Author Archives: bpriddy

The P and the Q

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When our state lawmakers get together during the next five weeks or so to play Scrabble, they can use four words containing the letters P and Q.  The number increases to sixty-one by the time they get to six-letter words then declines to only twenty-one for words with fifteen letters, according to an internet dictionary of words for Scrabble players.

But it’s not words that might be used as the pressure grows toward the end of the session, it’s the letters that might be heard.

The parliamentary technique of moving the Previous Question is used to cut off debate, sometimes long and tedious debate that is only holding up a vote on a bill, or when time is short toward the end of a session and leadership or sponsors rush to get something done in the last days.

Senator Rob Schaaf of St. Joseph is in the final weeks of his time in the Missouri Senate.  Because people throughout the state adopted term limits two decades-plus ago, the people in his district are denied the opportunity to vote for him ever again as their senator.  He will leave with a peculiar distinction when it comes to the previous question.

In our long experience covering the Senate, he is the only person who, in effect, PQ’d himself.

Here’s how it happened:

It was on January 28, 2013, early in the legislative session when the Senate was taking a final vote on its rules. In the previous session, in 2012, Cape Girardeau Senator Jason Crowell stopped debate on a bill when he refused to make a closing statement and sat down, thus yielding the floor for other actions but still controlling the bill.  The action left the bill in limbo.

Senate leadership at the start of the 2013 session decided to change a rule to stop such actions.  Pro Tem Tom Dempsey proposed the rule. Senator Schaaf, in challenging it, suggested amending the proposal to christen it the “Crowell rule.”  He then offered a substitute amendment to make the rule known as the “Jason Crowell rule,” a procedural move intended to block any one else from offering an amendment to his original proposal. When he was asked if he wanted to close on his amendment, Schaaf said, “No,” and sat down.

That’s when Senator Kurt Schaefer of Columbia cited another Senate Rule (number 76 for those who like to keep score) that read in part, “In order to maintain the recognition of the chair, the senator must be engaged in debate or in discourse.”  Dempsey ruled that Schaaf’s action constituted a failure to engage in debate or discourse, thus bringing the issue to an immediate vote, the equivalent of a previous question motion that debate or discourse be ended and the issue be decided immediately. Schaaf’s amendments lost. The rule proposed by Dempsey was adopted and the Crowell Strategy became in-valid in the Senate.

Senator Schaaf had, in effect, PQ’d himself.

The incident doesn’t show up on the list the press corps keeps of the times the previous question has been used in the Senate, where it is used less frequently than in the House because Schaaf’s action was an unintentional PQ and based on a ruling by Dempsey using another rule. It is not described in the official journal as a PQ issue. It was, after all, an unofficial PQ, self-inflicted.

But it is worthy of being recorded in legislative history somewhere.  Might as well be here as anywhere.

Keeping their own money

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There’s nothing wrong, really, with letting taxpayers keep more of their money.  And there’s something to the idea that letting taxpayers spend more of their own money generates a better economy.

Let’s open a discussion on this topic because, as in much of government, things are seldom as simple as they seem. The question today focuses on WHEN many taxpayers can spend more of their own money to fuel a growing economy and whether some steps seem to run counter to that goal.

There’s an overlooked segment of the economy that seems to this amateur economist  disadvantaged by the way the idea is carried out.  We mention them, not because we particularly disagree that more tax reductions are needed but because some people might become even more disadvantaged when the state lets them keep more of their own money.. We invite your participation in this discussion (there should be a box at the bottom of this entry for your comments).

We’ll be mixing some apples, oranges, pears, and peaches in our comparisons but we’ll excuse ourselves to suggest a point.

Here’s one of many places to start the discussion.

Any discussion of the size of government has to involve what government’s role should be.  Our United States Constitution says it is “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” general wording that leaves plenty of room for definition, discussion, and disagreement—and there HAS been plenty of all of that in the 230 years or so since those words were written.

Let’s narrow our focus to “promote the general welfare.”  Most of us at this meeting probably would agree that one of the major factors in achieving this goal is education.  Thomas Jefferson told Littleton Walter Tazewell in 1805 that “every member of society” should be able “to read, to judge, and to vote understandingly on what is passing.”  From such sentiments by Jefferson and others emerged the concept of an education system open to everybody, financially underwritten by everybody for the common good.

Our Missouri Constitution requires a certain minimum percentage of state tax collections to be set aside for elementary and secondary education.  However, there is no requirement for support of higher education and the state’s commitment to higher-ed has dwindled markedly.

A 2015 report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association found that since the 2008 recession, state and local funding per fulltime college student had declined almost 28 percent at a time when enrollment had increased by 20 percent.  Missouri, at that time, was found to be twenty percent below the national average in per-student funding.  State funding for higher education has taken some hits since then as anticipated tax collections have fallen below anticipated levels because of withholdings and vetoes to keep our state budget balanced.

Those actions do not necessarily mean that state government has become anti-higher education. The higher education budget is a huge pot of money and when it is necessary to make significant general funding reductions, those responsible for balancing the budget look at the biggest pots of money to make the biggest impact.  They can’t, for example, cut spending by $200-million by making big cuts in agencies with total budgets of $20-million.

So higher education becomes one of the usual targets.

And that means the institutions have to charge students more for their educations, bringing us to the nub of our observation. The Federal Reserve System says student debt has become the second largest kind of debt in the country.  The Institute for College Access & Success thinks fifty-seven percent of Missouri college graduates in 2016 left school with an average student debt of $27,532.   The same organization said the average debt of new college graduates increased at double the inflation rate between 2004-2014.

We’ve seen figures from the University of Missouri-Columbia saying forty-nine percent of incoming students take out loans averaging $7,059 per student to get through their freshman year.  The figure includes both private and federally-backed loans. And the loan amounts pile up on each other each year until graduation or drop-out.

There are those who wonder if the return on investment makes that student debt worthwhile.  Some of those students just walk away from paying off the debt. Of the 5,465 UMC students who began paying off their college debts after graduating in 2013, 4.2% had defaulted on their loans just three years later.  That’s lower than the national average but not something to be especially proud of.

Since we’re talking about education, we looked at the average salary for Missouri teachers.  Indeed.com put out an updated list on January 3.  The state requires school districts to pay salaries of at least $25,000.  The average elementary teacher salary in this survey was $36,847 which the survey said was twenty percent below the national average.

If the average elementary teacher salary is a little shy of $37,000 (before taxes and retirement withholdings) and the average college student debt is $27,532, it seems pretty clear that the economic impact of these teachers is severely reduced. They cannot fully contribute to the economy because their disposable income is reduced for many years by debt payments.

A Missouri State Teachers Association study for 2015-16 says the state requires districts to pay teachers with a master’s degree and ten years of experience at least $33,0001.  The average maximum salary in this study for a teacher with a master’s plus ten years’ experience was $48, 873.

We think we have the figures straight. Feel free to correct us if we have confused ourselves.  But if we were a teacher with a $27,000 student debt we’d have to seriously consider whether we want to borrow even more money to get an advanced degree that would increase our average salary only $11,000 with ten years experience—-at a time when we also might be starting a family that someday will want to go to college.

