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.

This is a good thing. My colleague David Stoked submitted testimony in favor of the effort in January and again in early April.

HB 2069 sets up a statewide framework, largely by adopting industry definitions from the Society of Automotive Engineers and clarifying how existing traffic laws apply. For example, it treats an automated driving system as the legal “driver,” while requiring operators to meet standards regarding certification, safety, and financial responsibility.

The legislation also sets baseline operational rules, including how law enforcement deals with car accidents and registration requirements. Importantly, it also sets up how driverless cars can be employed as taxi cabs.

One point of contention is that the bill pre-empts local governments from imposing their own additional restrictions or taxes. But recent history on ride-sharing tells us that Kansas City and St. Louis would likely bow to local pressure groups whose revenue might be challenged by the new technology. And Missouri’s preemption language is consistent with the approach taken in states including Florida, Texas, Nebraska, and Utah, which likewise centralize authority at the state level and prohibit local governments from imposing their own additional regulations.

The benefits of driverless technology in Missouri—and especially our cities—are immense. It will impact not only private owners, but could revolutionize how we provide public transportation, making it much cheaper and more convenient to users.

It may also finally encourage us to abandon our inflexible, expensive, and inefficient light rail and streetcar systems. As I wrote years ago, “the rail system that is being built likely will be abandoned by the hip urbanite core that it is meant to attract as soon as something sexier comes along  . . . like a Google car.”

Driverless cars are the future of transit; Missouri needs to get in.

The post Missouri Considers Going Driverless 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Last week in The Kansas City Star, I argued the earnings tax is harmful. The responses suggest the Show-Me Institute is winning the argument, regardless of the vote’s outcome. What’s striking is that even those who acknowledge the tax’s flaws remain unwilling to act on their supposed principles. (St. Louis will also be voting on the earnings tax.)

I argued that the tax is regressive, drives workers and businesses away, and fuels the city’s subsidy culture.

David Hudnall, a reliably left-of-center columnist for the Star, urged a yes vote but largely conceded my points. In a column titled, “Just hold your nose and vote for Kansas City’s earnings tax,“ he agreed the tax is regressive and supports lavish subsidies for wealthy developers.

Weirdly, Hudnall then lamented that the tax requires a public vote in the first place. But he wistfully concluded, “I’d welcome a little more fiscal discipline at City Hall.”

The Star’s Editorial Board also endorsed a yes vote but conceded the tax is regressive and “economically harmful”—a significant admission. The piece further conceded, “The earnings tax is not the best way to fund such a large proportion of our city services.” Another notable concession. The piece closed not with a demand for action, but with little more than meek, wishful thinking:

We hope to see future City Council candidates campaigning on a pledge to reform the system. We also hope to see council members who vow to keep the basics of what makes a city hum fully funded—and ratchet back the incentive handouts.

Back in 2021, the last time Kansas City voted on the earnings tax, the Editorial Board urged a yes vote after admitting the tax was regressive and fed the city’s incentive culture. (They even admitted that the sales tax was too high.) Yet they feared reform would be worse.

In 2015, another reliably left-of-center columnist for the Star, Yael Abouhalkah, lamented that the city has neither explored alternatives nor held a meaningful discussion about the tax. He also observed that the tax is regressive and hits the poor hardest.

The problem, then as now, is that city leaders have no incentive to explore alternatives or discuss a 10-year phaseout of a tax widely acknowledged as harmful. Why? Because rather than demand better, the Star’s opinion class and business leaders reliably fold at the slightest scare tactic.

Hand-wringing about Kansas City’s flawed tax structure is not enough. We need city leaders, including those at the Star, to live up to their principles. Otherwise, what is the point of having a platform?

The Mayor and Council have failed to address these issues. There is no reason to expect that will change until voters demand it.

The post Earnings Tax Defenders Unable to Defend Earnings Tax appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For some reason, film tax credits remain popular in Jefferson City. They are much less popular with economists.

Missouri lawmakers are once again debating whether to extend the state’s film tax credit program. Earlier this month, I testified against legislation that would continue the subsidy. For those who don’t remember, this is a debate the state has already had.

Missouri operated a film tax credit program before ending it more than a decade ago. In 2010, the state’s Tax Credit Review Commission examined the program and concluded it served too narrow an industry to justify its cost to taxpayers. Lawmakers shut it down soon after. The idea never fully disappeared, though, and in 2023 the subsidy returned, this time with the promise of better results. The current program allows up to $16 million per year in credits for film and television productions.

So far, there is little evidence that anything has changed. Supporters point to production spending as proof that the program works. The Missouri Film Office reports that productions spent more than $40 million in the state in 2025 while receiving roughly $15.7 million in credits. But production spending is not the same as fiscal return. Much of that activity consists of temporary wages, lodging, equipment rentals, and other short-term expenses tied to a shoot. When filming ends, much of that spending leaves with it. What matters for taxpayers is how much tax revenue actually makes its way back to the state.

