Category Archives: Jefferson City

The Pen

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It’s going to cost millions of dollars to restore the old Missouri State Penitentiary that was hit hard by the May tornado. Some folks think it shouldn’t be repaired. Just tear it all down, they say.   There’s room to differ with that opinion—and we do. It is, after all, one of the distinguishing features of Jefferson City. In fact, it might be one reason there IS a Jefferson City.

In the early days of the city’s existence, the place was pretty crude and the legislature, which moved here in 1826 was reluctant to spend any money to make the town better. Governor John Miller suggested that building a state penitentiary here would stabilize the town, provide year-around employment (the legislature did not meet annually back then), and answer a statewide public need.

So the place was built, well outside of town at the time.

An exploration of A Hall, the oldest building at the pen, or the solitary confinement dungeon in the basement of another cell block is more than enough to understand why the place was considered “a bar to heaven, a door to hell,” as one long-ago inmate put it.

The old joint opened in 1836 on the outskirts of Jefferson City and closed in 2004, well within a residential area of the city.   A Hall dates to 1868 and looks it. The inmate’s comment to the contrary, the prison was once praised as one of the most efficient state lockups in the nation because it fed prisoners for an average cost of eleven cents a day. A few years later, a local newspaper called it “The greatest in the world.” Local pride aside, if it was the greatest, the middlin’ kind of pen must have been really awful.

By 1967, thirteen years after the worst riot in the prison’s history, it was called “The bloodiest 47 acres in America” by Time magazine.

Your correspondent was in the place from time to time to cover stories or play softball. Once of the times he was there was very late at night, on the top tier of cells in ancient A Hall, interviewing inmates about the order to integrate the cell blocks. “I don’t care who’s in the cell next to me. I just want to do my time and get out,” one inmate told me. “How much more time do you have?” I asked. “Thirty-five years,” he answered as calmly as you and I might say “Friday.”

Weasel-worders in 1991 changed its name from the Missouri State Penitentiary to the Jefferson City Correctional Center. One look at the walls and the cell blocks, and it was hard to buy the idea that it was anything but a penitentiary. A pen.   By 2004 it was called the Missouri State Penitentiary again. That September, however, all the inmates moved into a Jefferson City Correctional Center east of the city.

Since then the old prison has been an increasingly popular place for public tours. About 35,000 people have been going through it each year, some of them buying into the idea the place might have spooks in it and taking overnight visits. There have been no visits since the tornado, though.

But whether you go through it in broad daylight or whether you are looking for extra chills in the middle of the night, the place is still what an anonymous inmate wrote about it in 1917. At least he was anonymous when the Rocheport Progress printed his verse, called “Rightfully Named,”  on March 30.

A bar to heaven, a door to hell,

Whoever named it, named it well.

A bar to manliness and wealth

A door to want and broken health.

A bar to honor, pride and fame

A door to grief, sin and shame.

A bar to home, a bar to prayer,

A door to darkness and despair.

A bar to honor, useful life,

A door to brawling senseless strife.

A bar to all that’s true and brave,

A door to every patron’s grave.

A bar to joys that home imparts,

A door to tears and aching hearts.

A bar to heaven, a door to hell;

Whoever named it, named it well.

The newspaper commented the verse had been written “by a poor devil in the Missouri State Penitentiary who learned by bitter experience the truth he here expresses in rhyme.”

The old pen, battered by the May tornado, faces some uncertain times now. Damaged roofs, blown-out windows, and a blown-down wall segment are discouraging things to see. But we cannot lose this place that for so long was the “bar to heaven, a door to hell” for many who lived and died there.

 

Where was it?

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When the permanent seat of state government was moved from St. Charles to Jefferson City on October 1, 1826, it was headquartered in a building known as The Governor’s House. Not the capitol.

It was called the Governor’s House because it contained a couple of rooms for the lodging of the Governor and his office. The House of Representatives chamber was on the first floor. The Senate was on the second floor, an appropriate positioning for the body known at state and federal levels as “the upper house.’   Rooms for other state officers were in the building.