Or should we give up on a profession we might love (and you better love, really love, being a teacher to walk into a classroom of twenty children from all economic and social conditions every morning and try to teach them “to read, to judge, and to vote understandingly on what is passing.”) and go sell insurance or real estate or something with much less stress but much better benefits?

We’ve drifted away from our point. But here it is: Teachers—and other college graduates who come into the real world saddled with a lot of college debts—cannot be a significant part of economic growth as long as significant parts of their incomes pay off the debts they incurred because tax reductions have led to less broad public support for “the general welfare” of the state.  “Their own money” cannot be spent in a consumer-driven economy because it is spent to pay for the higher education that is increasingly needed in our changing world but is suffering from declining public financial support caused to a great degree by a desire to let Missourians keep more of their own money.

Irony is an incongruity between what result is expected and what the actual result is. This situation seems to fit that definition.

We’ve seen a news story that some of our lawmakers are studying college affordability.  Their job is not an easy one, especially when it is politically popular to limit resources that might alleviate the problem they want to address.  But it’s good that they are looking into these issues including the degree to which new efforts to let people keep their own money are to a significant degree counterproductive for thousands of others.

We wish them well in their difficult task.

‘Tis the season for crowing

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It’s a campaign year. Filing for state offices is ending. There’s something about this editorial from the July 17, 1924 Jefferson City Daily Capital News that struck us as appropriate.  Not sure exactly why, though.

The Lowly Rooster

The rooster is a gentleman chicken and serves as press agent for the hen. When the hen has laid an egg the rooster tells the world. Nearly all well-advertised products are excellent, and the egg is no exception.  The contents are untouched by human hands and the sanitary wrapper has no equal.  Things happen to the contents, however, despite the wrapper, and as a result eggs are divided into three classes: “strictly fresh eggs,” “fresh eggs,” and “eggs.”  When those of the first class are worth 60 cents the dozen, those of the second class are worth 40 cents and those of the third class are not worth a darn.  Ancient eggs are useful only in political and dramatic criticism.

When the rooster is very young nobody knows whether he will turn out to be a rooster or a hen; but in a short time he begins to develop spurs and a comb that confesses his sex, and then he is called a frying chicken. If he is a very small rooster he may live to a ripe old age and then, being deprived of feathers, head and feet, may be called a frying chicken still.  Very large roosters that live to a ripe old age may be treated the same way and called turkey.

The rooster has many traits in common with man.  He fights when required to repel an invader; he affects the mannerisms of an important citizen while at home and is cowed in strange surroundings; and when he gets atop a fence or in any manner climbs above his fellows, he crows about it.

Crowing is offensive, as a rule; but in the rooster’s case it is not objectionable for he is ready at any time to back it up with his spurs.  When he is engaged in an argument with another rooster he does not hug his opponent to avoid punishment, and if the enemy’s superior prowess and strategy drive him from the field he will retire to a little distance and there throw back his bloody head and crow to proclaim his spirit unbroken.

The rooster does no useful labor, but he begins crowing at about 4 A. M., and anybody with pep enough to wake up and begin strutting his stuff at that hour in the morning deserves the respect of mankind.   

Apply it as you will, if you wish.

Going where the story takes you

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One of the best parts of being a reporter or an author or a historian or a detective (we suppose) is discovering where a story takes you.  Sometimes the real story is not the original story.

Such is the story of Daniel M. Grissom of Kirkwood.

Your reporter, author, and historian ran across Daniel in a letter he sent to Governor Arthur Hyde in 1924 saying he was honored to have been invited to the dedication of the Capitol that Daniel described as “one of the most chaste and beautiful structures in the world—equal in the exquisite symetry [sic] of its proportions to the once matchless now dismantled Parthenon at Athens, Greece,” perhaps a reference to the structure’s condition after a 1687 explosion.

He could not attend the dedication because “the infirmities of 94 years debar me” from being there. He concluded, “I send up my faint shout of gladness to join in the glorious and mighty outburst of patriotic joy that bursts from Capitol Hill this day.  If it be a cause for pride to be an American, the very next thing to it is being a Missourian.”

The letter was interesting enough to raise a question: “Who was this guy?”

And this is where the story took this author to a completely different place, a completely different time, and to one of Missouri’s most tragic moments.

The first question was how much longer he lasted.  He already was 94 but he seemed from his letter still to be at full mental strength.  A source for that information is the state death certificates on the Missouri State Archives webpage.  And there was Daniel M. Grissom, dead at the age of 101 on May 17, 1930.  But the certificate had another piece of information: “retired news paper editor.”  Two words.

The Missouri Press Association founded the State Historical Society of Missouri in 1898 and for many years, the society’s magazine, The Missouri Historical Review, carried obituary notices of editors and former editors who had been society members. And sure enough, there was Daniel, in the October, 1930 issue.

Daniel M. Grissom, it said, was twenty-four years old when he arrived in St. Louis from his home state of Kentucky to become a reporter for the St. Louis Evening News.  That would have been 1853.  He worked for the News for a decade, becoming the editor on a newspaper with a staff of two while still in his twenties.  When the News merged with the St. Louis Union, creating the Evening Dispatch, he became the editor-in-chief of the combined papers.  The Dispatch eventually merged with Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening Post to create today’s Post-Dispatch, which is probably when he joined the St. Louis Republican which later became just the Republic and lasted until its merger with the Globe-Democrat in 1919.

Then the eyebrows went up when the article reported, “While working on the News he was sent on the famous Pacific Railroad excursion train to Jefferson City, November 1, 1855.”

Suddenly, Daniel becomes even more significant.  That train would inaugurate passenger service between St. Louis and Jefferson City.  The legislature had put up bonding money for the Pacific Railroad and the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad and was to consider in the upcoming session whether to issue more bonds for more railroads. There was some doubt that it would because construction had been slower than expected and more expensive than expected on both lines.  Governor Sterling Price was skeptical.   The legislature was to come into session on November 5 so the arrival of the first passenger train at Jefferson City just ahead of the session was considered extremely important for the railroad interests. The capitol had been decorated for a big welcome. A huge banquet was to be held for the passengers.

But a violent and long-lasting rain storm swept in that afternoon.  And the train did not arrive.  The banquet went ahead solemnly in Jefferson City, attendees fearing something bad had happened.  But the storm had knocked out telegraph service and it was not until the next day that word arrived of what had occurred.

A separate locomotive and tender had been sent ahead of the train to make sure the not-quite-compete Gasconade River Bridge about nine miles west of Hermann was strong enough to support the train.  The locomotive made it safely across and was waiting on the other side when the passenger train steamed into sight.

The locomotive and a few cars made it across the first segment when, suddenly, that segment collapsed. Some of the cars fell thirty feet into the Gasconade River, pulling the engine and tender back on top of them.  Other following cars crashed on top of that wreckage. Only a few cars failed to go into the river. “Mr. Grissom was one of the survivors,” said the Review obituary, “and assisted in the rescue of many persons and became widely known for his reports of the catastrophe.”

