenges.

Susan Pendergrass (23:23): So build more starter homes?

Ness Sandoval (23:32): You need more entry-level homes. I’m not even going to use the word affordable. You need attainable homes for two incomes. And they can be built. But what I’ve heard is that a lot of cities do not want these homes. They want the $600,000 to $700,000 homes because of taxes. And so there is this tension there.

Ness Sandoval (23:56): Parkway and Rockwood are going to look very different in 30 years. They were very attractive amenities for young families with children. But I look at the data, and my kids are in Parkway. These schools are under-enrolled. You go and objectively look at the classrooms, you’re like, there should be 30 kids in these rooms and there’s 15. It’s great for me as a parent. I’m glad there’s only 15 kids for my fourth grader. One of the classes in Parkway Central, in the middle school, in his math class, there are eight students. I love it as a parent, but as someone who looks at the data, this is not sustainable.

Susan Pendergrass (24:45): Yeah, lots of one-on-one. Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out what would cause a renaissance in St. Louis. It doesn’t feel super safe. It has some great amenities and a great food scene and now MLS soccer. What would it take? Well, number one, you do have the school system problem where the St. Louis public school system is kind of a dumpster fire. So people want to move out if they have small children.

Ness Sandoval (25:32): Yeah, the decision to move out is made within the first three years once the baby’s born. We can see that in the data. When we moved from Chicago, because we lived in the city of Chicago, we wanted to live in the city of St. Louis. I think most people who move from Philadelphia or Boston are living in the city. We thought the city of St. Louis would be offering the same amenities. Because of the Great Recession, I came a year before my family, and we soon realized the city of St. Louis was not the city of Chicago in terms of amenities. And so we ended up in St. Charles. And I think most people make that same decision.

Susan Pendergrass (26:25): Yeah, my husband and I moved right into the city.

Ness Sandoval (26:27): We see it in the data. People are moving into the city from Philadelphia, from Boston, from Houston. But then, like me, if you have children and you’re not going to pay for private school, because that’s a tax in many ways, they’re going to exit out. And then with the Catholic schools closing in the city, there are going to be fewer options.

Susan Pendergrass (26:50): Yeah. But the public transportation is no good. I mean, there are things.

Ness Sandoval (26:57): And it’s interesting. We did see a kind of experiment during COVID. When COVID happened, the Catholic schools in the county opened up. A lot of families wanted their children in face-to-face instruction. So they left the city. They did not stay. So we had kind of a quasi-experimental design there. Education was very important.

Ness Sandoval (27:26): A lot of people left the city because of that and never came back. And that started before COVID. But I think this idea of school choice is something where parents want it. We have enough anecdotal evidence. When Normandy closed, the school system closed, families moved to Normandy to get their kids into Francis Howell. There’s enough evidence to show that families want to make these decisions. The question would be, would Parkway accept all of the students that would want to be in Parkway?

Susan Pendergrass (27:56): Yeah, the law would have to say that they would have to. You couldn’t let them pick and choose.

Ness Sandoval (28:15): Yeah. And so the question is, you have a lot of people who would love to be in Parkway. I gave a talk at Marquette and I was shocked because a good percentage of the students there were saying those public school students, but the parents had left to get out to West County for their children. So the question is, do you just let the private market dictate this? Those who can leave the city will ultimately leave the city and get out to West County.

Susan Pendergrass (28:50): There’s movement out. And I think in terms of domestic migration, to get parents to move in, you can go to our northern border, Iowa. The state pays for private school tuition. Oklahoma to the south, the state pays for private school tuition. Kansas, you can go to any public school in the state. It’s 100% open enrollment. Arkansas is one of the strongest for school choice, both public and private. I think we’re going to be surrounded by it and just have our arms folded across our chest. Because Parkway doesn’t want all those kids coming, or Rockwood doesn’t want all those kids coming. Parents are simply going to move across the border to a state where they can pick any public or private school. I’ve talked to some parents who have reached out to say, I’m thinking about moving to the region, is it true I can’t pick a school? And I’m like, it is true. You cannot pick a school. And I think they’re like, forget it. I’m not going to make this big decision on where to buy a house. I think if we don’t do things that are family friendly, and if we don’t get crime under control in some way, or have a 911 system where when you call somebody responds, I think it’s interesting that St. Louis will become this example for the nation of what a dying city looks like.

Ness Sandoval (30:08): We have three examples today: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Tampa is kind of unique because it is a destination for retirees. The Wall Street Journal has an article today on Cleveland, the renaissance of downtown Cleveland. And Detroit too, it’s a renaissance.

Susan Pendergrass (30:29): Wow. What about Detroit now? So St. Louis hasn’t figured out our renaissance yet.

Ness Sandoval (30:49): And to be honest with you, I think it will be hard. I’m not pro anything, but I find this whole debate about the city and county interesting. I’m not from here, so I don’t have this history of growing up here. But I think objectively, when I look at the budget of the city of St. Louis and compare it to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh is a little bit bigger. It’s got 25,000 more people. But their budget is significantly smaller than St. Louis City’s budget. Part of me wonders, because the city is both a city and a county, it doesn’t have enough people or revenue to operate as both. And this is what’s helping Pittsburgh out. This is what’s helping Cleveland out, because that county revenue is spread among more taxpayers. In St. Louis City, the county functions are spread among a dwindling number of taxpayers. The city probably cannot be a county anymore. There’s just too few taxpayers to provide both city services and county services.

Ness Sandoval (32:08): I looked at these budgets and I’m like, my gosh, why is St. Louis’s budget so much more? I’m talking not a little bit more, a lot more than Pittsburgh’s budget. Pittsburgh is having trouble. And I don’t see the long-term fiscal situation turning around for the city because it’s got to provide all of these services. The tax base is going to decline. The next three years are probably going to see population loss in the city. The numbers just came out in March, but we’ll get the numbers in May. It’ll probably lead the country again in population decline for large cities.

Susan Pendergrass (32:58): Are we still a top 20 city? We’re number one in population decline, but what about in population size?

Ness Sandoval (33:01): We’re number one in decline. Last year, St. Louis City was number one. We’re declining. We’re not in the top 20 yet, but we’re very close. If we go back to 2020, we’re smaller than we were in 2020. The only reason we’re not number one in decline is because we had so many immigrants that offset our domestic migration loss. But this will be an interesting 2030 census, because it’ll be the first time the region will go into a census with more people dying than babies born. In the last census, we had about 75,000 natural growth. We’re looking at about 25,000 to 30,000 natural decline going into this census without any domestic migration. I tell people that this story is just starting. We have 74 years of the century left.

Ness Sandoval (34:18): I’m just trying to get people to move from the mindset that this is 2010 St. Louis. You don’t have 36,000 births anymore. You have 27,000 and it’s declining, one of the fastest declines in the country. Because of it, we’re aging very fast, and so we have to shift. The region has to make a choice that we start to organize our economy around senior citizens. There’s lots of money to be made from senior citizens, but we will never be viewed as Nashville or Austin as a place for young people.

Susan Pendergrass (34:52): Absolutely. That Route 64 corridor is just going to be all retirement homes.

Ness Sandoval (35:04): We won’t be talking about single family homes anymore. We’ll be talking about senior housing. We’ll be talking about a workforce that’s going to work with seniors instead of a workforce for children. And there is money to be made in that economy. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing. But again, we can look at other parts of the country where this transition has happened. Local government spending is being consumed by senior citizens, the healthcare of senior citizens, the paratransit of seniors. Seniors will lose their ability to drive. That cost typically gets covered by local governments. And so you will not be providing buses for children. You’ll be providing paratransit to get seniors to their doctors. Churches will have to think about being accessible to seniors. I go to Church of the Ascension and they are not prepared. At Easter, one of the Masses, one-third of this section was senior citizens in wheelchairs. The churches are simply not prepared for a parish that’s going to be 50% of the population at 70 years old and older. Restaurants have to think about this.

Susan Pendergrass (36:30): Wow, that’s crazy. Well, interesting stuff. I hope you’ll come back and talk about this more. And certainly I’m very interested in reading everything that you write about what St. Louis can do. We need to figure out a renaissance.

Ness Sandoval (36:51): We’ve got to get younger. The kids are giving us a try. They’re coming to school, they’re coming here because they have hopes. We just have not responded the way we need to. A lot of companies are starting to recognize this. I talked to the mayor and said, you need to be a more proactive voice on this. But the region, this is not a city of St. Louis issue. This is a St. Charles issue, a Jefferson County issue, a Chesterfield issue. Most of the people live outside of St. Louis city. The loss we’re projecting is going to come from the suburbs. And that’s what’s happening in Pittsburgh, that’s what’s happening in Cleveland. 100% of the demographic loss is in the suburbs.

Susan Pendergrass (37:21): Yeah. Wow, that’s crazy. Well, fascinating. Thank you so much for explaining it. I don’t want to be depressed about it, but it’s not super optimistic. We’ll find a silver lining. Thanks, Dr. Sandoval.

Ness Sandoval (37:59): All right, thank you very much.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post St. Louis Demographics and the Future of the Region with Ness Sandoval appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The article explains the current rules:

St. Louis County regulations require a one-to-one ratio of apprentices to licensed journeyman plumbers, plus one apprentice for a master plumber. For example, if a plumbing company has nine journeyman plumbers and one master plumber – the latter being required by the code – it can only hire 10 apprentices.