That was fine for Governor John Miller, a bachelor. But his successor, Daniel Dunklin, had a family, a situation that led to construction of an executive mansion nearby.

There were plans for a specific capitol but they didn’t come about until the Governor’s House burned in 1837 with a terrible loss of early records. The historical record is sketchy about what happened after the fire. How long did the gutted walls of the brick building remain? How was that area used between then and 1871 when the Governor’s Mansion was built?

Just where was the first seat of government on that lot?

Two conjectural drawings exist of that first building. One appears to show the building near the corner of Madison Street and Capitol Avenue. The other places the building closer to the bluff where it would be more visible to people traveling on the Missouri River.

We know it must have been fairly close because contemporary accounts say wet blankets were used to keep the mansion roof from catching fire from sparks blown from the burning original Governor’s House and a map from about 1843 indicates the 1826 building was near the present Executive Mansion site and the first Executive Mansion was built at the northwest corner of Madison Street at Capitol Avenue (which was Main Street then). We know from written records that the house was used during the Civil War by the officer in charge of the federal force that occupied the capital of Missouri.

How much of the current mansion, if any, is on or in the footprint of the first government building in the City of Jefferson?

There are some issues, often small ones, that get wrapped around a historian’s mind and won’t let go. Where were those buildings?

For several administrations this dabbler in archaeology (Nancy and I have spent several weeks in southwest Colorado mapping and finding pueblos either in the cliffs or on the ground of the Mancos River valley area near Mesa Verde) has wished somebody would be allowed to peel back the grass (in one way or another) at the Governor’s Mansion and in the process peel back the historical record to find the remains of the buildings that have occupied that space. Maybe there’s equipment that can survey the area without disturbing the lawn and pinpoint places to investigate without wiping out tent space. With the state’s first family in temporary quarters while major repairs and restorations are done at the old house, this might be a time to electronically see what’s under the yard.

The problem is that the lawn is often used for entertainment. Big tents are pitched and gatherings are held and digging up the lawn would disrupt those. But my goodness, what might we learn about the place where government began at its permanent location?

What’s under there?   Where was that first building in Jefferson City where some of Missouri’s greatest citizens of the first half of the Nineteenth Century walked, negotiated, and thundered?

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“Our” disasters

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There’s something about a disaster that becomes personal even to those who are not damaged by it.   Many people take a personal ownership of it, even take a peculiar personal pride in it even if their property stays dry and intact.

We’re seeing some of that in Jefferson City in the wake of our tornado a few days before the Memorial Day Weekend and the accompanying flooding.  This is “our” disaster and we see and will see other disasters through our lens.

It’s not unusual.  Those of us who remember the 1993 flooding measure floods in other parts of the country against that one and in some odd way find satisfaction in thinking, “Theirs isn’t as bad as ours was.”   The Joplin tornado has become our measuring stick when we see reports of tornado disasters in other parts of the country.  Theirs isn’t as bad as ours was.

Until the disaster takes off OUR porch, blows down OUR house, destroys OUR business.

OUR tornado took nobody’s life.  It damaged about 200 buildings in Jefferson City, some of which will have to be removed because they cannot be repaired, but compared to Joplin it was a little thing.

Except it’s OUR thing.   And now we will consider ourselves kin to Joplin and we will see reports of tornadoes in other places through OUR lens, not in terms of extent of damage but in terms of fellowship.  We have now joined the fellowship of them.

We don’t know if the folks in Joplin, on hearing of the tornado that hit Eldon then Jefferson City, have thought inwardly, “Huh! We had it a lot worse than they did.”   But it is likely natural that some of them would have evaluated our situation against the extent of their disaster.

We’re still waiting to see if our rainy spring continues, as it did in 1993, and pushes later flood crests that establish new references that end observations such as, “Yeah, it looks pretty bad.  But back in ’93…,” the same way that the 1993 flood ended observations from the real old-timers that, “I remember back in 1951…”

In Eldon and in Jefferson City right now, though, the focus is on recovery. The comparisons with later disasters will come after the debris is cleared away, the buildings that can be saved are saved, and the buildings that cannot be rescued are bulldozed down and the lots where they stood grow new grass.