Thirty-one people were dead, including two State Representatives.  About two-hundred more were injured.

There are three online resources that we use for newspaper accounts of historic events: Newspapers.com, Newspaperarchive.com; and the Smithsonian’s “Chronicling America” webpage.  There also are more than fifty-million pages of Missouri newspapers on microfilm at the State Historical Society in Columbia. Newspaperarchive.com produced the Liberty Weekly Tribune for November 16, 1855 and a gripping account of the tragedy.

In those days before wire services as we know them, newspapers exchanged issues with one another, which is how the Liberty newspaper came to have this account more than two weeks after the event.  “Yesterday was a sad day for St. Louis—a day whose events have cast a shadow over many a heart and made desolate many a bright hearthstone,” the story began in a manner typical of reporting in those days but far different from our times.

There was no byline. Bylines did not catch on much for another forty years or so after reporters became more popular with the public although correspondents at the time of the disaster sometimes signed their stories, usually with nom de plumes such as “Publius,” the Liberty newspaper’s Jefferson City correspondent who had a brief story about the tragedy on another page.

At the end of the eyewitness account in the Tribune was another surprise.  The article originally appeared in the St. Louis News.  It was Daniel M. Grissom’s account—which a survey of other newspapers in the “Chronicling America” website shows became THE nationwide story of the event.

Betty Johnson Douglas, writing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat on March 6, 1927 described him as “a young newspaper man who had come to St. Louis from Kentucky only a few years before and was already editor of a paper which had given much support to railroad building projects in the state… blue-eyed, eager for new experiences and already making a reputation for himself as a writer of strong editorials.’

Climb aboard that ill-fated train and ride into a disaster with 26-year old Daniel M. Grissom:

Yesterday morning, at the seventh street depot of the Pacific railroad, a large crowd of happy persons were gathered, prepared for the excursion to Jefferson City, to celebrate the completion of the road to that point. It was a happy hour. Gay greetings were spoken and congratulations were joyously interchanged between friends who were glad each to find that the other was going.  Many who did not go came to wish a pleasant journey and God speed to those who did.  Some who could not go then promised to join the excursion to-morrow (today).  Two military companies, with stirring music and gay uniforms added to the pageant.  At half past eight the train started, freighted with six hundred happy hearts, followed by the good wishes of all whose hearts beat responsively to those “of the parting ones.” All was bright and pleasant, and although the twelve cars constituting the train were crowded to such an extent that many had to stand in the aisle between the seats, and others on the platform outside, yet there was a universal good feeling and “all went merry as a marriage bell.”  The people at the stations and villages along the road cheered us onward and shouted and waved hats and hand’cheifs in response to the merry music our Brass Band entertained them with.  As we came into Herman, a cannon pealed forth the glad greetings of the hearty citizens.  But how soon was the scene destined to be changed!  How soon were so many of those founding hearts to be pulseless. No one dreamed that death was near, yet it lurked for us only a few miles further on.  At 1 o’clock we left Herman [sic], preceded by a locomotive and tender which had been sent forward, to see what that the way was clear, and no danger impending.  Soon we came in sight of the bridge across the Gasconade river, about nine miles from Herman, and thirty-five from Jefferson City.  The bridge is approached by an embankment thirty feet high which terminated in a massive stone abutment.  Forty yards from the abutment, and just at the edge of the river, stands another staunch pillar, three more of which reach the other side of the stream, and support the bridge. The river is about two hundred and fifty yards wide and the bridge thirty feet high, at least.  The Pioneer locomotive had crossed the structure safely and was waiting at the other side to see the result of our attempt.  There was no fear of danger, nor thoughts of peril.  We slowly moved along the embankment and came on to the bridge.  The locomotive had passed the first span and had its forewheels above the first pillar beyond the abutment—there being then rested on the first span, the locomotive, baggage car and two heavily loaded passenger cars.  The weight was too much for the long, slender timbers which supported the rails and the enormous load above.  Suddenly we heard a horrid crash—it rings in our ears now—and saw a movement amongst those in the car in which we were seated; then there came crash-crashcrash as each car came to the abutment and took the fatal plunge.  The affair was but the work of an instant. We were running slowly at the time and the successive crashes came on at intervals of nearly a second.  We were seated in the seventh car—there being three behind us—and when we heard the horrid sound that came up, as each car slowly and deliberately took the leap, we hoped that our car might stop before it reached the precipice.  But no; it seemed that the spirit of ruin was beneath, determinedly dragging each car to the spot, wrenching it from its fastenings, and hurling it to atoms beneath.  Six cars fell in one mass, each on the other, and were shivered into fragments.  The seventh fell with its forward end to the ground; but the other end rested on top of the abutment.  Those in it were only bruised.  The eighth and ninth cars tumbled down the embankment before they reached the abutment.  Such a wreck I never saw and hope never again to see.  It was one undistinguishable mass of wooded beams, seats, iron wheels and rods, from beneath which came up groans of agony. Those who could, crawled out of the ruin immediately, and either sought to relieve their own wounds or the wounds of their friends.  Some wept tears of joy to find their friends alive and others shuddered to find their friends dead, the uninjured organized themselves under the lead of Mr. Pride, the conductor, and endeavored by chopping to extricate those who were yet alive from the wreck. Here a beam was cut into to disengage a broken arm; there an iron axle was pryed up to relieve a mutilated leg. There was no shrieking and screaming, though all begged for the love of heave to be extricated from some mass of iron or beam of wood which pinned them to the earth. All begged for water, drank it when brought and prayed for more.  There was hardly an entirely uninjured man to be seen.  Most of those who had escaped had streams of blood flowing over their faces from splinter wounds.  Others limped and hobbled about, looking for their friends.  A board shanty was the only shelter to be had and that was soon filled with the wounded, whose silent speechless agony was enough to make the stoutest heart shudder.  Soon after the accident the heavens grew dark and black as though in twain, and from the crevice gleamed the white lightning, and the harsh thunder bellowed its cruel mockings at the woe beneath. It seemed as if the elements were holding high carnival over the scene of slaughter. 

Grissom wrote a second version of the story, cited by Douglas in her 1927 article:

Suddenly there was an awful crash, a sickening lurch—another crash—another—another. We were moving forward jerkily, sickeningly.

Horrid sounds came from ahead. We realized in a flash what must have happened—the bridge was gone—we were being pulled into the river by the weight of the cars ahead, which had already crashed over the bank! Then—our car was going too. The violent motion threw us to the floor.

I was the first to gain my feet. I may have been unconscious for a moment, for the movement had stopped. When I got up and looked around not a soul was in sight. I was staggered for another second, but then I called aloud and one by one the passengers began to crawl out from under the seats, behind doors, through the debris of the wreck. No one in my car was seriously hurt, though we were all badly shaken up and some of us were bleeding and so weak from shock that we were hardly able to walk…

When a relief train from St. Louis came to our aid it was a very different kind of crowd which started on the return journey from that which had set out so gaily a few hours before. Hardly a word was spoken as we leaned our heads on our hands, some uttering groans and low cries of despair caused by their own sufferings or by the realization of the loss of a friend or relative in the disaster.     