That ratio is too strict, especially as the retirement rate continues to tick up, [Matt] LaMartina said. Plumbing companies need to be able to hire more apprentices who will become licensed journeyman plumbers, and it’s expensive to do so now because an apprentice has to work side-by-side with a licensed journeyman plumber for up to five years before he or she becomes a licensed journeyman plumber, he said.

There is one thing to remember about all occupational licensing. It is always proposed under the guise of “public safety,” but in reality it is often about increasing wages and profits for those already in the industry. This is true for the most absurd licenses and for the legitimate ones.

Predictably, the plumber’s union is opposed to easing licensing burdens and is using the “public safety” angle:

Christopher “Brian” Chumley, a business representative for Local 562, said he hopes the code review committee does not change the ratio. Weakening the plumbing code would endanger public health, he said.

Just to be clear, there is absolutely no evidence that adjusting the number requirements slightly to allow one current plumber to supervise a few more apprentices would “endanger public health.” In fact, one study found that more strict licensing of electricians actually led to more electrocutions, so it is really just the opposite. (Strict licensing leads to higher prices, which leads to more do-it-yourself work, which leads to more electrocutions.) Thankfully, plumbing, while difficult, is not as deadly, so the effects are not as drastic. Does licensing improve safety for the plumbers themselves? Nope, that question has been studied, too.

The purpose of strict plumber licensing (and other trades, too) in St. Louis County and elsewhere is to restrict trade and increase wages for the plumbers, especially the union members. Everything else is a smokescreen. St. Louis County, and every county in Missouri, should reduce its licensing rules for plumbers and many other occupations to make hiring and training for new jobs easier. The same thing goes for occupations licensed by the state, such as barbers and cosmetologists.

The post St. Louis County Should Reduce Plumbing Licensing Rules appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While the Missouri Legislature continues to debate A–F school report cards, the Show-Me Institute recently released our annual report card update on MOSchoolRankings.org.

Our rankings are built on a model that incorporates 10 academic indicators of student success. All data are sourced from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and all English/language arts (ELA) and math scores are based on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP). Each component is weighted equally, and a full explanation of the methodology is available online.

Table 1 shows all 24 public school districts and charter schools that received an “A” in the 2024–2025 school year.

Suburban and rural districts dominate the top rankings, with numerous districts from St. Louis County (Ladue, Brentwood, Clayton). Many of the rural school districts are exceptionally small: Skyline has 81 students and Thornfield has 48. The largest school district on the list is Nixa Public Schools (near Springfield) with 6,518 students.

The suburban districts have relatively low rates of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL)—a common proxy for school poverty rate. Fewer than 10 percent of Ladue and Clayton students were eligible for FRPL, with Brentwood at 18 percent, Nixa at 26 percent, Festus at 28 percent, and Ozark at 35 percent. However, some rural “A” districts have a sizeable number of lower-income students.

Mansfield R-IV, which had 60 percent of its 622 students qualify for FRPL, performed above average in almost every single category (except in ELA growth). Richwoods R-VII, a small rural district about an hour from St. Louis, had 100 percent of its 125 students qualify for FRPL and had particularly impressive scores in math. These examples demonstrate that low-income schools can achieve academic success.

There is a lot more to delve into for academic performance. Table 1 is just one snapshot of what is available on MOSchoolRankings.org. Accountability tools like these can help highlight success stories, identify areas for improvement, and provide a clearer picture of how schools across Missouri are performing.

The post Looking at Missouri’s “A” Districts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass and Patrick Tuohey join Zach Lawhorn to discuss their new report, The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis. They explore what the data actually show about crime trends over the past two decades, how St. Louis compares to similar cities like Cincinnati and Memphis, why crime perception lags so far behind the data, the challenges facing the 911 system and police staffing, why public disorder in high-traffic neighborhoods may be doing as much damage to the city’s reputation as violent crime itself, what it would take to make residents actually feel safer, and more.

Download a copy of the report.

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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, and today I’m joined by Susan Pendergrass and Patrick Tuohey from the Show Me Institute. Today we’re going to be talking about some work that the two of you have done on public safety and crime, specifically in the city of St. Louis. But before we get into the project, I want to talk to you both about your perception of crime as people who have both lived in and frequently visit the city of St. Louis. So Susan, I want to start with you. Before you started this project, before you started looking at the data, when someone said “Is the city of St. Louis dangerous?” what was your perception before you started this project?

Susan Pendergrass (00:38) I only moved to the city of St. Louis in 2015, so there’s a long period of time before I lived there. I was in D.C. for part of that, and my perception before I moved there was that it was dangerous. The Ferguson incident had just happened and I knew that there was a lot of crime. But then when I moved to St. Louis, my husband and I decided to live in the city itself and we loved our neighborhood. It was the coolest with this super cool house built around the time of the World’s Fair. It was amazing. But I never felt really safe. We started leaving our car doors unlocked because our cars would get rifled through. We had a smash-and-grab right within two weeks. I called to report the smash-and-grab and was told that they don’t take reports on them. That was new for me. We had to keep a lot of lights on outside. We didn’t really walk our dogs after dark. I felt like lots of times I would go by police cars sitting on corners idling, but it didn’t necessarily make me feel safer because I wasn’t sure how much they were doing. I also realized people run stoplights, run stop signs, use the right parking lane to pass, and that was all new for me. So I got this feeling that the rule of law wasn’t enforced very well in the city, and that just doesn’t feel good as somebody who has bought a house there and lives there.

Zach Lawhorn (02:06) Patrick, as someone who lives in Kansas City across the state, two questions. What do you think the perception is over there on the western half of the state? And then as someone who comes into St. Louis regularly, what was your perception of the safety situation in the city?

Patrick Tuohey (02:22) A lot of the issues that Susan and I explored in this paper bore out here in Kansas City. I’ve lived in cities my whole life. I understand that every city is going to have the parts you don’t want to go to, the parts that are rougher than others. Kansas City certainly has that. I’ve had my car broken into here in my driveway a number of times, no real damage, and it’s not something I reported to the police. As far as traveling to St. Louis, I’ve been going to St. Louis since the late nineties. Before I lived in Kansas City, I was in Washington, D.C. And I loved St. Louis. I still do. I would visit Creve Coeur, the Central West End, sometimes stay at the Westin downtown. But living in D.C. and growing up in D.C., I understood that every city is going to have the places that you don’t want to go. I understood that St. Louis often gets ranked higher than it should because the city’s footprint is so small. But it never felt to me that what was going on in St. Louis was way outside the normal limits of what we see in U.S. cities. There are those dangerous parts and you generally know not to go there. There is kind of an urban decline, which can be seen in a lack of services, graffiti, uncut grass. But I didn’t navigate St. Louis or think of St. Louis any differently than I thought of Kansas City, Washington D.C., Boston, or any other place I had been.

Zach Lawhorn (04:03) Yeah, and I’m glad you brought up the population of the city, the MSA. It seems like when there are national or even local news stories written on crime statistics in St. Louis, people will point out that if you’re not talking about the larger metropolitan area, you get down to actually a pretty small population number for U.S. cities. So for this work that we’re going to be talking about, can you define what area you guys looked at? When we say murders are a certain number, what area are we specifically talking about?

Patrick Tuohey (04:38) We looked at the city of St. Louis specifically, just those few square miles. We did not look at the metropolitan area and we did not look at the county. It is fair to want to combine all that data into one region, but oftentimes I think people want to do that to mask the seriousness of homicide and violent crime and property crime in the city. And that’s what we wanted to talk about. What is true in St. Louis is not unique to St. Louis. Kansas City has a crime problem that is not reflected in our metropolitan area. That’s true in Washington D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, everywhere. So I understand why people who live in St. Louis feel that you can cook the numbers by just looking at the city, but that’s true in every urban environment.

Susan Pendergrass (05:30) We also compared St. Louis to four other cities, and one of them in particular, Cincinnati, ended up being very similar. We wrote a paper and at the back of the paper there’s a table with variables on which we compared them. Similar size, similar poverty, similar median income, very similar. So to say that St. Louis is this very unique outlier and is the only city in the United States that has this situation where, essentially 100-plus years ago, St. Louis was so much better and more metropolitan and forward-thinking than the rest of the state of Missouri, and safer and wealthier, that they drew a line around the city of St. Louis and said we are going to be our own thing and we’re going to have our own police. It was called the Great Divorce. Now that line, the arrows are sort of pointing different ways, where St. Louis County isn’t necessarily excited to absorb the city of St. Louis and its services, systems, police departments, and 911 systems, because it is a uniquely crime-ridden area in parts. So while it would be nice to, as Patrick mentioned, just water down all the numbers by mixing them into a safer pot, it would really mask what’s going on.

Zach Lawhorn (06:47) Susan, you used the word “unique” there to describe the setup. Patrick, does that genuinely make it harder to talk about this topic? In the last few months you’ve had some public events, and we’re going to talk about those in a minute. But as you’ve gone through this process, do you think the unique setup has made it harder? Is there more throat-clearing and definitional work that goes into it?