On that measure, film subsidies perform poorly almost everywhere they have been tried. Research summarized by the Tax Foundation estimates governments recapture between eight and twenty-eight cents in new tax revenue for every dollar of credit issued. Even Georgia, often cited as the model for film incentives, struggles to demonstrate that the program pays for itself. A 2020 performance audit by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts found that tax revenue generated by film production activity fell well short of the credits the state awarded.

There is also a basic budget reality lawmakers should keep in mind. Film tax credits are sometimes treated as something different than spending because the state only grants them after a production films in Missouri. But the fiscal effect is the same. Each credit issued is a commitment to collect less revenue in the future.

Meanwhile, the productions most closely associated with Missouri often film somewhere else entirely. A new HBO series set in St. Louis, DTF St. Louis, was filmed in Georgia. The Netflix series Ozark, which was set at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks, was also largely filmed in Georgia.

Though it should go without saying, Missouri’s lawmakers should be focused on using state tax dollars as effectively as possible. And there’s no disputing that film tax credits have repeatedly failed that test. Extending the credit today would mean ignoring the state’s past experience and choosing to repeat it.

The post Missouri’s Film Tax Credits Still Don’t Add Up appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Todd Davidson, Vice President of Programs at the State Policy Network, about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the think tank world. They explore what AI is good at and where it falls short, how organizations like the Show-Me Institute can use it to become more productive without losing their edge, why face-to-face relationships will only become more valuable as AI-generated content floods the internet, how a Hawaii think tank used an AI agent to help fire victims submit legislative testimony, what good policy looks like in an AI-driven energy landscape, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00) Great, well, thanks so much for joining us this morning. Todd Davidson of the State Policy Network, to talk about the topic du jour: artificial intelligence. Thanks so much for coming on to talk about it. I’m afraid to even say anything out loud about AI because by next week it’ll be…

Todd Davidson (00:11) Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Susan Pendergrass (00:18) Nothing really ages — it changes so fast. But I did just read that Mark Zuckerberg has an AI agent who is performing his CEO duties for him. Did you see that? Why not, right?

Todd Davidson (00:28) I saw that, yeah. And then he can just kick back, go down to his Hawaii bunker and just let Facebook run itself.

Susan Pendergrass (00:37) Yeah, I mean, I still haven’t really dabbled in agentic AI, but I know it’s right there and I’m going to want to do it soon. We’re going to talk about AI in the think tank world, but I have to check legislation and hearings and see how those things are going every day. I can well imagine an AI agent doing that for me.

Todd Davidson (01:01) Yeah, if it’s properly trained. So ShowMe Institute, to give the audience broader context, is a member of State Policy Network, and we have sister organizations like ShowMe in states across the country. The Libertas Institute, which is based out of Utah, did exactly what you’re talking about. Connor Boyack, the CEO, built a legislative tracking system that then feeds into their scorecard where they keep track of legislation. He said it took him about eight hours of work to code the agentic AI, but now it does the work automatically. Of course it needs fine-tuning and always has a final human observer that verifies everything, but it’s being used for those purposes right now across the country.

Susan Pendergrass (01:59) So we’re in the think tank world, and it’s probably more of an art than a science at the state level. Tracking the policies — first of all, thinking about the policies that we think would be best for Missouri, then doing a bunch of research on those policies, then creating content on those policies, then trying to talk to legislators and hope that they see our point of view, and that they enact actual laws that reflect those policies. That’s a really labor-intensive job. Which parts of that could you see being picked up by AI?

Todd Davidson (02:33) I’m by no means an expert on AI, but I work with someone who is. What has been explained to me is that AI is very good at synthesizing information. It’s very good at predicting — it essentially predicts the next word. It takes all these inputs and predicts the next set of words, which comes out to us as sentences. So if you are able to give it certain inputs — say, I want you to look at these bills, I want you to look at these things — and give it a sort of walled garden, it can then be prompted to produce any type of analysis that you want. The reason you want that walled garden is because AI can still hallucinate. It can make stuff up. Actually, this just went viral last week: a lawyer down in Georgia went before the Georgia Supreme Court and had AI produce her entire argument. It cited five fictitious cases, and the judges called that out. So you have to give it constraints and say, here are the data inputs, now summarize this for me. And it can get you a pretty solid first draft of that summary. Of course, you’re still going to need a human to go through and edit it and add voice and texture to it. But summarizing that data, saying tell me which of these align with our principles or does not align with our principles — it would be very good at that kind of thing. What it’s not going to be able to do is the creative part. When you think about what is the policy that we want to design for Missouri, what does Missouri need — it’s not at the stage where it could do that. That’s where you would still want Show-Me Institute experts to be crafting those kinds of things. But if something’s already out there and existing, you can summarize it and score it based on criteria pretty easily.