(We pause for a while until the mental images of this extraordinary writing fade enough for us to continue.)

Jen Tebbe wrote on the Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis  (not to be confused with the state Historical Society of Missouri that is based in Columbia) last November about some things other survivors had to say. http://mohistory.org/blog/what-survivors-had-to-say/

Grissom built an outstanding career in the years ahead. Historian and journalist Walter Stevens wrote a long time ago that Grissom was “among the foremost editorial writers in the West for a third of a century. He…wrote in a virile, lucid style.”

During the Civil War he and his Evening News were critical of General John Fremont, the commander of the Army of the West at the start of the war.  Fremont became so upset at the newspaper’s criticism after the fall of Lexington that he jailed Grissom and fellow editor Charles G. Ramsey.  They were released two days later.

The microfilmed old newspapers in Columbia tell us Daniel Grissom was 82 when he moved into the Kirkwood Old Folks Home where, said the St. Louis Globe-Democrat he “delighted to regale willing listeners with tales of the Civil War, the Lincoln-Douglas debate, the capture of Camp Jackson, and other events, the formal accounts of which may only be found in histories.”

When he was in his nineties he wrote a dozen articles for the Missouri Historical Review about the famous people he had known, personal intimate sketches of people such as Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Governors Sterling Price and Claiborne Fox Jackson (who tried to take Missouri South at the start of the Civil War), James S. Rollins, and artist George Caleb Bingham, among others.  The last article was published when he was 98.

It was a surprise to him when he turned 100.  He thought he was only 99 until a week before the landmark birthday when he got a letter from a relative who had dug into an old family Bible and found that he had been born a year earlier than he thought.  So, actually, he was 95 when he wrote to the governor.

The Post-Dispatch reported he carried on a “voluminous correspondence with friends and relatives into his 90s but complained on his 100th birthday, “My pencil won’t do what I want it to now.  It wanders all over the page.  I used to walk up and down the corridor here by myself up to the last ten months but I just can’t make it alone any more.  I’m getting old and my legs just won’t support me the way they used to. I’m beginning to feel my years.”

More than one-hundred friends and relatives joined him at the home for his next, and last, birthday where he cut a thirty-two pound cake decorated by one candle symbolizing all of the others there wasn’t room for.

He survived one of Missouri’s greatest tragedies to live a long and historic life for another three-quarters of a century.  But his tombstone in Kirkwood’s Oak Hill Cemetery says only “Daniel M. Grissom, 1829-1930.”

When he thought he was 94 years old he wrote a letter to the governor of Missouri and another journalist read it after another ninety-four years and wondered, “Who was this guy?”  This is where the story took us.

Notes from the road (March, 2018 edition)

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(Jefferson City)—Nancy and I have returned from our annual few-days visit to our snowbird friends who head to Arizona in October and don’t return to Missouri until April.  We were starkly reminded when we got out of our car at our house why they do that.

We drove in some pretty big cities—Oklahoma City, Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque, for example—but we were never so lost as when we turned off Highway 54 at the Lake of the Ozarks, thinking we were headed to a gas station. We went for some distance down a nice divided roadway and never passed a building, let alone a gas station, before we turned around and figured out how to get back on 54. We cannot be the only hopeless souls who cannot figure out that maze of exit and entrance ramps, traffic circles and winding roads that lack what is (to us, anyway) any reasonable signage that tells us what goes where. Tan-Tar-A is somewhere in that tangle. And the Four Seasons.  And the Mall. Yes, we’re glad we don’t have to drag through the Bagnell Dam Bypass, which in its day was a wonder, but getting off the bypass of the bypass is about as adventurous as Lewis and Clark setting out from Wood River Illinois, bound somewhere up a long and winding Missouri River.

(Las Cruces, NM)—Maybe the world would be better if all of us followed the lead of Deputy Sheriff Jamar Cotton.

At halftime of the New Mexico State University men’s basketball game on February 24, he hugged 112 people in sixty seconds, believed to be a new world hugging record, smashing Jason Ritter’s record of 86 set last October during a taping of “The View” television show in New York City. He could have hugged more if he could have moved, but the rules say he had to stay in one place and let the hugees come to him. He’s sending the paperwork to the Guinness Book people for proper certification. “This isn’t just about breaking a world record,” he told the Las Cruces Sun-News, “This is about something that we need in our community: Unity, love, compassion, caring about people, bringing people together.”

But there was a little drizzle on his parade.  Cotton’s hug record took up three columns above the fold of the newspaper on Monday after the event.  The fourth column was about the city police department paying a $1.4 million dollar settlement to a former Las Cruces couple who accused city officers of brutality and civil rights violations.

(Hereford, TX)—Out here in the Texas Panhandle, the land is flatter than a possum after ten days in the truck lane.  The trains seem to go on forever.   We saw four Burlington Northern Santa Fe locomotives pulling a string of cars so long that it disappear into the vanishing point.  And it seemed only a minute after one train went past that another one rumbled by behind it.  Some have a couple of locomotives at the end as pushers.  We caught up with one westbound train that was probably going about 70 mph.  We were running about 80—you can do that out there; the flat distances entice you to do it—and it took us the better part of five minutes to go from the pushers at the end to the team of locomotives at the head of it all. Wish we could have counted the cars but we preferred staying in our lane. Some of the trains were hauling container cars—two stacked big boxes on flatcars that would somewhere be unloaded and mounted on the wheels of Lord Knows How Many Trucks and hauled away.

(Erick, Oklahoma)—There is some melancholy news to report for our generation from this little town of about eleven-hundred people a few miles east of the Texas-Oklahoma border (we are told it is just about halfway from Asheville, NC and Barstow, CA if that helps you locate it).  The Roger Miller Museum closed just before last Christmas.  Not enough people turned off of I-40 to go into downtown Erick, the town that Roger Miller called his hometown—although he was born in Texas.

The Museum had operated since 2004. The building is now the 100th Meridian Museum, which marks the Texas-Oklahoma boundary. The line (of longitude, west of Greenwich) was identified by John Wesley Powell, the explorer of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, as the line between the moist east and the arid west.

Erick was planning to continue the annual Do-Wacka-Do Trail Run if the public was interested. All of Roger Miller’s memorabilia was being returned to his widow, Mary.

Most of those who read these entries will remember Roger Miller and his wacky country songs of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly “King of the Road,” that reached number one on the country charts and number four on the pop charts. He died at the age of 56 in 1992, lung and throat cancer.

Before he left us, he created a Broadway musical in 1985 that was one of the few successful American Broadway musicals in an era when British productions were gaining popularity. “Big River,” based on Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, ran for a thousand performances in New York and won seven Tony Awards.  And those of us who enjoy the music of “Big River” are left to wonder what else he could have done as he moved farther away from the novelty songs that were so popular earlier in his career.

The 100th Meridian Museum is open now on the corner of Old Highway 66 and Sheb Wooley Boulevard in downtown Erick.  (Sheb, another country singer from Erick, is remembered also as the first of the Frank Miller gang killed in the shootout with Hadleyville Marshall Will Kane in “High Noon.”)