I haven’t consulted with Nancy yet, but if we win the big lottery jackpot(s) I think I’d like to offer one-million dollars to the Historic City of Jefferson, which has worked for years to revitalize East Capitol Avenue where some of the historic structures might become those grass-filled lots, to be used to supplement insurance payments to rebuild those damaged homes—even those now seemingly destined for destruction.  Gutting the destroyed interior and building a modern inside structure while salvaging the historic exterior would be a goal worth some of those lottery winnings.

But I’m not going to win the lottery.  Somebody else somewhere else always buys a winning ticket just before or just after I buy mine (I tell myself that).  I think I will send a much, much, much smaller amount, though.  And maybe others capable of greater philanthropic capacity will want to participate more grandly in saving what some think cannot be saved.

After all, it is OUR disaster. And part of comparing OUR disaster to those elsewhere in the future should include what we do now to save the things we are told can’t be saved.

History tells us an Act of God can be countered by godly acts that rescue people and the past from the worst that has happened.

I bought another lottery ticket a few days ago.  And I also wrote a check.

Notes from a quiet (and perhaps flooded) street

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Might one offer an observation about the extensive coverage of rainfall by the television weatherfolk?    They do an excellent job when weather is awful except for one thing.

What does it mean when they say the Missouri River is expected to crest at—for example—32.3 feet at Jefferson City?   Will there be 32 feet of water over the Jefferson City Airport?  Or in the River Bottom area west of the Capitol?  Will the community garden in what once was Cedar City (and the nearby Highway 63) have 32 feet of water over it?

Uh, no.

When we did flood stories at the Missourinet, we never used numbers like that.  Here’s why.

Flood stage at Jefferson City is 23 feet.   That means that a Corps of Engineers river gauge is someplace that measures the bank of the Missouri River at 723 feet above sea level.  The altitude changes as the river flows east or downhill. (Bank full at Washington is only 720 feet, or “20 feet” as is commonly said.)  Any water higher than that means the river is out of its banks.

So, 32 feet means the river is nine feet above bank full at Jefferson City.  It always seemed to us to be more meaningful to report the river was expected to crest nine feet over flood stage.  And a flood stage at 30.2 feet at Washington means the river will be about ten feet above bank full there.  Nine feet and ten feet are more meaningful to people who are five-feet-ten inches tall than thirty-two feet.

The record flood crest at Jefferson City in 1993, by the way was 38.65 feet, or as we reported it, 15.65 feet over flood stage.   There’s a graphic example of the accuracy of reporting flooding using the 15.65 feet standard we used.  Go to the restaurant at the airport and look at the markings on the door which record the levels of various floods.  The mark for the 1993 flood is almost at the ceiling level of the restaurant, about sixteen feet up, not thirty-two.

Having gotten that out of my craw—-

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A few days before the end of the legislative session, your observer watched some of the debate in the House about whether undocumented immigrants living in Missouri should be denied in-state tuition and financial aid when attending our state colleges and universities.

Among those banned from paying in-state tuition and financial assistance using tax dollars were the DACA people, children brought here at a young age by their undocumented parents.  The legislation says the state universities can use their own resources to provide that assistance or to make up the difference between in-state tuition and international student tuition.

The Columbia Daily Tribune had a story about then noting there were 6,000 people in Missouri approved for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or eligible for it.

 

A thought occurred during the discussion: Why couldn’t our universities, state or private, offer a course for those students that would lead to American citizenship, online for adults and especially for DACA high school students and current college students?  Might solve a few problems.

Might not be a bad idea to have a lot of our non-DACA students enroll, too.

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Come to think of it:  The capitol is awash in third-graders each spring, students who are taking their courses in Missouri government.   They sit in the visitors’ galleries for a few minutes and are introduced by their legislator and given a round of applause and then go downstairs to look at the old stage coach and the mammoth tooth.