Susan Pendergrass (04:35) So given how quickly firms are moving towards AI — and in fact mandating AI because it’s such a time saver and productivity increase — how does a think tank position itself in that world? There’s so much talk about AI just replacing all of our jobs. Maybe it does replace my job — I don’t know. I’ve heard podcasts generated by AI in my voice, so it could be doing this job right now. I would like to think it wouldn’t be as great, but how does a think tank position itself? What’s our value add in that scenario?

Todd Davidson (05:12) Start by going back to what your mission and objective is. ShowMe Institute — and by the way, I am a resident of Missouri and a big fan of the Show-Me Institute, both from my SPN perspective and from my Missouri resident perspective — we have principles: free markets, a robust civil society, a thriving economy. We want the feds to get out of the way in a lot of cases. We want the government to get out of the way. And then how we execute that mission is through policy change, mostly at the state level, though I know you also work at the local level. So state and local policy change is the objective. How do we go about that? We produce research and then we advocate — in some cases talking directly to policymakers, communicating out to the public through op-eds and things so that the public then talks to lawmakers. And ultimately we get policies passed that lower the income tax, reduce barriers to work, and provide more options for kids in schools. So what AI is going to do is make research and content much easier to produce. By research, again, I mean that summarization kind of research — it’s going to make that kind of stuff extremely easy for folks to produce. Everybody’s going to have a research assistant. What AI cannot do is personal relationships. It will never be able to do that. What it also cannot do is tour the entire state of Missouri, know all of the history and relationships and connections of people throughout the state. So I believe Show-Me Institute and all of the affiliates across the country that are state and local based are going to have an advantage because you’re in your community. You know people, you know policymakers, you know community leaders, you know people that are affected by your policies. And that’s something AI is not going to be able to do. AI can look at the statistics and arguments and academic literature, and it could put together a brief, and that could be useful. It would make your job more efficient — you’d be able to produce those things in a fraction of the time you do right now. But then with that extra time, I would use it to go out and build stronger relationships in the communities, and then use those relationships towards policy change.

Susan Pendergrass (07:51) What about grassroots? More grassroots-type stuff?

Todd Davidson (07:55) Grassroots very much. AI is going to have an interesting relationship with grassroots. In one way, it actually makes it easier for grassroots individuals to engage their legislature. On the other hand, it’s going to create a flood of grassroots engagement digitally. So face-to-face grassroots engagement is going to have more impact. I’ll tell you a story: Hawaii had the terrible fire that destroyed Lahaina a few years back. Hawaii has terrible building codes — it’s incredibly hard to build homes there. That town was completely destroyed, so the state needed to relax its building codes in order for homes to be rebuilt. Well, they weren’t making this change. Show-Me’s sister think tank, called the Grassroots Institute of Hawaii, built an AI platform that allowed individuals to submit testimony to the legislature. Testimony has a higher bar, right? You can email your lawmakers pretty easily, but testimony goes into the legislative record and has to follow a certain format and be structured in a certain way. That’s not something that grassroots individuals were very equipped to provide. So a think tank would typically provide the testimony and then get grassroots supporters to send emails to lawmakers. What Grassroots Institute of Hawaii did was build an AI agent so that an individual could say, “Hey, my house was burnt down, I need these things,” and the AI agent would turn that into testimony and submit it directly to the legislature. It resulted in a skyrocketing number of testimonies being filed. Because of that, the legislature said, “Wow, we’ve heard from 500 constituents — we’ve never heard from that many constituents before.” So they relaxed their regulatory regime, and now homes are being built in Lahaina much faster.

Susan Pendergrass (09:48) Did they know that AI was doing it? Were legislators thinking, okay, this is AI?

Todd Davidson (10:12) That is why they went through testimony. Legislators’ email inboxes — they’re not reading their emails anymore, right? They get thousands of them. But through testimony, the AI was not making up the stories. The people had to fill out the content and explain their story. The AI was just structuring it in a way to make sure that it got submitted as testimony. I do think that is a bit of an arms race. At some point the same thing that has happened with email will happen — there will just be thousands of pieces of testimony and you won’t be able to read all of them. So there was a bit of a first-mover advantage. And once that becomes ubiquitous, I do think what you predicted is going to happen, where legislators just say, well, this is AI-facilitated. And that’s where it’s going to have to go back to face-to-face, bringing those people in.

Susan Pendergrass (11:08) I think you’re absolutely right. As more video content comes out and we all realize it’s AI — I just don’t really believe that any videos are real anymore. I don’t really believe pictures are real. I don’t really believe music is real. And it doesn’t necessarily bother me that much, but I think because of that skepticism and unwillingness to believe in digital content, things happening in real life right in front of us are going to take on higher and higher value, so that we know for sure that if I’m speaking to a legislator, it is me saying it and what’s coming out of my head. That’s about the only way we’re going to know if something is real — or the default is just going to become AI-generated.