Patrick Tuohey (07:12) I don’t know that what St. Louis is dealing with is unique. Yes, the city has a particularly small footprint. It is as if you drew a line around just the bad neighborhood in your community and tried to use that small footprint to describe the whole area. I get that argument. But if it’s true by a matter of degree, it’s not uniquely true of St. Louis. And it’s something that the city needs to deal with and understand rather than try to paper over. As Susan said, there are real problems in the city. Their population decline is only exacerbating those problems because there’s less revenue. And frankly, the history of the city going back decades has been that the image of the city is dysfunctional, and not just on public safety, on lots of issues. So although I understand that people say they don’t just want to talk about the city when it comes to crime, St. Louis, while it’s got lots of opportunities and strengths, doesn’t do itself any favors by combining all this stuff and whistling past the graveyard. People in this country know that St. Louis has a crime problem. You don’t solve it by redirecting people.

Zach Lawhorn (08:30) Okay, and let’s talk about that crime problem. Susan, when we use the word “crime” in this context, what are we talking about? Murders? Car break-ins? Lay it out for us.

Susan Pendergrass (08:42) We have violent crime and property crime. Violent crime is murders, aggravated assault, and robbery. Property crimes are larceny and motor vehicle thefts. In our report, we break them all out separately. Murders are the one crime area that the media likes to focus on: how many murders, which city is the murder capital, did we have 150, did we have 200, are they down? They are certainly down in the last two years, to be clear. Murder rates are down. Aggravated assault rates are not down by as much. And sometimes the difference between aggravated assault and murder is how fast the ambulance drives. We still have a lot of violent crimes against people happening. We certainly have a lot of motor vehicle thefts. That’s an area of crime that spiked during COVID, particularly for Kias and Hyundais, and it’s come down, but it’s still a very high number. While it is wonderful that crime has come down across these areas in many cases, the numbers are still pretty high, particularly on a per capita basis, which is how we translate all the crime rates so we can compare them with other cities.

Zach Lawhorn (10:00) So you said crime is down. Is it fair to classify it as it was really bad and now it’s just bad? It was terrible, now it’s just bad. How would you summarize what you found with the drop in crime?

Susan Pendergrass (10:13) Crime’s been dropping since the 80s, so we had much worse crime decades ago. It’s been dropping, it spiked during the pandemic, and it is continuing basically down. Now, when you look at the murder rate per capita in the city of St. Louis, it is still on a slightly upward trend, the number of murders per people, and that could be driven by the fact that Missouri is losing population at a pretty good clip. We have more deaths than births. So on a per capita basis maybe not quite the same, but in terms of actual numbers, crime has been coming down for some time. Crime overall peaked in the late 80s and 90s.

Zach Lawhorn (10:58) Patrick, we talked about your perception and the relevance of many other cities. Did that surprise you, the finding that crime is down? Or was that kind of what you expected?

Patrick Tuohey (11:09) No, the data showing that crime in St. Louis was down wasn’t a surprise. It’s certainly been nice to see that it’s been down year after year. This doesn’t appear to be just a one-off good year. And I’ve known that the mayor and the police chief have been talking about these positive numbers for a while. What I was really interested in with this paper was perception of crime. That’s what I’ve really wrestled with, both at events in the city and in the county. It is a difficult problem to overcome because you can have good numbers like St. Louis has and yet people still rely on that decades-old impression. That’s not something you can address just by waving away the numbers downtown. You have to wrestle with it. You have to admit it, and you have to figure out how do you get people to accept good news, and then how do you make them confident that that good news is going to continue? It’s so easy these days, especially with cities, to just be a pessimist and to say that things are down and won’t ever continue to go down. It is a problem that St. Louis has, but St. Louis isn’t alone in having it. The news on crime is good all over the country, yet perceptions about crime all over the country are still very much with us.

Susan Pendergrass (12:43) There’s a survey question that’s often asked: do you feel safe walking outside alone at night? And those numbers aren’t down. As Patrick mentioned, you have graffiti and trash not being picked up and panhandling and homelessness. Those numbers aren’t necessarily down. But we did look at St. Louis on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, and it is true that out of 16 neighborhoods, four or five have basically no crime, they’re crime-free. But then there are some other pockets that have most of the murders concentrated in one neighborhood. So it isn’t equal across all the neighborhoods. There are some that have very little crime, but it’s hard to convince folks of that when they drive through the ones that have public disorder and still don’t feel safe.

Zach Lawhorn (13:29) Susan, as a researcher trying to ultimately figure out why things happen, you mentioned that crime is down across the country. Would it be easier if it was just a few select cities, so you could actually go and say what is Boston doing different, what is Memphis doing? Does it make it harder to find the “why” since it seems like it’s kind of across the board?

Susan Pendergrass (13:45) Yeah. There have been other periods of time when crime has gone down and then gone back up again. I personally believe, and this is not based on any research I’ve done, that cameras being absolutely everywhere makes it harder to commit crimes. You cannot basically travel through the world anymore without being on a camera somewhere. Police body cams probably make it harder to commit crimes too. I feel like we’re getting into more of a surveillance state, and maybe that’s what’s bringing crime down. I’ve heard that Detroit has brought crime down faster than other cities, that Pittsburgh is feeling safer, Chattanooga is feeling safer, Memphis feeling less safe. So it would be worthwhile to look into some of these differences. But I don’t think our research has yet pointed to a clear reason why it’s happening.

Patrick Tuohey (14:41) Let me follow up on that because Susan’s exactly right, and I think your question gets to that point. Crime is down nationwide, down in all cities if I remember correctly, and we don’t really know why. And it’s not just Susan and I that don’t know why. Susan has spoken with public safety and crime experts from all over the country, and that’s really frustrating from a public policy research point of view, because you would love to have that outlier, that one city, maybe Boston or Omaha, that tried something novel and got results unlike everybody else. But crime is so difficult because there are so many contributors. Some people want to point to the availability of guns. Some people want to talk about root causes. Some people want to talk about the number of police, the severity of crime, the clearance rate, population growth, new development, basic services like picking up the trash and making sure the streetlights work. And all of those things are right, all those things contribute. So it’s really difficult to figure out which one is driving the change. And sometimes, as Susan pointed out, you may just get a dip and there’s no explaining it. In 2014, in Kansas City, our mayor and police chief at the time came out and had a press conference because they were so proud of the homicide drop the previous year. There was a lot of back-slapping and self-congratulation. Then when the homicide rate went back up the next year, you couldn’t get those guys to answer a basic question. Policymakers are, and maybe rightly so, really shy about claiming credit, because they don’t want to be called to task a year later when the numbers reverse. The good news is that the numbers are trending down, and that’s always good. The frustration is it’s very difficult to figure out why and then make recommendations. We’re all kind of scratching our heads. Although again, this is a good problem to have. The numbers are heading in the right direction and we ought to be happy about that.

Zach Lawhorn (16:58) Patrick, to get a better idea of the perception side, you did the hard work of going to the people. In January and February you moderated events. We had one in the city of St. Louis and one in St. Louis County. There are full recordings of the events available at showmeinstitute.org. You had a panel of experts and spent a lot of time getting feedback from attendees who lived in the city and the county. What were your takeaways? Are they buying that crime is getting better?

Patrick Tuohey (17:33) No, in a word, they don’t. We gave them a short survey before the event. A lot of them believed that crime was important, certainly, but they didn’t necessarily believe that crime was getting better. They weren’t necessarily optimistic that crime was going to be better in St. Louis City in the next five years, and that was certainly true in the county. I wanted to press these audience members: what would it take for you to believe this good news? And I think sometimes they just didn’t want to believe anything. We got the frustrating line: “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” That’s a cute thing to say, but it really doesn’t help you explain your own view. If you’re just going to say you believe it’s bad and always going to be bad, that doesn’t get us anywhere. We were happy to have representatives from the Circuit Attorney’s office at both events, and they struggle with this too. They can do a better job. They can prosecute more and different cases, they can do it faster. The police can certainly improve their clearance rate. But public policymakers in those cities, in every city, are going to have to realize that they may have to continue that grind, doing the hard work of lowering crime, and they’re not going to get the attaboys from the people in their city or the communities around them. That’s just a reality. One of the panelists talked about how perception of crime is often a lagging indicator. When crime goes up, people feel it immediately. But when crime goes down, it may take a few years. The tough news for the people who lead St. Louis City is you may have to keep doing this for another 10 years before you get any credit for being successful. And that’s really tough in politics because people want that immediate payoff, that immediate

Susan Pendergrass (19:15) You

Patrick Tuohey (19:31) applause, that immediate press conference and support.

Susan Pendergrass (19:34) Patrick and I have been thinking about the things that could happen that could make a difference, that could maybe make people feel safer. Number one: when you see a crime happening, you need to be able to have faith that you can report it and somebody will respond. And that is not happening right now in the city of St. Louis. We’ve called several times about crimes and nobody showed up. You need to have faith in the 911 system, and the 911 system needs to function. We have about 28 different systems in the county. They’re building a new 911 center in the city that’s going to consolidate services, but it’s not finished. It’s going to be some time before it’s fully functioning. We also need to know that the police will be able to solve these crimes. They need resources. They need to be able to do DNA testing and rape kits and DNA. They need money to do those things. They need detectives. We need to know that these crimes can get solved, and then we need to know that the crimes are prosecuted. I think if these pieces on the front end, not just the “lock them up” approach, but on the front end, people would feel safer if they felt like they could call somebody and somebody would respond and something would happen. I’m not sure that’s happening right now. And until it does, people, especially when they start having small children, are probably going to move out.

