A futile session is predicted for Missouri Legislature in election year

By Max Goodwin

The new year brings a new regular session for the Missouri General Assembly. An election year in 2024 will likely provide a messy session following a record budget year 2023.

Missouri House Speaker Dean Plocher, a Republican from Des Peres, faces an ethics committee inquiry over allegations of false reimbursements for travel. Republican infighting derailed another year for conservative priorities in 2023. 

“Not a lot is getting done in the next year,” Missouri Senator Greg Razer, Democrat from Kansas City, said at a South Kansas City Alliance meeting. “One, it’s an election year. Those are always bad. But, two, there’s a lot of drama in the house. The speaker is under investigation for a number of things.” 

Despite that, the Missouri Legislature passed the largest budget in the state’s history, with $50 million added for Kansas City to spend on Arrowhead Stadium, transportation, and marketing for the 2026 World Cup. The budget included $3 billion to expand Interstate 70 to three lanes across the state. The budget is expected to shrink this year with less federal money going to states.

The budget in 2023 also gave $300 million for a new psychiatric hospital in the Hospital Hill neighborhood of Downtown Kansas City. The facility will move from about 50 beds owned by the state to about 300 beds and rooms. After touring the facility earlier this year, Sen. Razer said the improvements were urgently needed.

“It’s one of the saddest places I’ve ever been. I don’t know how people are supposed to get healthy in that facility,” Razer said. “The new building will be a happy place where people can come and get better.”

Razer described 2023 as an incredible budget year. There was also drama that muddled the year again, resulting in the legislature passing as few bills as any year since 2020. Razer expects the next year to be more of the same, if not worse. But here is legislation worth watching in 2024.

South Kansas City Landfill

State Rep. Mike Haffner, a Republican of Pleasant Hill, prefiled a house bill requiring an increased permitting process for waste disposal areas. The bill is meant to stop a proposed landfill in South Kansas City near the border with Raymore. 

Rep. Haffner filed a similar bill in the Missouri House last spring that stalled in the Senate. The conflict over the proposed landfill will return to the Missouri Legislature in 2024. 

Federal Reimbursement Allowance

The FRA provides billions of dollars to the state’s Medicaid program from federal funds. In 2021, an effort to stop funding for Planned Parenthood nearly ended the FRA, but a bill was passed to secure the funding in the end. Three years later, that fight will return as the FRA must be passed again this year. The FRA is going to be an early priority.

“Three years ago, we got held hostage by some extremist proposals. And we nearly didn’t renew this program, which would have blown a $4 billion hole to our bottom line,” Razer said. “In the Senate, we’re going to go to it, from what I’m told. That’s the only thing we’re going to discuss until it’s amendment-free.”

Initiative petition

Missouri is one of 18 states that allows citizens to initiate constitutional amendments by collecting signatures from a certain number of voters. Razer expects to see that initiative petition process tested by Republicans in an attempt to stop protections for abortion being added by initiative petition. 

“The speaker of the house, in his end-of-session wrap-up last year, said the quiet part out loud when he said the ban on abortion in Missouri will end because we didn’t fix initiative petition this year.”

Blair’s Law

Missouri Representative Mark Sharp, a Democrat from South Kansas City, introduced Blair’s law in the House last year, and Razer did the same in the Senate. It would have made a statewide offense to discharge a firearm within city limits. 

Blair’s law has been a priority for Kansas City-area representatives for years. The law passed last year as an amendment to a bill but was later vetoed by Governor Mike Parson. There is hope that Blair’s law has a better chance of passing again this year, and the governor vetoed it not because of anything in Blair’s law but because of the original bill it was attached to. 

“It’s been passed this previous session,” Sharp said. “It would have been nice if the governor would have told us there was something else in the bill he didn’t like. But in any case, he didn’t.”