It will be nine years before they graduate, months ahead of casting their first vote.  That’s a long time to remember what they saw and learned as third-graders.

I THINK I can remember the name of my teacher and the building I attended in third grade.  But that didn’t make me qualified to cast a learned vote the first time I had the chance to do so.

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I was driven out of retirement this year to lobby for the steamboat museum bill in the legislature.  The opportunity to help do something great for my town and my state forced me back into coat and tie more times in the last four months than I have worn them in the last four years. I found that I was regularly turning the wrong way to get to a meeting with a legislator in the most efficient way.  I had forgotten my way around the Capitol.

I confess there are some things I liked about being a lobbyist and being back in the capitol while the legal sausage was being made.  In all of my years as a reporter, my contacts with legislators were arms-length business arrangements.  As a lobbyist I got to spend a half-hour or more—sometimes less—in the office talking to lawmakers. And I met some REALLY interesting people, particularly the members of this year’s freshman class.

But, boy, did I miss my guilt-free naps. (A few times I hid behind a column in a side gallery of the House and snatched a doze—but those instances sometimes ran afoul of a school group that came in to see five minutes of debate that I’m sure didn’t teach them a darned thing about their government in action.  Or inaction.) And living by my own clock.  And going around in tennis shoes all day.  And going to the Y three days a week for the fellowship there that replaced the relationships I had while I was working.

But the chambers are dark and cool now.  And my naps have returned.  Until January when we take a stronger, better organized run at building a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City.  You’re welcome to join the effort.

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It was interesting to know that some things haven’t changed at all.  About three weeks before the end of the session, the place starts to get kind of squirrelly.  That’s about when the House gets all huffy because the Senate hasn’t turned fully to debating House-passed bills. And the Senate gets in a snit because the House hasn’t switched to Senate-passed bills.  And the budget isn’t done with the deadline looming.

 

In the second week, a purported compromise budget comes out and the chambers start and stop on no particular schedule depending on who’s filibustering what bill or which chamber thinks its conferees didn’t stand up for their chamber’s priorities, and whether to stop the entire process to have more conferences on a small part of a multi-billion dollar budget, and the Senate decides a “day” can actually last until sunrise the next morning or longer.

And the last week when legislators are like desert-crossing cattle who catch a whiff of water in the distance and scramble to get a bill dead a month ago resurrected and added to something moderately akin to the topic, thereby adding to the legend that “nothing is dead in the Senate until the gavel falls at 6 p.m. on the last Friday.”   And, oh, what a blessing that falling gavel is.

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The end of a session today is nothing compared to the days when the odd-year sessions ended at MIDNIGHT on June 15, usually with a “midnight special” appropriations bill just before adjournment that created funding for new programs approved during the session. The only people who knew what was in it likely were the people who hay-baled it together in the closing hours. Pandemonium hardly describes those nights when everybody was beyond exhaustion and more than a few were seriously—shall we say “impaired?”—because of social visits to numerous offices which were well-equipped with adult liquids.

 

And at midnight, many lawmakers went out to the Ramada Inn to celebrate surviving another session.  The Capitol press corps would start writing stories about the session, a process that was not nearly as much fun as falling in the swimming pool at the Ramada. Both groups would pack it in about sunrise—except for those of us who had newscasts all day Saturday.

One of the best things the legislature ever did was change the adjournment time to 6 p.m. on a Friday night.

Now—-

If we could only get rid of term limits now—–

 

The man who isn’t there (but he really is)

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Some of the sports wagering bills going through the legislature’s digestive process this year bring to mind Hughes Mearns poem that begins:

Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there…

Some bills establish a process by which someone can bet on sporting events remotely.  But whether in doing so they are the person who isn’t there is open to question.  So today, let’s look at the casino industry’s efforts to avoid paying admission fees for the largest segment of new gamblers it hopes to attract by legalizing sports betting, people the industry thinks should not be considered there.