Todd Davidson (12:01) 100%, I absolutely agree. And that’s where I think organizations like ShowMe are well positioned. Because you’re in the state of Missouri, you can be in Jefferson City or you can be in St. Louis or Kansas City in those face-to-face relationships. It’s going to make your government affairs personnel far more valuable, your fundraisers who can be face-to-face with donors far more valuable, grassroots activists that are face-to-face. It’s going to put a premium on face-to-face interactions for sure. I agree — there’s going to be so much content out there. You’re still going to need content because that gives you credibility, it gives you what you’re going to talk about. But then you’ve got to pair that with the face-to-face interaction, otherwise it’ll just get ignored.

Susan Pendergrass (12:47) And you can definitely see the gap when people are generating stuff through AI and they don’t know the subject matter enough — like you said about the attorney. But there is definitely a role for humans to say, I mean, I do this all the time with AI: I’ll say give me five of these things, give me five infographics or something like that. But the human has to know which one is the best or which one makes the most compelling argument. AI simply really can’t do that. So while some people would love to believe that AI is going to run the world, I do believe there is an emerging role for human discernment to know which AI products are better than other AI products. Would you agree with that?

Todd Davidson (13:32) Yeah, 100%. I think the sweet spot is utilizing AI to make yourself more efficient or do things that you don’t like doing. But then that raises you up into that discernment phase where you’re the one making the call. I do this all the time — I’m having conversations with AI to increase the outputs. I should not spend any time making infographics. I’m not good at it. But I can have a conversation with AI where it produces that infographic much more effectively than I could. I’ve also found that, if you put the prompting on it, it can help you find those particular sources that you’re looking for. Say you want to write a survey on school choice research — it can help you gather all of those materials much faster. But then you have to make sure that it’s of high quality.

Susan Pendergrass (14:35) What do you think about the current pushback on AI-generated pictures? Do you think that is just a learning phase we all need to get through? Some top artists on Spotify have been determined to be AI-generated.

Todd Davidson (14:57) Really?

Susan Pendergrass (14:59) Yeah. The number two Christian artist is just AI, and across all genres there are artists with millions of subscribers who are just AI-generated music based on what AI knows we all like. So we do like it. Does it matter that there’s no real person writing the music? I don’t know.

Todd Davidson (15:12) It’s kind of sad. Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (15:21) I know the initial reaction is, that’s sad. But then after a while you’re like, I don’t know.

Todd Davidson (15:26) There is going to be intense pushback to all things AI. AI is very unpopular right now. I saw some polling just last week that showed it is the number one concern of voters. There will be a populist pushback against AI. We’re seeing this pushback against the data centers. There’s even polling that showed a plurality of the population believes it’s immoral to use AI. And I think it gets at the core of some of what you’re talking about here — yes, there’s this very popular, satisfying music, but it loses some human element because there’s not a human behind it. I do think we’re going to see a lot of pushback to AI on multiple dimensions. There’s that cultural dimension. There’s the economic anxiety dimension right now: a fear that AI is driving up energy costs, a fear that AI could take my job. There’s going to be pretty significant pushback. Right now we’re mostly seeing that in anti-data center efforts, trying to stop the building up of data centers across the country. I was looking at some Democratic pollsters today who were pitching that Democrats should advocate for a guaranteed job, guaranteed income, guaranteed healthcare, and a guaranteed home if you lose your job to AI. That kind of populist messaging is going to resonate with a lot of the public. What is the response going to be to that? What are the other solutions that we could advocate for that both allow the continued growth and opportunity and also allow continued innovation around AI, because we’re going to need AI to continue to develop?

Susan Pendergrass (17:30) It’s already here. I mean, we’re doing this in reverse order. And I think my opinion is that massive new technologies always get pushback — like the car. People were on their horses, and then we started designing roads for cars. Calculators got a lot of pushback, the internet got a lot of pushback. But ultimately people decided that they liked it better. I think AI is the same — we just have to figure out how to work with it. And I know that it is threatening to take a lot of jobs, but I see it more as a good thing. It gives us an opportunity to become the expert over AI. AI is not going to be the expert — we still need the human component. Like you said, face-to-face interactions. Legislators are still going to know what Missourians want and how to represent their constituents, and those are real-world issues. The data center pushback is because I don’t want to look out my window and hear a buzz and see a data center — I don’t want all that land going to data centers. That’s a real-world, in-person issue. But I just think we’re going to have to learn to work with it. I don’t think robots are going to — maybe this is where I don’t want to say things out loud — but maybe the robots will take over the world, I don’t know. But personally I feel like it is helpful to get a lot more content out, because you don’t know what’s going to resonate with stakeholders. Whether it’s a video or an infographic or a report or a different type of content, the fact that we can generate these things much more quickly I think is a benefit to us, and it makes the in-person time more meaningful to me.

Todd Davidson (19:11) You’re absolutely right. When a new technology comes out there’s going to be pushback, and organizations like ours have to figure out what’s the policy framework that allows that innovation to thrive without getting in the way. And fortunately we have a lot of those policies already. Like Avery, your colleague at Show-Me Institute, talks a lot about energy. One of the biggest pushbacks on AI is that it’s driving up energy costs. There’s some research that shows that’s not quite what’s happening. What’s happening is a lot of green policies that got passed in the 2010s are coming to roost — the renewable portfolio standards and those things are really what’s driving up energy costs. But even still, what can we do to make energy more affordable and reliable, even with a bunch of data centers added to the grid? And Avery’s got good policy on this: expanding nuclear power, expanding the use of reliable energy sources.

