How Springfield priorities fared in Jefferson City: A few wins and a lot of 'obstruction'

Like anyone else looking to get things done in Missouri’s capital, the city of Springfield hires lobbyists.

And earlier this week, one of them came before the City Council to review how things went this session.

The upshot? Things were tough this year.

On one hand, lobbyist Will Marrs noted, Sen. Lincoln Hough, R-Springfield, got a council-endorsed measure passed requiring Medicaid coverage to be suspended rather than terminated when someone goes to jail. Advocates say that’ll make people less likely return to crowded jails like Greene County’s when they get out.

Sen. David Sater, R-Cassville, also pushed through a measure giving local judges more decision-making power when dealing with traffic violations.

But most of the council’s legislative agenda went nowhere, a result Marrs blamed mostly on “obstruction” from a bloc of senators calling themselves the Conservative Caucus.

Indeed, priority after priority for the council ran into opposition from the six-senator group.

Their concerns about due process and privacy doomed the latest effort to create a statewide prescription drug monitoring program and end Missouri's seven-year run as the only state in the nation without one.

Proponents of the systems, which are designed to identify people loading up on the same prescription from multiple doctors, hoped the departure of noted skeptic Sen. Rob Schaaf, R-St. Joseph, this year would end the filibusters.

Instead, the opposition was such that the bill didn’t even come up on the floor for debate.

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A bid to grant the council permission to put a tourism tax increase on the ballot — which would be essential to paying for a new convention center — made it only slightly further.

Authorization language made it through the House, but whenever Hough brought it up in the Senate, it got tied up in a broader conversation about local tax rates, which Conservative Caucus members want to cap or lower.

“He was stopped by Conservative Caucus members who heard the word ‘tax’ and didn’t like it,” Marrs said.

Bloc members also took issue with a bill the council supported that would make it easier to address nuisance violations.

When Hough forced the issue with an amendment to another senator’s bill, Sen. Eric Burlison, R-Battlefield, and Sen. Bill Eigel, R-Weldon Spring, took the floor and talked about property rights.

They weren’t the only ones killing legislation, though.

Despite the trouble passing priorities, Marrs told council members he was able to help block several bills that would have caused problems for the city.

One in particular, from Sen. Andrew Koenig, a Manchester Republican and a Conservative Caucus member, would have banned tax breaks for developments in floodplains, which could have crippled development of the IDEA Commons along a buried Jordan Creek downtown.  

The bill passed the Senate 33-0 but never came up for a vote in the House.

“If it made it to the floor, it very well could have passed,” Marrs said, “so we had to do a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure it didn’t.”

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Other bills that would have required the city to put its spending records online at an “absurd” cost and cap its sales tax rate also failed, Marrs said.

But he indicated the city likely hasn’t seen the last of those kinds of proposals in a deeply conservative legislature.

“There’s a lot of bills like that,” Marrs told the council, “that are not very well thought out in terms of how they will actually have an impact on local governments or the constituents that some of these people represent.”

“We’ve kind of come to a point,” he continued, “where there’s just this kind of monolithic belief in small government or lack of government, and it’s leading to a lot of bad policy statewide.”

After his presentation, council members asked questions and got some reasons for hope.

At Mayor Ken McClure’s prompting, Marrs noted Springfield Rep. Craig Fishel, a Republican and former council member, spent the session forging the makings of a local government caucus.

If made official next session, Marrs said, “that could be really instrumental in taking some of these preemptive bills that would take away local control and put it back in the hands of local governments where it belongs.”

In response to questions from Councilman Craig Hosmer, Marrs said it might also be possible to get tougher regulations on payday lenders in the Capitol in the near future.

For years, council members have decried the industry’s practice of issuing short-term, high-interest loans that advocates say trap low-income people in debt, and in Missouri, only the legislature has the power to cap the problematic interest rates.

But Marrs also told Hosmer there was likely no hope for a prescription drug monitoring program coming out of Jefferson City anytime soon and that physicians would have to make the best of a St. Louis County-run program for the foreseeable future.

That program pulls in data from 72 participating cities and counties, including Springfield and Greene County, but as of January, the only neighboring county participating was Polk County, meaning physicians here can't tell if someone's already obtained a prescription in the other neighboring counties.

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It’s unclear how accurate Marrs’ predictions will prove to be.

Senate President Pro Tem Dave Schatz, R-Sullivan, was more bullish on prescription drug monitoring in a press conference last month, telling reporters the issue would again be a top priority.

Rep. Steve Helms, R-Springfield, said he didn’t think legislation lowering interest rates on payday loans had a realistic chance with the current makeup of the General Assembly.

And all of it had Councilman Richard Ollis hoping for a break from ideological thinking in the capital.

"There are issues that need to be addressed and could be addressed if folks would just think pragmatically about what we need to do," he said. "But unfortunately, we’re caught up in this very ideological situation and in some cases, it’s hindering our problem-solving ability to legislate and make communities stronger and better."