This issue is important for the Missouri Gaming Commission’s worthy causes—including veterans homes and cemeteries—and for the casino industry’s home dock cities, which also rely on income from the casino admission fees. And, of course, there’s the museums proposal from Jefferson City that also asks for admissions fee money.

Reading the bills instead of just listening to the casino industry explain them raises or should raise some red flags. We will raise a few today—and we won’t even get much into the industry’s effort to direct the conversation in the direction of how much it is willing to be taxed.

Casino attendance has been declining since its peak in FY 2010-2011, dropping in fiscal year 2018 to its lowest level in twenty years. Casinos hope that opening sports books in the casinos will draw people back, particularly new people, and those new people will discover other kinds of gaming while they’re there for sports wagering.

It’s unlikely to produce a BIG turnaround in attendance, certainly nothing that will return casinos to the halcyon days when they were reporting fifty-million admissions or more (a decade ending in fiscal year 2012). But as the bills are now written, it will add millions to the casinos profits, although a relatively small amount compared to the overall adjusted gross receipts, largely because they don’t think about seventy percent of the sports bettors should be counted as casino admissions.  We’ll confront that strategy in a minute.

The proposed legislation gives our thirteen casinos a monopoly on sports betting. The bills require casinos to have a specific area set aside and staffed within the casino to handle those bets. A person who enters the casino wanting to bet that the Cardinals will beat the Cubs by more than fifteen runs must go to that specifically defined area where that person will offer to make a wager.  The casino will accept that offer and, when the final score is St. Louis 19, Chicago 3, the bettor will be paid.  If the score is 19-4, the casino keeps the bettor’s money.  The acceptance, handling, processing and final resolution of the bet is handled within that prescribed area of the casino.

But the casinos also want to allow betting through use of computer, whether it’s a big desktop tower or a cell phone or maybe the increasingly sophisticated things people put on their wrists these days. And that is likely to be most of the sports bettors.  They call it “remote” betting although some definitions of “remote” are debatable.

A webpage that keeps track of gaming trends in Nevada and elsewhere, playnevada.com, reports that 70 percent of all sports wagering in New Jersey, the first state to legalize online sports betting after last year’s Supreme Court ruling, were placed online.  It also reported Nevada, which seemingly has video gambling machines in every supermarket, business, bathroom, airport terminal, and anywhere else that people go, reports mobile sports wagering is used from twenty-five percent to more than fifty percent of the betting in Nevada’s many sportsbooks.  It’s difficult in Nevada’s case to be more specific because—and this is something we might come back to in a later post for a different reason—Nevada does not separate mobile and on-site wagering. That’s why it’s harder in Nevada than it is in New Jersey to determine what percent of sports wagering is done outside casinos.

Missouri’s proposed legislation would separate on-site wagering from remote wagering, which could be detrimental to veterans services or to home-dock communities that rely on in-person wagering in the sports book area but also could provide a major increase in casino profits. Missouri’s casinos want it that way and expect the legislature to rubber-stamp the idea.

As we compose this, we don’t know the final form sports wagering legislation will have if it makes it to the governor this year.  So we’re going to construct a scenario based on common provisions in the bills and a few differing provisions in some bills.

Missouri’s proposals don’t let just anybody dial a casino, and bet on sports. A bettor first has to go to the casino (where that person presumably will have to enter, thus triggering a two-dollar admission fee for the state) and register, open a betting account, and get a password.  That person then can leave and bet from anywhere in Missouri.  At least one proposal allows betting from other states if the other state lets Missourians place bets there.  It’s called reciprocity. On the other hand is a proposal that allows betting a few feet from the gambling area—-which doesn’t sound very “remote.”

If those provisions are in the bill that gets passed, the way will be clear for Betting Bertie to place a bet in say, Boonville, even if he is in Bevier.  He does. And he loses. Since he was not in the casino personally there is no admission fee paid to the state.  The bucks Betting Bertie of Bevier bet at Boonville go straight to the boat’s bottom line. The casino gets richer. The veterans and the home dock community get no benefit at all from this increased business because Betting Bernie doesn’t set his boots inside the Boonville boat.  At least that’s the way things are proposed.