Patrick Tuohey (20:59) What we’ve known since at least 1961, when Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is that you sometimes just need eyes on the street. Shop owners, pedestrians, people walking around. Cameras can reduce crime, but they’re kind of abstract and tucked in corners. When a street is vibrant, when it’s got people living there, when you’ve got kids playing in the street and families on the porch, there’s that sense of being watched, being seen. But because St. Louis has been in this population spiral, how do you bring people back into the city? The city talks about economic development subsidies all the time, but that’s about bringing in amenities and employers. Maybe what the city needs to do is figure out how to bring in people. And oftentimes it’s the non-crime-related policies, the housing policies, the regulations, the tax structure, that keep people out. Crime is one of those, but the city could open itself up to urban homesteaders who want to come in and rehab these old houses. What has struck me about St. Louis for the decades I’ve been going there is just the absolutely beautiful old neighborhoods, the incredible housing stock. Susan talked about living in a house that was built for the World’s Fair. There are gorgeous neighborhoods in St. Louis, and it’s the barriers to entry, red tape and government regulation, that are keeping people out, I have to believe. Crime is one of them, to be sure. But I am confident there are people who would love to move into those old houses and revitalize those old neighborhoods, because they’re just so gorgeous and so walkable. And it’s been done in other cities. DuPont Circle in Washington D.C. was a slow process of rehabbing neighborhoods block by block, and now 30 years later it is a vibrant community.

Zach Lawhorn (23:03) Susan, you mentioned the 911 system. I know in the report you don’t get into specific solutions, and I know we’re still kind of in the measuring-the-problem stage and trying to figure out next steps, but beyond the 911 system, are there any areas you’d consider low-hanging fruit worth considering moving forward?

Susan Pendergrass (23:25) The legislature passed and the governor signed a violent crime clearance grant program last year that cities like St. Louis could apply for, funding to hire detectives, do DNA testing, collect data, and other activities directly focused on solving crimes. The legislature has not appropriated any money for that program. If they did, St. Louis could apply for those funds. We also have, and I don’t know the exact number as I say this, but at least 100 open police positions in the department. Those are hard to fill. The policies that have been tried, like no longer requiring officers to live within the city and across-the-board raises, none of those have really made a difference. So we need recruitment and retention policies that could actually work. And as I mentioned with the 911 system, triaging calls and making sure the correct agency responds when a crime has been committed. There are community violence intervention programs that have been tried in some places, and using neighborhood-by-neighborhood data to focus in on where crimes are really happening. Those are all things we’d like to explore further: what is the cost of these programs, what is the likelihood that they’ll improve things, and what are some feasible ways to get them done.

Zach Lawhorn (24:54) So there’s the PR part of it. The city’s got a PR problem. There’s the need for more cops. We need people to be able to call 911. We need people to actually be prosecuted for crimes. That all seems doable.

Susan Pendergrass (24:58) Yeah.

Zach Lawhorn (25:06) Where do you think the city of St. Louis is at right now? Are we in a good place? Are we in just an improved place where it could still be a few years? How are you feeling about public safety in the city of St. Louis right now?

Susan Pendergrass (25:21) I don’t want to be a wet blanket. I love the city of St. Louis and I want it to succeed wildly. But I’m concerned that they’re going to say murders are down and these other crimes are down, but people are still running stop signs and stoplights, there are still panhandlers, and trash still isn’t being picked up. They’re not really fixing the small things that make people feel safe. They’re sort of focused on these big numbers. It could be like a school improving ACT scores. You have to be really careful if you’re just focusing on one aspect, because these big crime numbers being down could be hiding a lot of other stuff that really needs to be done and focused on. So I’m cautiously optimistic, I guess.

Patrick Tuohey (26:05) I’m optimistic because crime is going down everywhere, and I think it will probably continue to go down at least for the next few years, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the management of St. Louis. Part of it is because Susan and I have been reviewing the research for the last few months, and there is so much out there, primary research on crime and secondary, that talks about exactly the things Susan hit upon: the environment, picking up trash, cleaning up graffiti, fixing sidewalks, making sure the streetlights are lit. We know so much more about what drives crime, or at least what can ameliorate it, that even if we don’t know the specifics of what’s going on now, city leaders and state leaders are much more aware of what they can do to make communities not just safer but feel safe. And again, it is frustrating because you can say the numbers are down, but until people feel safe and want to go downtown and take advantage of what the city has to offer, we’re not going to see that public perception change. So yes, I think the public perception is accurate in as much as that is what people feel, but I don’t think it reflects what’s actually going on in St. Louis or in the county.

Zach Lawhorn (27:20) And we will leave it there. The report, The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis, is available at showmeinstitute.org. If you want to watch the full recordings of the events that Patrick moderated, those are available right now at showmeinstitute.org. Susan, Patrick, thank you very much.

Susan Pendergrass (27:36) Thank you.

Patrick Tuohey (27:36) Thank you.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis with Susan Pendergrass and Patrick Tuohey appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri’s property tax system works best when the assessments are accurate, the tax base is wide, and the rates are low. That combination will help grow Missouri’s economy for everyone while properly funding the necessary functions of local government. However, a radical change in the system is being put before voters in Webster, Christian, Lawrence, and Dade counties in April. These four counties will vote on whether to prohibit any property tax increases due to reassessments. Current law requires local governments to roll back tax rates as assessments increase, but we all know that taxes still go up, sometimes substantially.

At the Show-Me Institute, we support low taxes, and I am well-aware of how tempting this will be to voters. But using market valuations in reassessment to set tax levels is a good system. While our property tax system needs reforms, eliminating any and all tax increases from reassessments will make Missouri more dependent on other taxes that hurt our economy far more than property taxes do. Hate them as much as you wish, but property taxes indisputably harm economic growth less than other taxes do.

These property tax limitations would reduce the ability of school districts to fund themselves and would make them more dependent on state aid. Consider the following: school districts in St. Louis County regularly receive at least 80% of their funding from local sources, primarily property taxes, and some are over 90%. It is nowhere near that level in Southwest Missouri. Nixa school district in Christian County is only 54% locally funded, while Marshfield school district in Webster is only 46% locally funded. Even Springfield school district, the largest school district in Greene County, where no property taxes changes are proposed, is only 58% locally funded. These changes would make school districts in these counties more dependent on state aid, not less. Again, I’m aware that many voters may view that as a benefit, but it is anything but.

Numerous other harmful effects would come from diluting the market forces (in the form of assessments based on market values) that form the basis of property taxation. California provides us with an example of the harms of these types of property tax caps with its famous Proposition 13, passed in 1978, which dramatically limited increases in property assessments and taxes. Proposition 13 certainly had its intended effect of lowering property taxes for California homeowners. However, it also reduced mobility, significantly increased alternative taxes, limited homeownership opportunities, and caused substantial tax disparities for similar properties receiving similar services. These negative consequences are exactly what these four counties would experience over the long run.

There are also significant constitutional concerns with this legislation. Missouri Constitution Chapter X, Section 3 states that “taxes . . . shall be uniform upon the same class or subclass of subjects within the territorial limits of the authority levying the tax.” So, consider the issue of the Logan-Rogersville R-VIII school district. This school district serves families in three counties. If voters approve these tax changes, the property tax system in one of those three counties would remain unchanged (Greene), while in the other two (Webster and Christian) it would be illegal to have a tax increase from reassessment. It would certainly seem unconstitutional for property owners within the same taxing district who own the same type of property (single-family homes) to face different tax and assessment systems for the same services.

We need property tax reform in Missouri, but this total limitation is too severe. If enacted, the property tax proposals before the voters in these four fast-growing counties would make the region’s overall tax system worse, not better. I hope voters will look past the easy appeal of a tax limit to think about the long-term harms.

The post The Wrong Way to Fix Property Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A version of this commentary appeared in the St. Louis Business Journal.

Missouri’s property tax system works best when the assessments are accurate, the tax base is wide, and the rates are low. That combination will help grow Missouri’s economy for everyone while properly funding the necessary functions of local government. However, a radical change in the system is being put before voters in St. Charles, Jefferson, and Franklin counties in April. These three counties will vote on whether to prohibit any property tax increases due to reassessments. Current law requires local governments to roll back tax rates as assessments increase, but we all know that taxes still go up, sometimes substantially.

This change would also reduce the ability of school districts to fund themselves and would make them more dependent on state aid. Consider the following: Parkway school district in St. Louis County is 89% funded by local taxes. However, Fox school district in Jefferson County is only 51% locally funded, while Wentzville school district in St. Charles is only 64% locally funded, and St. Clair school district in Franklin is just 45% locally funded. These changes would make school districts in these three counties more dependent on state aid, not less. Again, I’m aware that many voters may view that as a benefit, but it is anything but.

At the Show-Me Institute, we support low taxes, and I am well-aware of how tempting this will be to voters. But using market valuations in reassessment to set tax levels is a good system. While our property tax system needs reforms, eliminating any and all tax increases from reassessments will make Missouri more dependent on other taxes that hurt our economy far more than property taxes do. Hate them as much as you wish, but property taxes indisputably harm economic growth less than other taxes do.

Numerous other harmful effects would come from diluting the market forces (in the form of assessments based on market values) that form the basis of property taxation. California provides us with an example of the harms of these types of property tax caps with its famous Proposition 13, passed in 1978, which dramatically limited increases in property assessments and taxes. Proposition 13 certainly had its intended effect of lowering property taxes for California homeowners. However, it also reduced mobility, significantly increased alternative taxes, limited homeownership opportunities, and caused substantial tax disparities for similar properties receiving similar services. These negative consequences are exactly what St. Charles, Jefferson, and Franklin counties would experience over the long run.