Susan Pendergrass (20:23) It’s separating out consumer electricity from data center electricity. You can carve these things differently.

Todd Davidson (20:29) Yeah, that’s another one — where the data center has its own power source. So there are policies out there that can mitigate it. And on the job question, unfortunately AI is happening at the same time that we’re having a continued cost of living and inflation issue. It’s one more thing that is driving anxiety. It’s not the root cause of what’s going on — we’ve got other factors that we need to address to get inflation under control, particularly on the energy side.

Susan Pendergrass (21:08) Yeah, but I do think it’s great that we have so many opportunities to expand or improve how we do things. In our little corner of the world, which is think tanks, we’ve been doing things kind of the same way for a long time. So I think a new approach to how we do business is a welcome change, and I think we could be a lot more effective.

Todd Davidson (21:38) Yeah, I think we’re going to see far more productive think tanks on the research side. On the litigation side, I was talking to Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. They litigate a lot of cases. With the advent of AI, every lawyer essentially got a legal clerk right away. They went from nine lawyers and a handful of legal clerks to nine lawyers who each now have their own AI legal clerk. It’s dramatically expanded the number of cases they can take on. And the same thing on the research side. On the marketing side, production of content is going to be quite a bit easier and more cost effective as well.

Susan Pendergrass (22:26) Well, I appreciate having a chance to talk to somebody who has a positive perspective on it, because I do hear a lot of doom and gloom when it comes to AI. I was reminded by somebody that many of the scenarios in movies and books about AI are very dystopian, but perhaps it’ll be utopian. We don’t know. It’s all in how we approach it, right?

Todd Davidson (22:48) Yeah, it is. It’s going to be an exciting new world that we live in and we’re right on the frontier.

Susan Pendergrass (22:54) Anyone with little kids, like you — who knows what the world’s going to look like when they’re going to college. So you’ve got to stay flexible, right? Well, thanks so much, Todd. I appreciate you coming and talking to us about it. We’ll have to talk about it again sometime soon when the whole thing has changed.

Todd Davidson (23:02) Yep, stay flexible and always be learning. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post AI, Think Tanks, and the Future of Policy Work with Todd Davidson appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

While 2025 was a record-breaking year for the St. Louis as homicides fell to new lows and overall crime dropped by 16 percent. However, there remains a persistent gap between reported data and public perception. Even as the major numbers like homicides and carjackings decline, other issues keep the public on edge. Offenses such as aggravated assaults and vehicle thefts remain high, reminding residents that the threat of violence and serious property crime is still present. Finally, visible signs of disorder like graffiti and aggressive panhandling reinforce the feeling that the city is not yet fully under control.

As this report makes clear, there is more work to be done before St. Louisans and visitors to the city will feel safe walking alone at night. But some potential policy solutions have emerged from this analysis, and we look forward to continuing the conversation.

Click here to read the full report

Key Takeaways from the Report

• Most types of crime in St. Louis have declined consistently over the past 20 years. The major exceptions are homicide, which has declined from its COVID spike in 2021 but remains on a slightly upward trajectory on a per-capita basis, and motor vehicle theft, which spiked substantially in 2020.
• Although St. Louis once had considerably higher per-capita rates of aggravated assault, larceny, burglary, and robbery than Kansas City or Springfield, the three cities — the largest three cities in Missouri — are now quite similar.
• When compared to similar U.S. cities (Louisville, Cincinnati, Memphis, and Mobile), St. Louis’s crime rates (with the exception of homicide and motor vehicle theft) follow similar trends. The one exception is Memphis, which has become more dangerous than St. Louis in recent years.
• Since 2021, St. Louis has improved its clearance rates for homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, and burglary. Clearance rates for homicide have been as high as 70 percent in recent years.
• Motor vehicle thefts largely go unsolved in St. Louis; over the last 10 years, just one out of 10 has been cleared annually.
• Estimates of the number of Missourians who were victims of crime, compared to reported crimes, suggest that as many as 50 percent of violent crimes and 65 percent of property crimes in the state may go unreported. So, although the number of reported crimes has declined in recent years, total crimes committed may not have.
• Although it happened over a decade ago, the shooting of Michael Brown and the subsequent “Ferguson Effect” have had an impact on the relationship between St. Louis police officers and the community. A lack of trust in the police force may still be contributing to crimes going unreported.
• The St. Louis 911 system has been plagued by staffing shortages and other challenges that have left response times below national targets. Construction of a new 911 center is underway, but it has been delayed.
• Media sensationalism around violent crime, and homicides in particular, in St. Louis led to distorted perceptions regarding public safety (or the lack thereof) in the city.
• While violent crimes, including homicides, are concentrated in a few of the poorest neighborhoods in St. Louis, crimes of public disorder, such as vandalism, vagrancy, trash in the street, and aggressive panhandling are concentrated in the downtown and Central West End neighborhoods, where visitors are more likely to spend time. This may contribute to St. Louis’s reputation as a dangerous city to visit.