Now comes the part likely to get the casino industry lathered up.

We argue, and we would bet that a number of members of the legislature might agree, that requiring Betting Bertie to physically go to Boonville to register as a bettor constitutes the creation of a presence within the sports book area. The bills require casinos to keep detailed records in the casino of Bertie’s betting.

If Betting Bertie does not place a bet, it’s as if he’s not present that day. But if he does put down a bet that is accepted by the casino, processed by the casino, and paid off by the casino in the sports book area as required, he has activated that established presence and has electronically entered that casino.  And because the casino has accepted the bet, processed it, and paid it, it has acknowledged that he has had that presence in that casino.

Because the casino has decided to admit him to the sportsbook area with his bet, the two-dollar admission fee should apply as surely to him as it would apply to someone who walked in. A bet is a bet whether it is made by someone sitting in a comfortable chair staring at all the big screen teevees or whether it is made by someone sitting in an office chair in Bevier.  Both parties have entered the casino, one physically and the other electronically. Admission is admission—at least if the casino wants either bettor’s money. It cannot get Bertie’s money if it does not acknowledge the presence it as established for him by accepting his application and giving him his password.

Casinos will argue that physical and electronic admissions are different. But the end result is the same—the casino is most likely to win and the principle of winning is the same whether that person walks in or phones in. There is no bet if there is no acknowledged presence.

To put it more directly: The casino recognizes the arrival of the electronic bettor because it maintains a space for that person’s arrival thanks to the required registration and subsequent password issuance.  The password is the equivalent of the turnstile the on-site bettor has to go through to place a bet.

By making the password the electronic equivalent of the turnstile, the legislature can make sure that casinos don’t game the system further than they already do by claiming seventy percent of sports betting is different from the on-site betting, thus benefitting only the casino and not improving funding for veterans (and others) and home dock cities. The casino industry likes to cite Las Vegas practices in advocating a part of this bill and remember: Nevada does not separate mobile and on-site betting.

There is precedent within existing law that argues for our point.

If free passes or complimentary admission tickets are issued, the excursion boat licensee shall pay to the commission the same fee upon these passes or complimentary tickets as if they were sold at the regular and usual admission rate.

The provision kept casinos in the early days when real excursions were anticipated from declaring that everyone entering the gaming floor had been given a free pass or complimentary ticket.  As proposed statutes are written now, electronic entrance to the gaming floor and remote placement of bets is the equivalent of a free pass or complimentary ticket that, without existing law, would be treated as a non-admission. A strong argument can be made that it should not be considered as any kind of a free pass or complimentary ticket. And we suspect there are people who would support the concept—veterans groups and home-dock communities for example—who would be losers because the casinos are proposing an end-run around the admissions issue.  Why shouldn’t these bills consider remotely-placed bets to be “admissions” when the bets are received, processed, and (if necessary) paid in the casino or on behalf of the casino by a third party that conducts the wagering at the casino?

The answer is simple: the casinos don’t want them treated that way because if remote betting is not considered an “admission” there is no admission fee obligation to the state and to the host communities.  The casino thus increases its gross receipts without increasing any payments for veterans homes and cemeteries or home-dock communities and other causes. As we’ve noted before, they’re already getting tens of millions of dollars in windfalls because the admission fees are not inflation-adjusted each year and they fight aggressively if anyone suggests they should be.  By not considering remotely-placed but in-house processed bets as “admissions” their windfall will get windier.

Some additional proposed language that on first blush seems to be fairly benign appears on second blush to be much less than that.  Here’s how that works:

One of the bills appears to make that point when it says, “All sports wagers…shall be deemed initiated, received, and otherwise made on the property of an excursion gambling boat within this state.”  While that language would appear to support the points just made, please note the phrase “on the property.” Another bill seems to clarify that wording by saying sports bettors can wager on sports at “a hotel, restaurant, or other amenity that is operated by the certificate holder and subject to the supervision of the (gaming) commission.” A restaurant twenty feet from the turnstile to the gaming floor is an okay place “on the property” from which to place a bet. We suspect there are some folks who don’t think that quite qualifies as “remote.”