There are also significant constitutional concerns with this legislation. Missouri Constitution Chapter X, Section 3 states that “taxes . . . shall be uniform upon the same class or subclass of subjects within the territorial limits of the authority levying the tax.” So, consider the issue of the Meramec Valley R-III school district. This school district serves families in three counties. If voters approve these tax changes, the property tax system in one of those three counties would remain unchanged (St. Louis), while in the other two (Jefferson and Franklin) it would be illegal to have a tax increase from reassessment. It would certainly seem unconstitutional for property owners within the same taxing district who own the same type of property (single-family homes) to face different tax and assessment systems for the same services.

We need property tax reform in Missouri, but this total limitation is too severe. If enacted, the property tax proposals before the voters in these three fast-growing counties would make the region’s overall tax system worse, not better. I hope voters will look past the easy appeal of a tax limit to think about the long-term harms.

The post The Wrong Way to Fix Property Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

St. Louis County Executive Sam Page has announced that the county is raising park and recreation fees as part of an effort to address budget shortfalls in county government. This is after the county announced a reduction in recreation facility hours a while back (among other cuts) in response to the same budget issues.

The increase in fees is a good move by St. Louis County government. According to the article:

Page . . . [said] the changes stem from a comprehensive review of the actual cost of providing services and reflect “operational realities, market standards, and equity considerations.”

The most important part there is “operational realities.” (I’ll let you guess which one I think is the least important.) I covered this topic in my most recent paper in the free-market municipality series. The operating costs of recreational facilities should be funded to the largest extent possible by user fees. (Capital costs are generally funded through bonds paid back by taxes.) It may not be possible to get 100% of funding with user fees, but fees should consistently be updated to ensure that they cover as much of costs as they can.

One increase that the county announced is that ice rink rentals are increasing to $300 per hour. Building, managing, and maintaining an ice rink is very expensive, and it is not something that most of the general public often uses. The hockey teams that rent it out should pay the cost of the service, not the general public. The same reasoning applies to regular ice skaters during open ice time. The fee for a ticket and skate rental should cover the costs.

Parks are different. Nobody wants to pay a fee to take a walk in a park. That is why general taxes are the best way to pay for community parks. (Many national parks and some state parks are more “destination” type facilities where user fees should be and are a part of the funding.)

St. Louis County is doing the right thing here. I hope other cities and counties also stay on top of the fee structures to make sure their recreational facilities are capturing the right amount of money in user fees.

The post St. Louis County to Raise Park Fees—That’s Good appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Youth sports centers have been exploding around Missouri for two decades and, unfortunately, tax subsidies seem to go hand-in-glove with them. Let’s make one thing clear at the start: these aren’t parks. These aren’t public facilities where any kid or family can go and play or picnic or fly a kite with a delightful, singing nanny. These are businesses aimed at youth travel sports clubs, which are private, expensive teams. I like club sports (if my kids’ coaches are reading this, please don’t bench them). I just don’t think they fit any definition of a public good. These private facilities have no business being subsidized by taxpayers; if there is a market for them (there is), then they will succeed on their own.

Here is a brief listing of some of the major youth sports facilities that received taxpayer funds of various types (grants, incentives, special sales taxes, etc.) by various governments:

• Springfield heavily subsidized the Sports Town project.
• St. Louis County had trouble deciding which of multiple youth sports projects to ultimately fund (it eventually subsidized both).
• A baseball complex in Lake of the Ozarks has seen multiple battles over tax incentives.
• O’Fallon just rejected subsidies for another complex (yeah!), but then turned around one week later and approved them (boo!).

This is just a short list. I am sure there are more. The first policy change we need is to remove the ability of cities to make these decisions. At a minimum, counties should make all of these tax subsidy decisions. County officials are at least answerable to the voters for their choices. Municipalities routinely grant tax subsidies to businesses where the immediate impact to the city is limited but the harm to the school district, library district, and other entities that rely on tax revenue is substantial. Yet voters in those other districts often don’t live within the municipality and can’t hold anyone responsible with their votes.

Beyond that, we need local municipal officials to better understand basic economics and think both long term and regionally. I am not holding my breath.

The post What’s the Deal with the Tax Subsidies for Youth Sports Centers? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Great. Mike McShane, EdChoice, always great to have you on the podcast. I read your Substack, Informed Choice. I know you do not write them all, but you write a lot of them, and I think they are super interesting. A month or so ago, there was a lot of “what’s out, what’s in,” closing down 2025 and starting 2026. I really liked your post about six words for 2026, but…

Mike McShane (00:03)
Always great to be with you. Thanks for having me. I tried to.

Susan Pendergrass (00:28)
I want to talk about that, but generally speaking, I have been having this feeling, and I think we have even talked about this on the podcast, that something has changed in K–12 education in the United States. Something seems different than it did. You track the number of kids in private school choice programs, which took forever to get to a million, and now it is like a million and a half, right? It just seems to have been growing so fast.

Mike McShane (00:52)
Yeah. I think there has definitely been a shift. I have noticed that, with the start of the year and legislative sessions starting across the country, I am talking to journalists and other folks, and it seems like the normal conversation I would have had in the past was, “Are we going to have these programs, is there going to be choice, or what?” Now it is, “What is the shape of it going to be?”

So much of choice now is being taken as a given. I think we are even seeing that within public school districts. Even in states that might not have private school choice or robust charter schools, they are at least saying, “Parents are going to need to have choice, and maybe we can keep the genie in the bottle by just having it within public school districts, or in between public school districts.” But the idea that we are going to go back to residentially assigned public schools…

Susan Pendergrass (01:41)
Like Kansas.

Mike McShane (01:50)
…with the odd aberration here and there, it just seems like that shift has happened. Now it is a question of what it is going to look like, and it is going to look different in different states. It is not a “whether,” it is a “how.”

Susan Pendergrass (02:03)
That’s right, because we have a whole bunch of second-generation choosers, right? We have parents of young kids whose parents chose it, so they are not, like you said, going to go backwards.

Another interesting outcome you have talked about over the years is that the Catholic school movement is growing again, right? Like in Florida, we are seeing a resurgence in Catholic schools, and in Iowa, because parents did not necessarily not want to send their kids to Catholic schools. Some got mad about the scandals…

Mike McShane (02:05)
Yeah, for sure. Iowa, Florida, and probably other places when data comes out, for sure.

Susan Pendergrass (02:32)
…or they did not want to pay tuition, and now they can. And certainly this survey you all have done for so long, on where parents would send their kids to school versus where they do send their kids to school, maybe we are going to see some sort of convergence where parents can actually send their kids to the school they want.

A couple of the words you said are going to be big in education in 2026, “participants,” is that right? Participants.

Mike McShane (02:34)
Yeah. Totally, absolutely. “Participants” is one of them.

Susan Pendergrass (03:02)
And “supply side.” What do you mean by “participants”?

Mike McShane (03:06)
“Participants” is, there is this big debate now, and in the piece I started with very general words that are part of the broader conversation, and then I got very narrow into school choice research words. “Participants” is kind of a school choice research word, but not entirely. I think it is going to be part of broader debates about choice in general.

There is a big question out there, who uses these programs? Who is going to participate? There are competing theories. Skeptics say it is going to be all rich kids, or kids who are already in private schools. Stronger advocates say it will be low-income kids, or kids desperate for more options.

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, and it will probably be different in different places at different times. Some of the emerging research suggests that when universal private school choice programs first start, for reasons that are perfectly predictable, students who are already in private schools are the first movers.

Susan Pendergrass (04:01)
Sure.

Mike McShane (04:28)
That is probably because private schools find out about these programs and have an audience. They can say, “Hey, you all know how you are paying to go here? Now you do not have to do that anymore.” And then over time, the circle expands outward.

Susan Pendergrass (04:33)
They pass out a piece of paper in every backpack, yeah. “You should get this.”

Mike McShane (04:48)
More and more, those families have neighbors, cousins, and people they play YMCA basketball with. The word gets out over time. A lot of traditional channels for educating people do not work as well. It is not like everyone watches the nightly news or reads the local newspaper.

Susan Pendergrass (05:08)
“Put it on your website.” That’s a Missouri legislative mainstay, put it on your website.

Mike McShane (05:14)
So a lot of this comes out via word of mouth or discussions. You could look at the same state and see participation change over time.

Because these programs are rolling out in different states at different times, there is not going to be one national answer to who is participating. It could be the first year in Mississippi, but the second year in Alabama, and the makeup of students will be different. Because of the nationalized nature of coverage, people will keep pushing for “the one answer,” but there isn’t one. Though, to be fair, some people will say there is. I do not think that will be true.

Susan Pendergrass (06:07)
Yeah, I get a ton of questions around the rural issue. Either it is going to be the demise of our rural school system because we are all going to close, or rural families do not need it, which are opposites. It is opposites, right?

Mike McShane (06:09)
Yeah. It cannot be both. And yet a frequent criticism is that it will be both of them.

Susan Pendergrass (06:25)
But I get that a lot. “There are no private schools for them to go to,” and “it is going to cause rural schools to close.”

