State Does Citizens A
Gross Injustice
When Law Applies
To Just One City
Every day it seems State and Federal officials dream up new ways to limit our freedom. Their actions are based on a false premise that you, the local voter and taxpayer, can’t be trusted. They believe they are in some way superior to make decisions whether a hundred miles away in Jefferson City or eight hundred miles away in Washington D. C.
I believe the most responsive form of government is the one closest to the people. You elect a Mayor every four years and City Council every three. Local elections tend to be pedestrian, with candidates going door-to-door, shaking hands and asking for your vote. State and Federal elections have become ludicrously expensive rounds of dueling thirty-second television ads paid for by mass amounts of special interest money. They just held a special election in Jefferson County that was the most expensive State Senate campaign in Missouri history. Each side spent over $600,000 dollars! Where that money came from will influence decision making at the State level more than you or I.
So any time I’m told officials in Washington or Jefferson City know best how to run a city, a county or local school district, I tend to have severe reservations. It gets worse in Missouri, where the General Assembly has a history of passing laws that apply to only one city at a time! Talk about being micro-managed! Here is a recent case in point.
There are nine casinos in the State of Missouri. They are all in communities where local residents voted to allow gaming. A bill sponsored this year by State Senator Chuck Gross singled out St. Charles as the “only” community in Missouri whose local tax revenues from the casino would be capped. Further, it dictates how the money can be spent.
Now if this is such great legislation, why shouldn’t it apply to the other eight casino communities you might ask? The original draft of the bill by Senator Gross would have applied to the entire State, but apparently not a single other State Senator wanted these restrictions to apply to communities in their districts.
So to pass the bill in the Senate, our State Senator stripped out of his bill all other communities and made the bill apply “exclusively” to the City of St. Charles. That is when the legislative process breaks down. Instead of debating the merits of a bill, Senators have an unwritten rule to vote for anything proposed by a colleague provided that legislation “only” effects that Senator’s home district and doesn’t cost the State much if anything.
This practice is turning Missouri from a State, into 34 separate fiefdoms, each ruled over by a State Senator.
On the question of whether or not less gaming money should be used for recurring expenses, I agree with Senator Gross. But this City Council has already started to move in that direction. We froze salaries this year and made cuts to reduce our dependence on gaming funds.
But the bill by Senator Gross would force us to spend the money on all capital items. City Administrator Allan Williams and the City Finance Director both studied the legislation and its fiscal impact. They both concluded it would force us to lay off twenty employees immediately and up to another forty over the next few years.
Currently, gaming funds are used to pay for D.A.R.E. Officers and School Resource Officers (SROs). The City of St. Charles is spending this money to make sure our kids were safe in school and to fight drugs. After what happened at Columbine, that seemed like a pretty good idea. So a logical question for our State Senator is whether the State of Missouri is now going to pick up those costs for the school districts?
It also makes no sense to totally restrict this funding source to capital items. What this in effect says is you can use gaming funds to build a Community Center, but you can’t use the money to keep the lights on. You can build more roads, but don’t hire anyone to fill potholes or sweep the streets.
To his credit, Senator Gross has listened and perhaps the bill will be further amended in the House to lessen its impact. But what we really need is to convince our lawmakers that it is simply not fair to single out St. Charles. Maryland Heights uses a portion of their casino money for public safety and most for capital expenditures just like we do. Are they saying that on one side of the Missouri River that’s just fine, but on the other side of the river it isn’t? Is it too much to ask for fairness and consistency in our State laws?
The original concerns about a gaming boat just “floating” away have pretty much died when the State said they could be put in concrete moats. Missouri has rightly been very conservative about giving out licenses, forcing competing casinos to invest in their current sites. Does it make sense any more to believe a casino would abandon $200 million of land based development? When the economy went bad, gaming revenues went up. We don’t have to get into a debate about whether casinos are good or bad, to agree they are pretty darn resilient and aren’t going away anytime soon.
In fact, the Missouri General Assembly is getting ready to take the loss limits off. I know that sounds fantastic. After all, the new Governor is devoutly fundamentalist and both the House and Senate have Republican majorities which popular wisdom would say have greater allegiance to a more conservative religious base. But if you thought that meant gambling would be restricted…think again. The State of Missouri is broke and they don’t have a choice. I think we are about to see just how resilient the gaming industry has become in Missouri. Besides, who do you think pays for those thirty-second television ads?