The definition of “on the property” is troublesome.  On one hand, the casino must establish a specific area where sports wagering is done and processed by the casino. On the other hand are suggestions that someone can be anywhere, even right outside the turnstile leading to the casino, or in a room of a hotel owned by the casino. These provisions seem to sanction avoidance of physically entering the specified area or of even entering the broader casino betting floor while on casino property, thus avoiding an “admission” and thus avoiding the two-dollar admission fee..

That is why it is important that the use of the password—from wherever—should constitute entrance to (or admission to) the specific area set aside for sports wagering and thus trigger the admission fee.

We hope the General Assembly’s final version of a sports wagering bill does not allow the casinos to ignore existing standards that require admission fees—that help veterans, home-dock communities and others—for seventy-percent of those the industry hopes to lure inside its specified sports betting areas physically as well as electronically.

—because the man who isn’t there

really will be there.

Casino abuse

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Missouri’s casino industry is feeling abused.

And those of us who want to do something great in Jefferson City are the apparent chief abusers.

Takes one to know one.

We’ve now had committee hearings in both the House and the Senate on the Steamboat Legacy Fund bill that suggests Missouri’s casino industry be the main funding source for the creation of a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, the construction of a Missouri State Museum that has been needed for ninety years, and the conversion of the present state museum space into a Capitol Museum/Visitor Center that focuses on the history of the capitol and the function of state government.  Our goal is to do all of this without state funds and without any general tax increase.

In each hearing, the casino industry has complained that it’s being picked on because we (a small group of Jefferson City residents who have been working on these goals for more than a year) think the industry has capitalized on—–no, the proper phrase is “taken advantage of”—Missouri’s steamboat heritage for more than a quarter-century.

The casino industry thinks we’re picking on it by telling the truth about it.  We think the casino industry has earned the right to provide the financial base to accomplish these goals. 

We’ll start showing you why today.

The attempt to portray yourself as the victim when you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar is as old as cookies and jars.

The casinos aren’t victims. But there are victims—Missouri’s veterans and the home communities of the casinos in particular.  We’re going to show you how it happens by using numbers from three sources: Missouri Gaming Commission annual reports for the last 25 years, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.  And one other source: the casino industry itself.

Let’s begin this explanation with the parable of the 1994 pickup truck.  That was the year the first two casinos opened in Missouri. It was near the end of fiscal 1993-1994.  During that year, legislation went into effect establishing the two-dollar admission fee for casinos.

It’s important to understand that casino patrons do not pay that fee.  The casinos do, based on the number of people who gamble.

We won’t go into detail about how that number was established except to note that it goes back to the time when the industry convinced Missourians to allow casino gambling here by selling the image of steamboats cruising our great rivers on two-hour cruises while people could gamble (but lose no more than $500 per cruise). Each time someone went on a cruise, they would pay two dollars. One of those dollars was for the Missouri Gaming Commission and it’s “worthy causes” (more about those in a minute).  The other dollar went to the city and county that had a casino to offset the extra costs of public services because of the presence of a casino.  Leftover funds were used for capital improvements in those towns.  When the image of steamboats on our great rivers turned rather quickly into so-called boats in so-called moats the casinos decided not to charge patrons to enter the gambling floor. Instead the casinos counted noses and wrote checks to the state, probably making up that expense in charges for food and beverage, hotel rooms and the like, which is how the industry says it would make up for the dollar we are seeking for the museums project.

There is no doubt the host cities have made good use of that money.  But in the process they have become victims of their casino.

If the city street department in one of the first two casino towns bought a Ford F-150 four-wheel drive extended cab long-bed pickup truck in 1994, it might have paid the MSRP of $18,607.  By 2018 the truck badly needed to be replaced. But the price of a new Ford F-150 four-wheel drive, extended cab, long-bed truck, was $40,010.