Certainly in Missouri, even our MOScholars program is quite small, and we do not really have charter schools outside of two districts, two very far away places. So I think for a lot of folks in Missouri, it is mysterious, who would do this, and why would anyone want it? And of course, “All the poor kids are going to go to the wealthy school districts.” Still a lot of talk about property taxes. It is almost like 2005 in Missouri, a lot of that going on.

But the reality is, in long-running programs, and now I am thinking open enrollment, anywhere you let parents pick, you get a lot of rural participation. They have the fewest choices, right? And you get a lot of urban participation, and some suburban participation. Like you said, I do not think you can…

Mike McShane (06:55)
Yeah, right.

Susan Pendergrass (07:20)
I have had so many parents over the years say, “We do not need that here because all our schools are good.” And I am like, I promise you there is a child who got on the bus with a stomach ache this morning because they did not want to go to school, for whatever reason. They think the teachers do not like them, or they are being bullied, whatever it is. I promise you there are families who would leave if they could easily do it.

Mike McShane (07:30)
Yeah, for sure. Totally.

One thing that is going to be interesting, as we watch this play out, with questions about who is participating and who is leaving public schools, is that there are broader trends of public school enrollment decreasing. You hear in some states, “My gosh, all these public schools are closing because of choice programs.” But the state next door that does not have a choice program, their public schools are closing too, because there are just fewer kids than there were before.

So that is another thing we have to disentangle, the broader population trends. I was just seeing something earlier about how congressional seats and electoral college seats are going to change because of population shifts.

Susan Pendergrass (08:17)
It’s huge.

Mike McShane (08:26)
You look at states like New York and California losing large numbers of people, Florida and Texas increasing numbers of people. These are people in general, because that is how it all happens. We have to start with that baseline and then layer these other things on top, because I feel like school choice is going to get blamed for this, even in places where it does not exist.

Susan Pendergrass (08:36)
Yeah. I cannot tell you how many times I have talked about this and shocked people. Every school district in St. Louis County, for example, has declining enrollment by large numbers. Clayton’s declining enrollment, Ladue declining enrollment, all declining enrollment. People are like, “Where are they going?” And I say, “They were not born.” They simply were not born.

We had our biggest kindergarten cohort in 2013. That moved through to senior year of high school like two years ago. It is just demographics. They just were not born.

Mike McShane (09:00)
Right? Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (09:20)
We have net out-migration of some groups of people, people with bachelor’s degrees, but for sure, it is demographics. These kids were not born.

There is going to be this push and pull between five-to-seventeen-year-olds and retirees, basically, because we are getting more old people and fewer young people. Do we build a school or a nursing home? I think it is going to be a thing.

And we still have school districts getting bonds, 30-year bonds, to build schools and buy buses. I do not know if that is the right answer. At least the charter school sector, and probably similarly the private school sector, figured out how to not be in the real estate business, how to lease a building, or do different types of arrangements. They are going to benefit from this, while the public school system is still building schools. The kids are not being born, but we will see how that plays out.

Another thing you mentioned, one of your words I have been thinking about a lot, two of them, is “transparency.” I have wondered, can I start calling accountability transparency? Because accountability is kind of negative, but transparency, of course.

And you talk about “rage bait.” Sorry, I am rolling these into one, but with early media stories around some of these private school choice programs, like Arizona, people really jumped on what parents were spending their money on. As though they cannot be trusted to spend this money, in the way the public school system can be trusted with billions, I mean trillions, of dollars. Parents cannot be trusted with this $8,000, they will simply…

Mike McShane (10:52)
Totally. This is the irony. The irony is kind of like the discussion earlier, how there are no places in rural America, and everyone will leave rural schools to go to these non-existent places. Both cannot be true at the same time.

We cannot say these programs are not transparent and then talk about all the individual purchases families are making. That has to be transparent for you to be able to make those arguments. It is kind of a shell game people are playing when they talk about transparency.

When you say, “Here are ways in which ESA programs are not transparent,” your research is a perfect example of the opposite. Transaction-level data, you have published papers that offer transaction-level data on every purchase in the ESA program.

Susan Pendergrass (11:59)
Trust me, there are hundreds of thousands of records.

Mike McShane (12:00)
Right, hundreds of thousands of records that are available for anybody to look at.

I think this is actually good. We need to have discussions about what should be included in these programs and what should not. It is an education savings account, not just a savings account, so we have to draw the borders around what is an educational purchase and what is not.

We live in a big, vibrant democracy, so we need to have these discussions. Should you be able to buy a trampoline, or a Lego set, or whatever? Let’s talk about it. That’s fine. Maybe we decide in some cases it is allowed, and in some cases it is not.

This is part of transparency and accountability. You are democratically accountable, we need to participate in this.

But I am still blown away by the number of people who claim these programs are not transparent, when what we know about what parents are doing is more granular and more detailed than any public school district, any charter school network, almost any institution you are going to see. You just do not get transaction-level data on anything.

We can debate whether those are good purchases or not good purchases, but to say they are not being transparent is wild to me.

Susan Pendergrass (13:09)
No, I mean, my kids all went to public school. They certainly went to amusement parks. They certainly watched a lot of movies. They would not want anyone scrutinizing every, you know, you have 30 teachers buying 30 whiteboards. Decisions were made that were not the best.

I did not see anything in the transaction-level data that made me think, “This is outrageous.” And who am I to say woodworking is not an okay thing for your child to learn? Swimming lessons, I had to swim. I do not know.

I do not want to get into that conversation because I assume the best intentions for parents. I cannot understand why a parent would invest the time and effort to get into these programs to simply buy themselves a trampoline, and not really care if their kids are reading or not. I do not understand that, but that is what…

Mike McShane (14:04)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (14:15)
…they are throwing mud at the wall to try to discredit. Clearly, it is what parents want.

I am baffled that, when you look at politics in the United States right now, those on the left just refuse to accept this fact. It is a fact. Parents want to choose their school.

There are certainly Democrats for education reform, and plenty of people working hard from the left, but the general approach feels very last century. The teachers’ union saying, “Nobody wants this, we have to stop it at all costs. We have to put a halt to this and put more money into the public school your address sends you to. We need to fund those fully first before we can ever let kids out.” That is such a failed argument to me.

Mike McShane (15:18)
Look, this is why “accountability” and “transparency” are two of the words for 2026. Opponents to choice have figured out they cannot just go out hammer-and-tongs against it, or directly say, “We are against choice.” People do not learn lessons in politics, but they learn that one.

I was looking at the gubernatorial candidate just to Missouri’s north in Iowa. It was interesting. There was an interview with the Democratic candidate for governor, Rob Sand. He would not come out and condemn the ESA program outright. The interviewer perceptively drilled down and asked, “Are you saying you are not opposed to this program, you just want changes?” He never said yes to that. He has never said, “I am for this program.” If you read between the lines, he is saying, “I am not for this program, but I cannot come out and say it.”

His pivot was immediately, “I am just talking about accountability and transparency.” He wants private schools to follow every single one of the same rules that public schools do, and expects them to somehow do better.

Part of it is, these are folks working in red states who need to make arguments that appeal to conservatives. Accountability appeals to conservatives. Fiscal responsibility appeals to conservatives, not wanting to waste tax dollars. So it is smart strategy. People need to see what it is.

If this is a blue state, these exact same people are making arguments that appeal to progressives. But you are in a red state, so they are trying to make arguments that appeal to you. If you think about it for a little bit longer, what they are saying does not hold a lot of water.

Susan Pendergrass (17:41)
Yeah, and with this federal tax credit program, even though every state has to decide whether or not they are going to take the money, it is going to be a weird shifting of resources. If I live in a state that says, “We are not going to take the money,” that is fine. I can give my $1,700 to a scholarship group in any state. I will just send my $1,700 to another state.

Some states, like Virginia, the governor, one of the last things he did when he left was opt in. Now the new governor is going to have to make this weird choice. Do I want to go against it? If you looked at any poll of parents, any poll, you would know they want to be able to choose where their kids go to school. Do you really want to be the person that withdraws?

Mike McShane (18:21)
Yeah, when she seems to be in a perfect position to just say, “Oh, the last guy did this on the way out, so I guess we are going to do it.” Once they do it for a year and everybody is fine with it, it is just, “Oh well, whatever.”

Susan Pendergrass (18:33)
I do not know. I did not do it.

I think it is going to be really interesting because, again, the way we started this, there is a groundswell. I do not think you are going to turn it back. If you stay on the side of saying it is better when kids can only go to their assigned public school, you are in quicksand. You are going to bury yourself.

Mike McShane (19:03)
Yeah. The only thing I would say, and it was another one of my six words, is “rage bait.” It is always lingering in the background for me. I am seeing it more and more, all day, every day, stuff that shows up in your feed deliberately to upset you, terrify you, whatever.

Rage bait is unpredictable. You never know what is going to catch fire and cause a big shift. There is obviously potential for rage bait content, as we mentioned, we have crossed one and a half million, hundreds of thousands of people in various states, with lots of flexibility in what they can buy. People making bad decisions, people stealing things, it is totally possible that happens. Something egregious could happen.

With a large enough population, even very improbable events can happen. One fear I do have is that something rage-bait-y happens and people lose their minds over it.

But this is the key, if one parent in Arizona does something crazy, that does not mean the other 1,499,999 parents around the country should not have the right or opportunity to do this. We have to be able to say, “This is rage bait, this is not actually what is happening.”