(Itsnotsnow, NM)—The drifts were taller than our car and the road was covered.  But we didn’t slide and the weather was warm. And nothing was melting. Welcome to White Sands National Monument.

Fine gypsum sand stretches for miles, creating interesting light and shadows.  Bushes dot the landscape.  Desert animals survive in that environment somehow.   We didn’t see anyone doing it, but we were told that some folks go snowboarding or dog-sledding in the comfort of the desert warmth.   It’s a bit of an adjustment to be surrounded by so much whiteness but not be cold and wet.  Not a place to visit in the heat of summer, though, we were told.

(Peoria, Arizona)—The Kansas City Royals played the Seattle Mariners in their fifth exhibition game of the season on a mild and lovely Arizona day.  Royals won.  The same field is used by the San Diego Padres, who beat the Royals the next day.  Royals diehards know that former Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer now plays for the Padres.

In the teams store at the stadium, they sell baseballs.  If you want to spend some extra money, you can buy game-used balls with a tag attached that tells you who hit that ball and what the play was—foul ball, single, and so forth.  Most of the game-used balls went for forty bucks.   But there was one that was a foul ball struck by Hosmer in his first at-bat as a Padre.  The price tag on that one was $80.  Gotta sell a lot of foul balls to make back that $144 million the Padres are paying him.  Wonder what a fair ball would cost.

(Unidentified Flying New Mexico)—We found ourselves face to face with aliens one day.  The folks in Roswell, New Mexico do a pretty good job of trying to convince visitors that a spaceship with intergalactic aliens crashed near their town seventy-one years ago.

Roswell is bigger than we expected—almost forty-thousand people.  The museum appears to be in an old theatre and it has copies of newspaper accounts of something that somebody claims happened and accounts of the disappearance of all of the evidence, including the purported remains of the ship and its occupant(s), and government agencies and officials telling people who supposedly knew something they better not talk.  There are life-size figures in the museum of the purported aliens. Oddly enough, it seemed to us, there did not appear to be any female aliens.  Or male aliens. They were just aliens. There was no indication of reproductive apparatus or of different genders.  But, hey, these are serious aliens and they might be so advanced that such things are not necessary. If I see one for real, however, I’m not going to shake hands.

Did something really happen out there and at Area 51?   There’s only one person who has the authority to find out.   And with his abiding interest in getting to the bottom of all things aliens, we’re sure he’ll soon tweet a definitive answer to seven decades of questions.  He also might think about increasing the height of his wall.

(Albuquerque)—We filled up the car’s gas tank for $2.03 a gallon.  When we got home we filled it up for $2.29.  Just for the record.

(Toiletsnake, Arizona)—Just inside Arizona there was this rest stop.  Note the sign along the sidewalk suggesting people step carefully no matter how badly they need to go.

We don’t know why, but the sign left us wondering:

“In groups that practice snake-handling, if a young woman breaks her engagement can her former fiancé ask for his Diamondback?”

(Photo credits: Las Cruces Sun-News (Cotton) and Bob Priddy)

Succession

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What happens when the office of Missouri Governor becomes vacant?   That’s an important question but a more complicated one is what happens when a vacancy in the office of governor leads to the vacancy in another office? We’ve been asked about this in recent days. And, as we emphasized last week, we do not want to anticipate what might happen in this difficult time for so many people, but people have asked. So we will explore that a little bit.

Before we plunge into today’s topic, we want to offer a clarification to our last column about impeachment. The Missouri Supreme Court does indeed handle impeachment trials of state officials EXCEPT in the cases of Supreme Court members and Governors. In those instances, the trial is conducted by “seven eminent jurists” elected by the Missouri Senate. We thank our longtime friend King Marc of Arcania, from whom we have not heard for too long. Arcania is a small kingdom within the Missouri Capitol. Now, on with today’s exploration.

Some recall that we offered some thoughts several years ago in the wake of the death of Governor Carnahan and the ascension of Lieutenant Governor Roger Wilson to the governorship.  That’s provided for in the Missouri Constitution.  After that——

Well, it appears to his non-lawyer that all of the cards are wild.

Blame Bill Phelps.

Back in 1972, State Representative William C. Phelps of Kansas City was elected Lieutenant Governor under the campaign promise that he would make the office a “full-time” job.  Full-Time Phelps, he was called.   Until then, the light governor’s main job was to preside over the Senate—a job the Missouri Supreme Court later limited—and to step in when the governor died or was incapacitated.

Well, Phelps created some new responsibilities for that office and the legislature over time assigned more duties to actually make it a full-time post.  So now we have an office that has obligations.  And if the person in that office has to move up to the big room on the second floor, what happens to those obligations?

Simply put:  They remain the obligations of an office that has no one to fulfill them.

The gubernatorial succession part of our Missouri Constitution says the President Pro-Tem of the Senate becomes the Governor if the Governor and the Lieutenant Governor die or are incapacitated.  It does NOT say the Pro-Tem moves up to Lieutenant Governor if that office becomes vacant.  Nor does it say the Pro-Tem assumes the responsibilities of that office.  It might be illegal anyway because that would mean that person would have one foot in the Executive Branch and the other foot in the Legislative Branch.  The Pro-Tem could not resign from the Senate and move into the Lieutenant Governor’s office because there is nothing in the Constitution that allows that. Besides, if that person resigned to take the office, he or she couldn’t take the office because their resignation would take them out of the line of succession.

The Missouri Constitution is silent on how the obligations added to the office since the Constitution was written more than sixty years ago are met when the office becomes vacant.

The office did go vacant for a short time in 2000 until Governor Roger Wilson appointed Lieutenant Governor-elect Joe Maxwell after the November election to hold the job until his regular term began in January, 2001.   The question was raised then, however, whether that appointment was legal.  The Missouri Constitution appears not to give the Governor the power to appoint someone who could become his successor should the Governor resign or become incapacitated. Maxwell has always maintained that legal experts consulted at the time felt the appointment was legal.

The legislature tried to solve that problem in 2013 but Governor Nixon vetoed it.

The bill would have left the office vacant until the next election.  It said that a staff member of the departing Lieutenant Governor would be picked to handle the ministerial duties of the office.  The Senate President pro tem would handle the Lieutenant Governor’s duties in briefly presiding over the Senate.  Nixon called that situation “confusing and untenable.”  He did not want the constitutional duties of the office turned over to a “vaguely defined staff member.”  He also noted the bill called for a general election for the office but did not mention a primary election.  That was important, he argued, because it meant the political parties would select the contenders for the office, not the people.

Nixon did not like the bill’s lack of definition of “ministerial duties” nor its failure to formally create a process to appoint the person to do those jobs.  His veto message questioned the propriety of having an unelected staff member replacing a statewide elected official, particularly if that position became vacant because of impeachment or criminal activity involving the office.

Those who follow Missouri politics will recall that the issue arose when Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder was thinking about trying to replace Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson, who had resigned to take a lobbyist job.  When Kinder did not win his party’s nomination, the issue faded away. At the time, Nixon—a Democrat—maintained he could appoint a new Lieutenant Governor.  The Republican-led legislature disagreed.