Watch Full Recordings of the Public Events

The Public Safety Climate in the City of St Louis –  January 21, 2026:

The Public Safety Climate in the City of St Louis – February 10, 2026:

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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.

The post The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis 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.

Show-Me Institute analysts have written often about housing in these pages. Missouri doesn’t face the same affordability crisis as coastal markets, but that doesn’t mean policymakers are powerless to further reduce costs.

A recent executive order from President Trump aims to lower housing costs by reducing federal regulatory barriers. The order directs federal agencies to review environmental rules, permitting processes, and other regulations that can delay projects or raise costs.

This isn’t a new insight. A 2016 report from the Obama administration warned that regulatory barriers—especially zoning and land-use restrictions—have made it harder for housing markets to respond to growing demand.

The Trump order addresses part of that problem. But the most consequential barriers to new housing are found at the municipal level. Zoning determines where housing can be built—and how much. Minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, height limits, and single-family zoning can sharply restrict supply. When zoning allows only a small number of homes on large parcels of land, the cost of each unit inevitably rises.

Federal action also played a role in shaping these systems. Throughout the twentieth century, federal housing programs promoted local zoning and land-use regulation as tools for stabilizing property values and guiding development. Those policies encouraged the spread of zoning frameworks that remain common today.

The administration’s order stops short of addressing local land-use restrictions directly. Addressing federal rules may help at the margins, but without local reforms, many communities will continue to limit the amount of housing that can be built.

Supporters of strict zoning sometimes argue that land-use decisions should remain entirely local. Local authority is important, but it does not eliminate the broader consequences of housing shortages, and it should not be used in a way that violates individual property rights. When cities restrict construction, as Kansas City did with rigid energy code standards, the effects ripple across regions through higher rents, longer commutes, and constrained labor markets.

If policymakers in Kansas City, St. Louis, or anywhere else want to make housing more affordable, they should start with the rules that determine whether housing can be built at all.

The post Trump Executive Order Targets Some Housing Regulation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Patrick Tuohey and David Stokes join Zach Lawhorn to break down the key issues Missouri voters will decide on April 7th. They discuss whether local elections should stay in April or move to November, property tax limit votes happening in more than 90 counties, new fire district sales tax authority and what it means for taxpayers, the 1% earnings tax renewals in Kansas City and St. Louis, and Springfield’s convention center lodging tax returning to the ballot after voters already rejected it. They also discuss use taxes, senior property tax freezes, the economic development sales tax on the ballot in O’Fallon, and more.

Listen on Spotify

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Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Missouri’s April 7 Ballot Breakdown with David Stokes and Patrick Tuohey appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In a series of sketches for Saturday Night Live, Billy Crystal played a fictionalized version of actor and director Fernando Lamas as host of the talk show “Fernando’s Hideaway.” Crystal’s character would often say that it is better to look good than to feel good.

This was on my mind as I reviewed recent evaluations of St. Louis’s guaranteed basic income pilot by Washington University’s Center for Social Development. The review’s claims will sound familiar to anyone who has followed these pilot programs around the country. Participants reported feeling more financially secure. They were better able to pay bills and cover everyday expenses like rent, utilities, and groceries.

In many ways, the findings are exactly what one would expect. St. Louis distributed $500 per month for 18 months to several hundred households using federal pandemic relief funds. If someone suddenly receives an additional $500 each month, it should not surprise anyone that paying bills becomes easier in the short run.

The St. Louis program is also not unique. Over the past several years, cities across the country have launched similar guaranteed income pilot programs. Their evaluations tend to report the same kinds of outcomes: reduced financial stress, improved food security, and higher levels of self-reported well-being.

But as economists Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley note in a review of the universal basic income literature, the new wave of guaranteed-income pilots is “not well suited” to answer the most important questions about the policy. (My colleague David Stokes wrote about this same study in 2024.) The pilot program evaluations tend to measure short-run responses that economists have already examined for decades in earlier experiments.

These evaluations often measure something quite narrow—how recipients say they feel about their financial situation. But feeling good about one’s finances is not the same thing as actually being better off.

More comprehensive research on guaranteed income programs paints a more complicated picture. A recent randomized study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research examined the effects of unconditional cash transfers using a large experimental design. In that study, 1,000 individuals were randomly selected to receive $1,000 per month for three years, while a control group received only a nominal payment.

The researchers tracked employment, income, and time use using administrative data and detailed surveys. Their findings suggest that while the payments increased consumption and temporarily improved subjective well-being, participants also worked fewer hours and saw declines in income earned from work. The transfers reduced labor-force participation and led participants to shift some of their time away from paid work and toward leisure.