Susan Pendergrass (20:51)
Yeah, we have talked about this. Those of us who have pressed for school choice for so long have said, “We will do anything you want, take our arm. We will put all our data out there, we will be as transparent as possible.” And your colleague, Marty Lueken, had a Substack about this recently, like, “We will take half the money. We do not need all the money, half the money will be…”

Mike McShane (21:08)
For sure.

Susan Pendergrass (21:19)
…150 percent transparent. We will jump through all these hoops just to get this thing that everybody wants, and it is from that transparency that we are going to get those stories. We are going to pay for that.

Mike McShane (21:29)
Yeah. It is important for people to be more attuned to the rage bait they are getting. People ask, “Have you seen this thing that happened in this place?” And I am like, okay, yeah, even if it did, what do you extrapolate?

A teacher in Sacramento did something crazy. There are north of a hundred thousand schools across America. There are north of three million public school teachers. At any given moment, someone is doing something dumb. I do not know what to extrapolate from that. It could just be one crazy person.

This is not just education. Across public policy, you point to one person in the military doing something terrible to delegitimize the military in general. Do not fall for this.

To be fair, sometimes we in the school choice movement, or education reform, have done rage bait of our own. People have used social media to point out, “My gosh, look at this assignment that a second-grade teacher in Poughkeepsie did, this is why we need school choice.” People have done that.

The measure with which you measure will be measured back to you. If you live by the sword, die by the sword.

Susan Pendergrass (22:54)
John Oliver did a story on charter schools. Remember, it was the guy in Florida that was letting a charter school be a nightclub at night? There is no way that is representative of charter schools.

Mike McShane (22:58)
Yeah, I remember that.

Susan Pendergrass (23:10)
That was an example I found shocking, but it is not representative. And you are right, they will find those stories.

Mike McShane (23:13)
Yeah, totally. We should all use less rage bait. We should not use rage bait to say just because one teacher in one place did something dumb, that is an indictment of public education in general. Nor should we allow the same thing to be done in reverse, which is, because one family did something crazy, we should not have choice at all.

Susan Pendergrass (23:49)
That leads to another one of your words, “slop.” There is so much talk about AI in schools and what to do about it. Is one person going to figure this out for every school everywhere, or are we all going to figure it out individually?

Mike McShane (24:03)
Yeah, I played out the scenario I am worried about. I do not know if it will happen in 2026, but it might.

We have heard a lot about AI in schools, students cheating, which is real and worrisome. But the specific scenario I have not heard as many people talking about is the prevalence of AI video, and the ability to create videos of things that did not happen.

How many, if you have a student in a classroom, after taking a picture or a short, unrelated video of their teacher, they can put it through a series of prompts, “Hey, have this teacher do,” and then insert whatever horrible thing, say something horrible, do something horrible.

Susan Pendergrass (24:34)
Yeah.

Mike McShane (24:53)
And if you are not savvy, and I will be the first to say I think I am a savvy consumer of the internet, I have been fooled or very close to fooled. AI videos of animals doing things, dogs protecting people from bears, or that one recently that went around with a bald eagle that had ice on its beak that someone knocked off, whatever.

Susan Pendergrass (24:58)
It is like a parlor game, right? No dogs are going off diving boards, just to clarify. The rabbits on the trampoline, these are not happening. But you are right.

Mike McShane (25:20)
People who are not as savvy, the thing I spelled out was, someone does that, and then suddenly the next PTA meeting is flooded with people because this viral thing went around. The superintendent or principal has to say, “This did not happen, it is not real.”

If you do not have the media literacy, it is like one person’s word versus another. “We saw it happen, it is on video.” “No, it did not happen, it is AI.” How we adjudicate those things, and how it could be weaponized by teenagers, or by bad actors, all of that stuff will happen. Whenever a new model is released, everyone tries to break it immediately, they are much more creative than I ever was.

I am worried for teachers, worried for schools, worried for school board meetings. It could be anything. It could be taking video at a football game and saying something happened that did not. Even if it all works out eventually, the time and energy wasted dealing with it…

Now, again, I am hoping more and more schools, this could be a real kick in the rear end to get phones out of schools and say, “We are not going to have phones in schools, because people are going to be making AI videos of their teachers.” That is one of a thousand reasons we should not have phones in schools.

But it is not the only place kids are interacting with one another, or with teachers. So we have to be really skeptical when we see that video of that teacher, or that student, or that principal doing something. Take a deep breath and ask, “Is this video real? Does this pass the smell test? Does this sound like something a teacher would actually do?” I am increasingly worried about that. There are many other things people worry about that I do not really worry about, but AI video in the context of schools, bad news bears.

Susan Pendergrass (27:53)
Yeah, I think we are going to have to start adjusting our thinking to only believing things that happen in front of our face, things we can touch. The prevalence of, you know, Amazon ads now, they are… I mean, I went to get my haircut and somebody was holding up a picture, and she was like, “Okay, well, that is not a real person.” We are going to have to default to disbelief if it is on a phone or on a screen. If it is happening in front of you, you can touch it, you can believe it. But the rest of it, I think we are going to become extra skeptical, because I do not believe much stuff anymore.

Mike McShane (28:22)
Totally. Are schools going to need CCTV cameras everywhere? Are we going to be oddly surveilled in a lot of different ways, just for CYA? “If people are going to be making up fake videos, we need the real video of what is going on.” I do not know how that is going to go, but…

That was the “rage bait” one, my plea to people, please do not fall victim to rage bait. It is pinging parts of our brains that we should not. I get wrapped up in it too. “My God, I cannot believe that is happening.” Then you take 10 seconds and you are like, “Wait, why am I fired up about this road rage incident in South Carolina?” Someone cut somebody off on the highway. Who cares? I am not there. It is not my deal.

I think this “slop” stuff is also something we are going to have to be really cautious about and thoughtful about, because it could cause lots of problems.

Susan Pendergrass (29:35)
Yeah, but then people are like, “I am not going to allow AI, I am going to check it.” I think AI, we are going to have to accept, right? We have to live with it.

Mike McShane (29:41)
Yeah, we are going to have to realize this is just part of it. There will be so many great things that come out of it, the creativity it will unleash.

In our own Substack, a bunch of the graphics we do are AI generated. I could not, I laugh, I have young kids, they are better drawers, I am horrible at it, but I can do this stuff with a couple of prompts in ChatGPT. “Hey, make me…” and they can be funny. You can do someone in the style of a famous painter and suddenly it is a Renaissance painting of me.

That is incredible productivity. The fact that I do not have to have a graphic designer, I can basically do it myself and put out essentially a small newspaper with some contributors and a bit of AI. That is an insane productivity increase, and it is incredible, but we have to be cautious of the downsides.

Susan Pendergrass (30:48)
Finally, your last word, “supply side.” In Missouri, folks will say, “Well, we do not need private school choice in our rural areas, there are no private schools,” as though the supply of private schools is fixed. It is treated like a natural result of how much interest there is, the kind of people who live in the community, and what is there is there, without thinking that if parents suddenly had $7,000 or $8,000 to spend, maybe somebody would open a new school.

Or not even a new school. Maybe somebody would open a visual arts business, or a soccer academy, tutoring, dyslexia therapy, whatever it is they think parents want or need. You would be free to be an entrepreneur in that space. That piece is largely overlooked, because it is like, “We have this many private schools with this many seats, so we can only have this many scholarships.” It is like, no, that is not fixed. Do you think we are going to see a lot of changes in that area?

Mike McShane (32:00)
Yeah, because another dimension where people think things are fixed is not only the number and locations, but the shape of what schools look like. “We are not going to have a private school in this small area because we cannot have a brick-and-mortar building with 30 rooms and 250 kids.” That is not what we are talking about.

If you can get 10 kids together at $8,000 apiece…

Susan Pendergrass (32:26)
There are no buildings.

Mike McShane (32:36)
…you can do a lot of interesting stuff. Especially if you can get space donated, leverage resources in the community, maybe some online stuff, and a local teacher. You could put together a heck of an education on $80,000 or $100,000.

It is happening. What makes it challenging to talk about is that it is happening across different dimensions. At the same time we are talking about Catholic schools growing and starting new schools in a traditional sense, two blocks away in some rented bungalow people are creating a Montessori micro school.

Because these things get spoken about in national terms and in a thousand-word news story, we struggle to discuss multiple dimensions. Existing schools are growing, new schools are emerging, and those new schools are going to look different. Some will grow, some will shrink, all these things can be happening at once.

Our job as researchers and observers is to do a lot of descriptive work, describe what is happening. There has been a push in earlier generations of school choice research toward causal results, horse-race comparisons, “Are they better than public schools?” “Is this type of private school better than that type?” But the only reason we were able to do that in 1998 is because, for a hundred years before, people did descriptive work to know, how many schools, what are they doing? Then you can talk about who is doing better, because you have to decide what they are doing, where they are, who is attending, are there differences.

It is almost like we are starting over.

Susan Pendergrass (34:39)
Yeah.

Mike McShane (35:01)
…doing that basic descriptive work. What is actually happening? What are people doing?

Susan Pendergrass (35:08)
Yeah, I know somebody who started a school in a barn on their property, and the parents came and converted the empty barn to a school. I know somebody who started a mobile school, basically in a big van, so that the school came to their house one day a week. And I know someone who started one in a high-rise in Queens. It is only limited by people’s imagination, basically, right?