The issue now has arisen three times in less than twenty years.

There have been several times in Missouri’s history when the office stayed vacant until a new Lieutenant Governor could be elected. Eight times in the first seventy years of statehood the office remained vacant. The longest time was about forty-one months. That was the first time. Lieutenant Governor Benjamin Reeves resigned to join the party surveying the still-new Santa Fe Trail. When Governor Frederick Bates died in the summer of 1825, Senate President Pro Tem Abraham Williams, a one-legged shoemaker from Columbia, became the Governor. He was confronted by the question of whether the state could afford an election to pick a new governor or whether he should remain. He chose to have an election in which John Miller was elected to finish the Bates term and then was elected to a full term of his own. He remained the longest-serving Missouri Governor (in terms of consecutive years) until Warren Hearnes became the first governor elected to a second consecutive four-year term in 1969. Williams then returned to his Pro Tem role in the Senate.

There was no Lieutenant Governor after Lilburn Boggs succeeded Daniel Dunklin, who resigned to become United States Surveyor General for Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas (he was responsible for the Missouri-Arkansas state line). M. M. Marmaduke succeeded Thomas Reynolds, who committed suicide in 1844 and the number two office remained vacant. Lieutenant Governor Wilson Brown died in office in August of 1855 and the office remained vacant until January, 1857. The office was vacant for eight months when Hancock Lee Jackson succeeded Trusten Polk after Polk was elected by the legislature to the U. S. Senate early in 1857. There was no Lieutenant Governor when Willard Hall replaced Hamilton Gamble, who died in office in 1864. The office was vacant for about eight months after Lieutenant Governor Joseph Gravely died in office in April, 1872. When Governor John Marmaduke died in office at the end of 1887, Albert Morehouse moved up to Governor and the office was not filled again until January, 1889.

Something interesting happened, however, in 1903 when Lieutenant Governor John Lee quit after admitting he had carried bribe money from the Royal Baking Power Trust to four Senators, buying their votes on a bill establishing the ingredients for baking Powder that shut down Missouri manufacturers and favored the Royal powder. Remember that one of the jobs of the Lieutenant Governor was to serve as President of the Senate. One contemporary newspaper account we have seen notes that Lee’s departure left the Senate without a presiding officer. Senators elected Pro Tem Thomas Rubey as the temporary presiding officer of the senate, i.e., the Senate President. With that designation, says the account, Rubey thus “fell heir” to the Lieutenant Governorship. Rubey is the only Pro Tem listed as a Lieutenant Governor.

The office was vacant for a few days when Frank Gaines died on December 30, 1944, a few days short of completing his third term in the office (which many years later made Peter Kinder the only person in Missouri history to COMPLETE three terms in the office. Walter Davis, who was elected to succeed Gaines, took office on January 8, 1945.

When Edward V. Long resigned to replace Senator Thomas Hennings, who died in the fall of 1960, Governor Blair did not appoint anyone to finish the term. Hillary Bush was elected a few weeks later and was sworn in in 1961.

Thomas Eagleton resigned just before Christmas, 1968 after having been elected to replace the retiring Stuart Symington. Symington resigned his Senate seat early so Eagleton could be sworn in a few days early, giving him some seniority over those who were not sworn in as senators until January. Governor Hearnes appointed William S. Morris to fill the rest of the Eagleton term until Morris could be sworn in for his own term as Lieutenant Governor.  That infuriated Pro Tem Earl Blackwell, a strong opponent of Hearnes (reportedly he was upset that Hearnes supported Morris instead of him in the campaign for the number two job), who threatened to throw Morris out of the chamber if he came in to preside.  Blackwell maintained the appointment was illegal. Morris didn’t darken the Senate’s doors until after he’d been sworn in for the full term.

The role of the Lieutenant Governor as the President of the Senate became so insignificant that in the 1980s, outgoing Pro Tem John Scott and incoming Pro Tem Jim Mathewson ousted the Senate President/Lieutenant Governor from the office created for that person and moved incoming Lieutenant Governor Mel Carnahan into some renovated committee rooms on a lower floor. What would have been Carnahan’s office became the Pro Tem’s office. When Kinder was Lieutenant Governor, he and the head of the Office Administration arranged for the Lieutenant Governor and the State Auditor to switch office rooms. The fulltime Lieutenant Governor’s office staff had expanded enough that it needed the extra space and most of the employees of the auditor by then worked in another state office building.

What’s the solution?  The legislature can try again to write a law.  Or a constitutional amendment that would fill the apparent void in the constitution.

When we wrote about this on the old Missourinet Blog several years ago, we suggested that the new governor appoint someone to serve in the office and carry out the duties of it, someone who would willingly become the target of a test lawsuit that could provide some clarity to what needs to be done to correct the problem—which means the lawyers on both sides would have to carefully word the lawsuit to achieve from the courts the desired result.  We suggested the person for the job be someone with no pretentions about using it for future political gain, perhaps someone with no particular party loyalty so neither party could make claims that the other was trying to take advantage of something.  The person would be content to be a footnote in Missouri history, a sacrificial lamb I think we called it, someone appointed to hold the office and see that its duties were carried out until such time as the courts and subsequent elections eliminated the problem.  A lot of people can gavel the Senate into session each day, call for the chaplain to pray, and run down the order of business before turning the gavel over to a senator to preside—which is what usually happens.

Perhaps the procedure used in the wake of Mel Carnahan’s death and posthumous election could provide a guideline for a clarifying law or amendment—allowing the governor to appoint a Lieutenant Governor to serve until the next general election when someone would be elected to complete the remainder of the term. As you might recall, Jean Carnahan served for two years in her husband’s place but lost a bid to serve he remaining four years.

Whatever. The answer is out there somewhere.

If only Bill Phelps had not decided to make the office a fulltime job…..

 

 

 

Removal

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It’s important to not get ahead of ourselves at a difficult time like this.  But some people who know that we dabble in Missouri history have asked if a Missouri governor has ever been impeached and removed from office.

The answer on impeachment is “no.” The answer to removal is “yes.” Herewith, we tell the tale.

Understand that impeachment is not the same as removal.  Impeachment is the filing of charges against an office holder by the legislature.  The removal trial is conducted by the Missouri Supreme Court.  In the 1930s, under a different State Constitution, the House impeached State Treasurer Larry Brunk.  At that time the trial was handled by the Missouri Senate, of which Brunk was a former member.  Two-thirds of the senators had to vote to remove him.  The Senate failed to get that two-thirds with some people saying it just could not remove a former member from a statewide office.  True or not, Brunk completed his term.

That circumstance led to a change in procedure when a new constitution was adopted in 1945.  It leaves impeachment to the House but the trial will be conducted by the Missouri Supreme Court.  The process has been used only once, in 1994-1995, when Secretary of State Judi Moriarty was removed from office.  The Supreme Court had to have a special witness box built for that occasion because the Supreme Court hears arguments only from attorneys. There was no testimony until this case came along.