In other words, the transfers made recipients feel more financially secure—but they also changed work behavior in ways that reduced earned income.

This should not come as a surprise. Economists have been studying guaranteed income–style policies for decades. Earlier negative income tax experiments and other research on income transfers have consistently found that unconditional income tends to reduce work effort modestly. Those effects may be small, but they are real and have important implications for the long-term economic impact of such policies.

None of this is to say that guaranteed income programs provide no benefit to recipients, or that the research from Washington University is flawed. Reducing financial stress and helping families weather unexpected expenses is not nothing. But policymakers should be careful not to confuse the short-term financial relief detailed in the St. Louis pilot program evaluation with long-term economic improvement.

There are also broader societal concerns that pilot evaluations like this one cannot address. One of the Show-Me Institute’s objectives is to build a state where “all Missourians are free from dependence on government.” Large unconditional cash-transfer programs, such as the program tested in St. Louis, could expand long-term dependency on government support and weaken incentives for work and self-sufficiency. That risk remains a significant policy concern.

Feeling better about your finances is not the same thing as improving the underlying economics—regardless of what Billy Crystal might advise.

Local leaders must be careful not to confuse the two, lest we commit to an expensive program that does more harm than good.

The post Economically, Feeling Better Isn’t the Same as Being Better appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

They say that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now. That about sums up my opinion on the City of St. Louis’s one-percent earnings tax, the continuation of which is before St. Louis voters on the April ballot. The best time to start phasing out the earnings tax really was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is still now.

The 20 years in the saying is particularly appropriate in this case, as the Show-Me Institute released its first study on the earnings tax almost exactly 20 years ago. Professor Joseph Haslag, then at the University of Missouri, documented how the earnings tax reduces overall income and employment in the city by encouraging businesses and individuals to locate outside of the city. Additional studies conducted by Show-Me Institute analysts and others have found similar results regarding the harms of local income taxes generally.

Haslag didn’t just demonstrate the harm of the earnings tax; he also recommended a strategy to replace it in order to maintain necessary city services. Haslag suggested changing state laws to allow St. Louis to institute a land tax, which is simply a property tax on the value of the land only. Pittsburgh is one city that had beneficial results from implementing land taxation in the 1980s. Alas, while land taxes are popular with economists and fiscally beneficial, they are politically unpopular to say the least. Needless to say, land taxes have never been adopted in St. Louis (nor has state law been amended to allow them). But the harms of the earnings tax have continued to help drive St. Louis’s population and economy lower, and those fiscal harms were exacerbated during the pandemic.

An easier change (legally, if not politically) than a land tax would have been to start phasing out the earnings tax 20 years ago while increasing a combination of property and sales taxes over time to replace the lost revenues (while cutting spending where possible as well). Poor decision-making over the past two decades has made that already-difficult change almost impossible. Damaging special sales taxes such as community improvement district (CID) taxes are now ubiquitous throughout shopping areas in the city. Primarily used as a smokescreen for harmful corporate welfare, CIDs and other special sales taxes have driven sales tax rates sky high. While the sales taxes have gone up, commercial property values have plummeted. According to the St. Louis Business-Journal, downtown St. Louis office buildings have lost 19 percent of their assessed value since 2019, and even more if you go back further. The largest office building downtown, the AT&T building at 909 Chestnut, paid $5.5 million in property taxes in 2009. It paid just $200,000 in 2024. While that is the most extreme example, similar examples can be found throughout downtown.

The economic situation in the city was already bad, and the tornado that hit in May made it even worse. It was the type of disaster that could make people consider radical changes, and perhaps the land tax is the type of radical change the city needs. (For the record, the Show-Me Institute’s offices were destroyed in the tornado, and while we’re a nonprofit, our office building is subject to property taxes.)

As large parts of the Central West End and the Northside are still recovering from the tornado, St. Louis city government has commendably allowed homeowners with damaged homes to reduce their tax payments, but the long-term impacts on city tax revenues may be significant. The population of New Orleans still hasn’t recovered from Hurricane Katrina and, while the damage to St. Louis was not that severe, the risk is the same.

I suggest it is time to change state law to allow for a land tax, including on land owned by larger “nonprofits” like Barnes Hospital. The land tax could be imposed on the value of the land throughout St. Louis at a level that would gradually increase to make up for revenue lost as the earnings tax is phased out over a period of 10 years (or more). (Other changes would be necessary, including ending the tax subsidies the city gives out.) What makes land taxation so beneficial is that as homeowners and businesses rebuild their damaged property, they aren’t hit with higher taxes for the home or building. The tax is set to the land, which can’t be altered, rather than the building. So, return to the city, rebuild your home or business, make it even larger—do whatever you want—and you won’t be punished with higher taxes.

Pittsburgh in the 1970s was experiencing economic difficulties just as St. Louis is now. Land taxation helped spur investment in Pittsburgh, and it could have the same effect on St. Louis. The city has been hemorrhaging population, jobs, and wealth for decades. Honestly, at this point in its history, what does St. Louis have to lose?