And a like-minded group of parents. There are more people homeschooling now than used to be, so you could do this individually, but there are many more opportunities to do it. Parents, what emerged from the pandemic, at least, is they want their kids home maybe two days or three days. That is popular, and people are finding that two days out of the house creates unique opportunities in that space.

I think it is limited by people’s imagination, and some curriculum standards, and perhaps some accountability. But if you can meet those, I think we are seeing this idea.

I am not trying to be anti-traditional public school, but I butted up against this when my kids were little. “We are the only ones who know how to do this, so you have to accept our way of doing it because it is tried and tested and comes out of our schools of education at the universities.” This is the one and only way you have to teach the number line in third grade. “This is how it has to be, we cannot vary it because we are the great equalizer of civic society in the United States.”

Your boss, Rob Enlow, really shut me down on this. It has not panned out. We only read and do math less well each year.

I cannot imagine that letting all these flowers bloom is going to have a worse result. If we fast forward 20 years and look at median earnings and educational attainment rates, and we let this thrive, I think the outcome would improve. I do not see how it goes down.

Mike McShane (37:23)
That is the thing. You mentioned the interesting times we are living in now. So many of the “parade of horribles” choice opponents talked about forever, polarization, balkanization, people retreating to silos, it is like, hey guys, that already happened without choice. You cannot blame choice, because choice did not exist yet for that to happen.

Lots of people pushing each other in the streets went to public schools. Statistically, these are public school graduates having large problems with one another.

The conservative in me says things can always get worse. The fundamental progressive view is things can always get better, and the fundamental conservative view is things could always get worse. That strand in me says, yes, things could get worse. But across a lot of these dimensions, academic outcomes, civic outcomes, there is a lot of room for growth, and not nearly as much bottom end to fall out. So the risks associated with giving people more choices are not nearly as severe as proponents of the traditional public schooling system make it out to be.

Susan Pendergrass (38:58)
Yeah. Well, in Missouri, 40 percent of our fourth graders are below the basic level in reading, which means they cannot read at all. They cannot read. They are illiterate.

Would 40 percent of parents, if given the money to spend on their child’s education, have a nine-year-old and say, “Turns out they cannot read. I tried and tried, we just did not get there. They just cannot read.” I do not think so.

I know this is not the perfect solution, that accountability through parental choice is the answer. I am not saying that. But I do not think that if parents were truly put in charge, four out of 10 would just say, “Gosh darn it, this kid is never going to read, there is probably a lot of opportunity in the service industry.” I do not think so. I think that would be a much better check on the system.

Interesting stuff. Thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it, always.

Mike McShane (39:42)
Yep. Yeah. I agree with you. Agreed, 100 percent.

Susan Pendergrass (39:59)
So great to talk to you. What is your Substack called?

Mike McShane (40:02)
Informed Choice, so people can check that out. Informed Choice on Substack. Subscribe, it would be great.

Susan Pendergrass (40:05)
Yeah, it is really interesting. Great. Thanks so much.

Mike McShane (40:10)
Thanks for having me.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Six Words Driving the Education Debate in 2026 With Mike McShane 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.

In St. Louis County, parts of the county are still recovering from the tornado, the county executive is under indictment (everyone is innocent until proven guilty), and county government’s 2026 budget forecast says there is an $80 million budget shortfall. The last part is the focus of this post.

Every government budget can be cut, and in every government budget there is enough waste and fat to be trimmed to make a difference. That said, cutting government spending is hard (I wish it weren’t). County governments in Missouri are not bloated bureaucracies wasting money hand over foot. They tend to operate fairly efficiently, at least by government standards. So, while making cuts should be the highest priority for the budget shortfall, I doubt that there is $80 million in waste and fraud to be trimmed. Some tough choices are going to have to be made. So, beyond cutting all the waste that it can, what should St. Louis County do?

First, if you are in a hole, stop digging. St. Louis County continues to inexplicably grant tax abatements and other subsidies that never live up to their promises. If these subsidies worked—and by “worked” I mean generated long-term revenues that outweighted the short-term costs—then St. Louis County wouldn’t be in this predicament in the first place. St. Louis County needs to stop giving away taxpayer money as part of a delusion that government planning grows the economy. And yes, this includes getting rid of the senior property tax freeze among other subsidies.

Privatization and outsourcing some services are always an important option for local governments. St. Louis County’s options here are limited, in that the county doesn’t operate any public utilities and it already provides many services via outsourcing. (This is, of course, all a good thing.) The biggest mistake county government has made in recent years is the debacle with the animal shelter. The county should never have taken the animal shelter back in-house. St. Louis County officials should admit their mistake and once again outsource management of the animal shelter.

One of the reasons St. Louis County is in this situation is that it has gone over a decade without a qualified county auditor catching mistakes and making suggestions for fiscal improvements. Hopefully, the recently hired county auditor can change that.

Now let’s talk about the revenue side. Nobody likes tax increases, but sometimes they are necessary. If the county were to consider raising taxes, what taxes should it either institute or increase?

St. Louis County voters have rejected a use tax several times, most recently in April, 2022. A use tax (which is a sales tax on online purchases) is probably the best tax option for the county from a revenue perspective. Two other options could be imposing a small county gas tax to help fund roads or a modest property tax increase. Both of these would be politically complicated.

Beyond all of this, cuts will have to be made. Those may be cuts to services people like, such as the police department or highway projects. But elected officials are there to make hard choices.

The post What Should St. Louis County Do about Its Budget Shortfall? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

David Stokes, Elias Tsapelas, and Avery Frank join host Zach Lawhorn to outline what a responsible plan to eliminate Missouri’s income tax should include, from revenue triggers and spending restraint to rethinking other taxes. They also break down St. Louis County’s Bill 182 expanding prevailing wage and DBE mandates, Independence’s proposed TIF package for a new Wally’s gas station and what it says about corporate welfare, Missouri’s early literacy crisis and reforms like a universal third grade reading screener, mandatory retention, and banning three cueing, and what they are watching next on prefiled tax bills, data center policy, and rising property tax bills across the state.

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Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Missouri’s Income Tax Elimination Plan
02:52 Strategies for Reducing Income Tax Reliance
05:19 Understanding Missouri’s Tax System
08:26 The Importance of Competitive Tax Policies
10:53 St. Louis County’s Prevailing Wage Bill Discussion
13:45 Economic Implications of Tax Subsidies
16:24 Independence’s Wally’s Gas Station Development
19:28 The Flaws in Tax Increment Financing
20:20 Addressing Early Literacy in Missouri
27:54 Looking Ahead: Legislative Priorities

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Eliminating Missouri’s Income Tax, Subsidies for Gas Stations, and Early Literacy Reform appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Testimony: St. Louis County Procurement Rules appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Local governments often hide documents and spending records from the taxpaying public despite requirements under the Sunshine Law that mandate meaningful transparency.

The Solution

Require that local governments report spending information.

Key Facts

• Missouri already has two programs through which local governments may report their spending to facilitate oversight by the public, but thus far only 33 counties and six municipalities are sharing information.

• One of the few ways for many taxpayers to obtain detailed information about their government’s expenditures is through the submission of a Sunshine Law request, but this system is fraught with government roadblocks and weak consequences for statutory violations.

A Checkbook for Missouri

The creation of the Show-Me Checkbook by the state treasurer’s office in 2018 and the passage of House Bill 271 in 2021 established voluntary reporting programs in the state for local governments. Yet those developments should be the beginning, not the end, of transparency and accountability for local government in Missouri. Local governing bodies should be required, not invited, to report their spending.

Accountability Pays Dividends

Online transparency portals ensure that rather than responding to Sunshine Law requests for these data, local governments can simply refer requestors to the continuously updating online resource. At the same time, taxpayers will be able to see in an understandable format where their money is going, and they will be able to keep tabs on the activities of elected leaders and bureaucrats when they choose.

Empowering the Auditors

Missouri adopted House Bill 2111 in the 2024 legislative session to increase the authority of the state auditor to investigate reports of malfeasance in local government. This positive change has improved accountability in local government by giving the state auditor the ability to audit local governments without a formal request or a petition drive in cases where financial irregularities are suspected.

Next, the state should consider adopting requirements and standards for local county auditors in Missouri’s larger counties (charter, first, and second-class counties). The quality of local auditing varies dramatically, from good in St. Charles County to basically nonexistent in St. Louis County.

Unfortunately, in 2025 the courts overturned a law imposing stricter reporting standards for municipalities within St. Louis County on the grounds that it was a “special law” applying only within St. Louis County. The legislature should address that issue by making higher reporting standards applicable to municipalities in every Missouri county.

The use of tax dollars to advocate for or against local government ballot issues has received significant attention this year. The time is right for the legislature to restrict or even eliminate the ability of local governments to use tax dollars to share information on ballot issues with voters. Attempts by local governments to be “neutral” generally make a mockery of the idea of neutrality and should be curtailed.

Policy Recommendations

• Make the reporting of local government spending data to the Show-Me Checkbook and the Missouri Accountability Portal database mandatory rather than voluntary.

• Expand the now-overturned financial reporting requirements in RSMO §67.287 for municipalities in St. Louis County to all municipalities statewide.

• Ban the use of tax dollars by local governments to share information on local ballot issues.

The post Local Government Transparency appeared first on Show-Me Institute.