The only governor removed from office in Missouri was Claiborne Fox Jackson in 1861. Jackson lied during his campaign by pretending to be against secession when actually he was plotting to take Missouri South. When he was sworn in, he immediately asserted that Missouri’s lot was tied to the fate of the seceding states.  The legislature refused to vote on secession and instead called for a special convention to be convened to determine the proper course of action. About six weeks after Jackson took office, the convention of ninety-nine men met to chart a course for the state. Jackson had been stunned when he saw no avowed secessionists were in that group, which voted strongly to stay in the Union.  He then declared Missouri would be an “armed neutral” if a civil war broke out.

When President Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand troops to defend the Union after the attack on Fort Sumter, Jackson replied, “Your resolution, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman, and diabolical and cannot be complied with. Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on any unholy crusade.”

By now, Jackson was clandestinely plotting with Jefferson Davis to move Missouri into the Confederacy. His big target was the St. Louis federal arsenal. He went so far as to ask Davis to send some cannons that could be used to seize it and ship its weapons to the Confederacy. But federal troops moved first.

Then-Captain, later General, Nathaniel Lyon, who was in charge of the arsenal, smelled out the deal and rounded up the troops Jackson was planning to use for the attack.  He also rejected Jackson’s efforts to keep federal forces out of Missouri, remarking that he would see every man, woman, and child in the state dead before he would let Jackson and friends cut a deal that would prohibit federal troops from entering the state. Lyon gave Jackson and his military aide, Sterling Price, an hour to get out of town.

In a late-night session at the Capitol, Jackson asked legislators to follow him to Boonville where Missouri volunteers were going to take a stand against the Union Army.   A couple of days later, Lyon and the Union Army took Jefferson City, and stabilized the situation by leaving a small unit of troops in charge of the town while Lyon got back on the boat and led his men to Boonville for Missouri’s first out-and-out-battle of the Civil War.  Jackson and Price were soundly whipped and headed south to the safety of Arkansas and a link-up with Confederate troops there.

A majority of the Convention of ninety-nine did not join Jackson and Price.  Although Jackson would maintain that he was running a government in exile, which soon declared it had seceded, he never had a quorum of the duly-elected legislature.

The Convention, back in Jefferson City, re-assembled in July and declared the office of governor to be vacant.  Former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Hamilton Gamble was installed as the Provisional Governor. Other statewide offices were declared vacant, too, and filled with loyal Unionists among whom was the famous artist George Caleb Bingham, who became Treasurer.

The legality of the convention’s actions is not above question.  But it was protected by a Union occupational force that wasn’t going to tolerate challenges to the convention’s authority.

We do not know specifically what Jackson swore to when he was sworn in as governor.  The 1820 Missouri Constitution, which was still in effect, does not contain any oath language for the governor or for the legislature.  Our present Constitution reiterates language from the 1875 Constitution: “I do solemnly swear, or affirm, that I will support the Constitution of the United States and of the state of Missouri, and faithfully perform the duties of my office, and that I will not knowingly receive, directly or indirectly, any money or other valuable thing for the performance or nonperformance of any act or duty pertaining to my office, other than the compensation allowed by law.”

That language only applies—in the Constitution—to members of the General Assembly. It is, however, the same language we have heard on a dozen occasions when governors have been inaugurated.  Pretty clearly, Jackson had violated his oath of office to “support the Constitution of the United States and the State of Missouri,” and thus was subject to actions removing him from office.  The legal standing of the Convention of 99 to do so has been argued, but wartime expedience prevailed.

Jackson died in 1862 and his elected Lieutenant Governor, Thomas C. Reynolds, became the leader of the self-proclaimed government in exile—which wound up headquartered in Marshall, Texas.  He was with Price on the 1864 last-gasp attempt to regain Missouri for the South, hoping that Price’s army could seize Jefferson City and he could be sworn in as the legitimate governor, probably swearing to support the Confederate Constitution. But Price decided not to attack the capital city after surrounding it—he’d already had one catastrophic fight at Pilot Knob—and he moved on.  Reynolds was irate but no amount of screaming and cursing could change the course of Price and his increasingly bedraggled troops who went on to a three-day fight at Westport before scrambling back to Arkansas, badly mauled by the Union Army.

And that’s the story of the only time a Missouri Governor was ever removed from office.

The office of Governor of Missouri has not become officially vacant since Mel Carnahan’s plane crash in 2000.  What happened then raised some questions about gubernatorial succession that remain unanswered.  We’ll have another history lesson next week.

Who is next?

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Your fearful observer awoke one morning last week wondering when it will happen in Missouri.

It was the morning after the latest school shooting, this one in Florida, the seventh school shooting incident in the first forty-five days of the year.  As of the morning after the latest shooting, twenty people had been killed and thirty-four others had been wounded in those seven incidents.

Since the pace of school shootings began to pick up nationally in the 1980s there have been more than 350 school shootings in this country.

Three hundred.  And fifty.  Plus.

The escalation of shootings at schools is stunning.  Wikipedia has compiled a list of incidents at schools going back to Greencastle, Pennsylvania’s Enoch Brown School massacre in 1764, although that doesn’t quite fit today’s description of a school shooting because it was part of an Indian uprising against the British.  Only one of the ten people killed was shot.  The others were killed with “melee weapons,” as they are called.

The chart says there were twenty-eight incidents in the nineteenth century. The number jumped to 226 in the Twentieth Century (141 of them in the last three decades including the first mass shooting, 1999’s Littleton Colorado incident that killed fifteen—including the two suicidal shooters—and wounded twenty-one).

In the first seventeen years and two months of the Twenty-First Century there already have been 212 incidents that have made this list.

The Wikipedia list shows nine such shootings in Missouri since 1980. Eleven deaths, including four of the shooters.  Seven injuries.  Not all of the incidents are what we might think of as school shootings, namely students killing students.  The killing of three monks at Conception Abbey is on the list, for example.  Some involved only adults.  Missouri’s most recent incident was three years ago when a man was wounded in a school parking lot shooting, apparently by another adult.  The most recent student incident was in Joplin in 2006 when a student failed to kill a principal when his gun failed.

We hope we never have one of those horrific incidents in Missouri.  But we are sure we are not the only person in Missouri living in dread that it could happen here.

What is there to do about it? Opinions are strong on this issue and we will not wade into it here. Our focus will be on an important factor that can get lost in the discussion of school shootings and what should be done beyond the increasingly stale phrase “thoughts and prayers.”

The Associated Press the morning after the Florida incident described the suspect as, “An orphaned 19-year old with a troubled past and an AR-15 rifle…” and reported, “Students who knew him described him as a volatile teenager whose strange behavior had caused others to end friendships with him.”

Sooner or later someone is going to ask—some probably have by now—“Why didn’t somebody do something to head him off?” And some will wonder why he didn’t get help with mental health issues, sentiments frequently heard after incidents such as these.

Unanswerable questions.  A similar question might be, “How many school shooting incidents did NOT take place because our mental health people turned their clients in a better direction?”