The post It’s Time to Phase Out the Earnings Tax. Honestly, Nothing Else Has Worked . . . appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

With Kansas City preparing to host matches during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Missouri lawmakers are considering a bill to simplify food truck licensing in Jackson County. The proposal would allow vendors licensed by the county to operate in any municipality without additional city permits.

The change would remove a common barrier: multiple permits just to cross a city boundary.

The idea makes sense. But if it will help entrepreneurs and visitors during the World Cup, why should the same principle not apply across Missouri? As the Squirrel Nut Zippers sang, “If it’s good enough for Grandad, its good enough for me.”

Food truck regulations vary widely by city. Vendors operating across a metro area may face requirements for multiple permits, fees, and regulatory approvals.

Show-Me Institute writers have written about these barriers for years. In 2019, we noted that St. Louis food trucks still faced significant regulatory constraints despite growing demand. Food trucks offer a flexible and relatively low-cost entry into the restaurant business, but local regulations can make that opportunity harder to pursue.

In some places, additional rules beyond health and sanitation standards function as a de facto ban on mobile vendors.

Health and safety regulations would remain under the proposal being considered in Jefferson City. Missouri already regulates food safety through inspections and sanitation standards administered by local health departments.

The real issue is duplication. Requiring vendors who already meet health standards to obtain a license in every municipality adds cost and delay without improving safety.

Every occupational license carries costs: higher prices for consumers, barriers to entry for workers, fewer providers, and lost time and money for licensees. The central policy question is whether those costs are justified by clear benefits to public safety or product quality.

Several Missouri communities have taken steps to loosen food truck restrictions in recent years. Clayton, for example, expanded opportunities for food trucks to operate at events and public gatherings while maintaining basic safety requirements.

Such changes recognize that mobile vendors are part of the broader restaurant ecosystem and often serve as a first step toward larger businesses.

Starting a small business often requires navigating numerous regulatory steps and fees. Reducing unnecessary barriers can make it easier for entrepreneurs to test new ideas and serve customers.

That flexibility helps explain the popularity of food trucks: vendors can move where demand is strongest, serve events, and test new concepts without the overhead of a traditional restaurant.

Major events like the World Cup highlight that advantage. When large numbers of visitors arrive, mobile vendors can help meet the temporary surge in demand for food and entertainment.

But the benefits of reducing unnecessary regulation should not depend on an international sporting event. If getting government out of the way helps vendors serve World Cup visitors in Kansas City, it should also help them serve customers across the rest of Missouri.

The post If Food Truck Reform Is Good for One County, It’s Good for All 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.

The 74’s Bright Spots project identifies public schools across the country that are beating the odds in reading. Specifically, “Bright Spot” schools have literacy rates that are significantly higher than what is predicted based on their student poverty rates. In other words, these schools are outperforming expectations in terms of teaching kids to read.

The project is impressive in both scope and purpose. Using data from 41,883 schools across 10,414 districts in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., it shines a light on excelling schools. Too often, education debates fixate on failure. Highlighting success—and learning from it—is just as important.

While there are surely all kinds of interesting tidbits in the data, in this post I want to focus on the disproportionate representation of charter schools among Bright Spots.

Charter schools make up seven percent of The 74’s national sample, but 11 percent of schools identified as Bright Spots. This means charter schools are overrepresented among Bright Spot schools by more than 50 percent. If performance were unrelated to charter status, we would expect charter schools to comprise seven percent of the Bright Spot list—not 11 percent.

This adds to a large and growing body of evidence showing that charter schools produce stronger academic gains than traditional public schools, on average. This does not mean that every charter school is more effective than every traditional public school, nor does it mean that there aren’t high-performing traditional public schools (indeed, the Bright Spots project highlights many!). But it does mean that, more often than not, a school system with more charter schools will outperform a school system with fewer charter schools.

In Missouri, we’re missing the boat on charter schools. Our outdated charter laws result in them operating in just four jurisdictions in the state (Boone County, Kansas City, Normandy, and the City of St. Louis). This leaves most Missouri families without charter school options.

The fundamental reason is that outside of these four jurisdictions, a charter school can only open with the approval of the local school board. But because the local school board has a vested interest in maintaining resources for its own traditional public schools, this rule effectively serves as a ban on charter schools in most of our state.

If state policymakers are serious about improving student outcomes, they should modernize Missouri’s charter law. A simple solution is to allow the Missouri Charter Public School Commission to authorize charter schools statewide, rather than relying on local school boards to approve them. This would allow the charter sector to expand and result in more students attending high-quality public schools.

The post Charter Schools Are More Likely to Be Bright Spots appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE

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

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

Current and Past Tax Credit Failures

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

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

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

The Competitiveness Argument Doesn’t Hold

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

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

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

Targeted Credits Are Poor Economic Policy

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

Prioritize Tax Relief That Benefits All Missourians

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

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

NOTES

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

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