MCLAUGHLIN FILES---STATE LEGISLATURE JOB ONE...DON'T SCREW IT UP

The McLaughlin Files

Looking to the State Level—Supermajorities have real challenges not to “muck things up”

Missouri GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Eigel coined the phrase “Big Red Republican Things” as a part of his primary campaign for governor.

He talked about a “day of reckoning for swamp things” in Jefferson City.  While Eigel didn’t win the April primary, and Mike Kehoe is now our governor, he left us with that memorable “catch phrase” that encompasses so many things on the state and the national level.

At the state level in Missouri, it means that with a maintained super majority in the Missouri State Legislature, Republicans can work on things like increasing teacher pay, seeking tax relief at the property tax level, and closing off the sale of Missouri farmland once and for all to foreign interests.

On that last issue, the only unfinished business to me is finding a legal, constitutional way to force the sale of Chinese-owned farmland and factory interests, ergo, Smithfield north of Princeton back into the hands of American ownership.

The state legislature needs to go back and revisit the issue of “Initiative Petition” and examine how to make amending the Missouri Constitution a tougher thing.  The last session saw GOP Establishment leadership put their thumb on Eigel and incoming Secretary of State Denny Hoskins who filibustered the issue, and found themselves stripped of all their committee assignments in the last quarter of the session.

Because it was so easy to get initiatives and petitions on the ballot, we have recreational marijuana sales legalized, sports betting now “in” in Missouri, and the most heinous of things, Amendment 3’s passage to re-open the butcher shop on abortion in Missouri and clear the way to gender reassignment surgeries for minors, now “lumping” the entire trans-agenda under the “Reproductive Rights” umbrella.

In my first week here, I related that the Dobbes case was going to put the abortion issue squarely in the hands of the individual voter to adopt their own personal policy.  

It is the most direct democracy possible and while the vote didn’t turn out as many of us in Missouri hoped, it was within three to four percentage points on the final vote count, and that bodes well.

In the meantime, the people have spoken on that issue and we may not like the result, but we have to live with it…for now.

The Legislature needs to turn its attention to resolving some major issues — Writing legislation that is clear, straightforward, and says exactly what it means, without requiring two or three revisions and “clean-ups” after the fact.

The  2022 legislation on the increasing of County Sheriff’s pay to be 50% of that of the county’s Associate Division Judge was needed, but it needed to be clarified to go into effect in the next term, beginning January 2025.  Because it wasn’t, some sheriffs received what has been called an unconstitutional pay raise during an elected term.  

Ten counties in the state opted not to do so.  In my communication last spring with the State Auditor’s Office, I was told that as county audits take place, counties will receive a “negative finding” that they executed the Sheriff’s pay raise against the Constitutional guideline.  Some counties, if not all in the audit cycle have been directed to “claw back” those raises from their Sheriffs.

104 of the 110 counties in the state supposedly moved ahead with this.  That this hasn’t broken as a major story across the state is baffling to me, and it may yet.

Bad bill-writing and poor guidance out to the counties puts more pressure on County Commissioners, and county sheriffs to hire deputies at up to 25% less than what a local beginning police officer makes.

Law enforcement needs to be funded as a much higher priority.  Our police and deputies take their lives in their hands every time they roll up on a traffic stop or respond to a report of a domestic disturbance.

That isn’t where we need to be “picking nits”.

The Legislature is considering rolling back or eliminating the property tax altogether.  Eigel’s assertion that our property tax bills tap vehicles that we paid for a long time ago, and essentially paying rent on them annually is bad juju.

But if we pull out property tax funding of counties and the twenty-six or twenty-seven “taxing entities” covered by property taxes, most importantly our school districts, how do we replace that funding?

We’re told that the counties need to get their use taxes on the ballot, like the internet sales tax that has found it’s way into County law a lot of different places.  The other shortfall, we are told, will be handled by “legislative appropriation”.

Really?  We’re depending on the legislature to even-handedly fund public services at the county level?  

That dog don’t hunt.

The legislature hands down dictums to the counties that look good on their press releases from Jefferson City, and commissioners have to fund roads and bridges, ambulance services. Rural fire, and law enforcement with less.

Removing the property tax is a help to individual tax payers at the county level, but until someone can convince me that the movement of funding goes from our courthouses to the Statehouse is a better deal for Missourians, I’m not sold.

The only thing I can surmise is that there is a long-term intent to force counties to consolidate, for small schools to be forced to become big county high schools, and for public services generally to be more centralized at the state level.

If a pothole swallows up my car on a county highway, I want to be able to go to my commissioners and bitch about it face to face, not send in an online report to MoDOT that will get answered when they get around to it.

All politics are local.  But all governance, including the most important thing…responsiveness to citizen needs  to be as close to the people involved as possible.