Many years ago, one of my sometime-colleagues who sat next to me while we covered the legislature turned out to have murdered his wife a couple of years earlier. Who among us can honestly say that we can determine that the person next to us is so unstable that he or she is or can become a killer?

Can we, however, reduce the chances that something terrible might happen if we put more resources into a system that works to reduce those chances?

We wrote a column last year about a courageous and striking book we had read called, “No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America.” I suggested that anyone in the legislature who deals with health and mental health funding should have this book on their must-read list.  With the General Assembly in session, now—particularly as we ask questions in the wake of the Florida school shooting—it is time to renew that suggestion, not just for those dealing with mental health funding but for all of our lawmakers.

Discussions are underway at the Capitol of further reductions in the state’s ability to finance vital programs and services at a time when the organization, Mental Health America, has published its 2017 report on the state of mental health in this country.  It ranks each state and territory on fifteen categories to arrive at a ranking that “indicates lower prevalence of mental illness and higher access to care.”

Missouri’s overall ranking was 31st.   Seven criteria used to rank services to adults placed Missouri 36th. We were 24th in the “youth” category.

The study found that we are 23rd in the prevalence of mental illness.   But when it comes to access to mental health care, we are only 36th.

If one of these unspeakable tragedies caused by someone of noticeable “strange behavior” happens in our state, as has happened in Florida, how will we think about that 36th place ranking?  And should this situation, this possibility, this circumstance be part of those discussions?

We pray that Missourians never have to confront those questions.  Or the people of any other state.

Let all of us pray.

Maybe a little bigger government makes sense

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But there are those who will say bigger government NEVER makes sense.  Don’t go off in a huff, though, if you’re one of them. Take a deep breath, let the blood pressure drop a notch or two, and consider the words of Governor Guy B. Park who told the legislature in his second (and last) biennial message on January 6, 1937:

When the boundaries of our counties were fixed by the Constitution of 1875 (editor’s note—that was the Constitution in effect in 1937), time and distance were the principal consideration. The boundaries were probably determined on the basis of how long it would take a resident to ride his horse from his home to the county seat, transact his business and get back in time to milk the cows.  As a matter of practical economy and common sense, it would be the better part of wisdom to materially increase the size, thereby reducing the number of counties. Should that be done, the local county government would be as close to the people in point of time as they were in 1875.  In order to accomplish this, an amendment to the Constitution would be necessary, and I recommend that you adopt a resolution submitting such an amendment to the people of the state.

Governors could make such suggestions in the days when the Constitution forbade them from seeking re-election.  And members of the legislature then, as now—particularly those from some of the counties likely to be affected—knew they would be greeted by pitchfork-carrying constituents if they went home after voting for such an idea.

Here we are, eighty-one years after Park’s speech and 157 years after Worth County became the last county created in our state, and we have twenty-five counties populated by fewer than ten-thousand people and six more who are just barely at ten-thousand.  That’s more than one-fourth of our counties, a lot of them in the sparsely-populated northern counties.  Seven counties have fewer than FIVE thousand residents. Worth County struggles to stay above two-thousand.

It’s been almost sixteen decades since Missouri honored some kind of hero or notable citizen or family member of an early settler by naming a county for them.   But we’ve had plenty of heroes since then, plenty of famous people who are better known than the people whose names adorn many of our counties.  Who was Dade after all?  Or Holt or Knox or Sullivan or Schuyler or, well, Worth?

Naturally, combining small counties or changing their names will generate a lot of hostility.  We’re a pretty territorial species.

But that doesn’t mean that Guy B. Park didn’t have a good point that has only gotten better.

(We wrote at some length about this more than two years ago when a longtime friend passed along a propose map of new counties.  If  you go back to Dec. 19, 2015, you’ll find that proposal along with some of the same musings in this column.  But maybe it is an idea worth bringing up more frequently than once every eighty-one years.)

Capitol credit

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State Senate leader Ron Richard has had a goal for the State Capitol for a long time and he’s hoping his last year in the legislature is the year that goal is reached.  And it should be.

Richard loves the Capitol as the symbol of a state’s greatness and power, of its stability and beauty.  But he has watched as the Capitol has deteriorated during his almost sixteen-year career and how appropriations that have finally started providing some rehabilitation of the now century-old building are not nearly enough to get the job done.

He has seen the state struggle with meeting its budgetary responsibilities for education, health and mental health, social services—you name it.  And as the state has struggled to meet those responsibilities, the state’s greatest symbol has deteriorated.

Millions are being spent as a continuation of exterior restoration that has been underway for about three years.  Some critical problems in the basement have been attacked. But millions of dollars more are needed to do what needs to be done now and to meet the costs of ongoing expenses later.

Richard has been hoping to get a bill passed setting up a tax credit program that would encourage people and organizations to donate money to fix our Capitol.   He is the sponsor of one of two bills in the Missouri Senate addressing the problem.  While he could be putting the muscle of his position behind his own legislation he has decided to let Senator Dan Hegeman from the northwest Missouri community of Cosby carry the issue.  The bill already is out of committee and is ready for Senate debate. It started the week twenty-seventh on the debate list, a good position for early approval.

It’s Senate Bill 590 for those of you who keep score. It does two things.  It creates tax credits for people who donate to restoration and repair work at the Capitol complex, and it creates tax credits for those who want to contribute to restoration and repair work on other public buildings.

A lot of deep-pocket people and companies have representatives in the capitol hallways every day that Richard, Hegeman, and their colleagues on both side of the rotunda are meeting.  It would not be surprising if those hallway denizens carried word back to their employers that their workplace needs some help.  Some of the money raised can be used to increase general public awareness of the need for donations for which private citizen-donors would get credit on their state taxes.

Richard has several times shared this dream with your correspondent and it’s time the dream comes true.   Richard already has created a legacy as the only person in the almost-two century history of the state to serve as the leader of the House and the leader of the Senate.  But that accomplishment is more a legislative distinction.  Leaving behind a program that can raise money for the capitol’s upkeep is the more important thing.  It could be a legacy.

But times have changed a little since Ron Richard first established this goal.  Historic Tax Credits are not as popular as they once were.   The legislature established caps on those tax credits a few years ago—no more than an aggregate total of $140 million.  That cap drops to seventy-million dollars on July 1.  Local historic preservation organizations can point to buildings and districts in their communities that have benefitted from those tax credits.  Now, as the cap is cut in half, there could be two new causes trying to attract tax credit seekers.

Historic preservation tax credits aren’t very sexy.  Some lawmakers question whether they create enough new jobs to justify the reduction in state revenue that they produce.  Others with little interest in history might see little value in them to begin with.

But they ARE important.  They’re important for the towns where we live because they encourage us to think of how far we have come while making sites usable, even inhabitable.  They’re important for our capitol, a place intended to inspire those who visit and who serve there.  The fact that some who visit and who serve do not find the intended inspiration cannot be an excuse to let our capitol decline into a symbol of decisions not made, responsibilities not met, and needs not acknowledged.

Our capitol is better than that.  And the Richards dream and the Hegeman legislation is the best chance for our lawmakers to prove it so.   We hope they don’t miss the chance this year.