The price of pickup trucks has doubled, and more.  But the city is still getting a dollar.  And it’s not a 2018 dollar.  It’s still 1993 dollar. And it’s not worth a dollar any more

The legislature in 1993 didn’t think to include an inflation adjustment clause when it set that two-dollar fee and the casino industry has successfully insisted the legislature not correct that shortcoming.

The inflation calculators at the BLS and the Minneapolis Fed tell us that the equivalent of $2 in 1993 was $3.41 in 2018.  The host city in 2018 got a dollar per admission at its casino.  Had there been an inflation clause built into that 1993 law they would have gotten a dollar-seventy.  Plus another half cent.

And the situation is worse for the city because those webpage inflation calculators show the dollar they DID get in FY18 had the purchasing power of only 58 ½ cents.

Does the casino industry give a hoot?  Suggesting this avaricious industry should care about making sure its thirteen host communities receive a dollar that is worth a dollar will bring forth claims that such suggestions make the industry a victim somehow.

The other half of the two-dollar admission fee goes to the Missouri Gaming Commission which takes its annual operating costs out and then distributes the rest to a list of “worthy causes.”  Those causes have varied through the years but the biggest beneficiary in 2018 was the Missouri Veterans Commission Capital Improvement Trust Fund, which funds veterans’ homes and cemeteries.  Last year it got about $22 million.   In 1993 dollars.  While the casinos were hauling in 2018 dollars from people who thought they could go to a casino and win, the veterans homes and cemeteries were getting dollars worth 58 ½ cents in purchasing power..

In fiscal year 2018, the difference between a 1993 two-dollar admission fee and its 2018 equivalent value ($3.41) was more than $56 million dollars.

Where did that money go?  Not to veterans’ programs.  Not to the home dock cities.  That $56 million dollars in windfall profits left Missouri and went to casino corporate headquarters in Nevada and in Pennsylvania.

And each year, because there’s no inflation adjustment in that two dollar admission fee, the windfall gets bigger and bigger.  In the twenty-five years that Missouri has had casinos, the industry has had windfall profits of more than $830,000,000.  That’s as of last June 30.

That’s $830-million that has not gone to programs for veterans, early childhood education, college tuition assistance programs, programs for problem gamblers—and to the host cities.

And when representatives of Jefferson City suggest that about two-thirds of the windfall going forward remain in Missouri to keep a treasure trove of American history from being purchased by a museum in Pennsylvania and moved there, and to satisfy a 90-year need for a state museum that can REALLY tell the story of Missouri and its people and its resources, the casinos whine that we are abusing them.

The casinos will attack any proposal to make two-dollar admission fees worth two dollars.  And anybody who suggests it, or who suggests (as we have) that using part of the huge annual windfall profit casinos realize for something benefitting Missourians is making the casinos victims somehow, and we should be ashamed to suggest it. .

Reviewing every annual report of the Missouri Gaming Commission makes this clear: The casinos get richer ever year by paying the state in 1993 money.  The state gets poorer because the programs and services that admission fee goes for cost 2018 dollars to operate.

We know that casinos are not built because their patrons have an even chance of winning.  The tables are always tilted in the casinos’ favor.  The tables tilt even more with each passing year that they pay the state two dollars in admission fees.

An industry spokesman has accused those of us supporting this measure of suggesting the casinos make too much money.  As is often the case with statements from the industry, it’s less than truthful and is intended to deflect attention away from the issues. It’s not the amount of money the casinos make, it’s how much they KEEP, how they keep it, and how they are adamantly opposed to any idea that the two-dollar admission fee should be changed so that veterans and home dock communities get dollars that are worth dollars.

Now, having beaten up on these “victims,” let’s acknowledge some important things.

The casinos have broken no laws. They are paying what the law requires them to pay.  Whether they are keeping faith with Missourians who voted to have majestic steamboats cruising our rivers or keeping faith with those who thought two dollars was going to be worth two dollars is another issue.  But they have not broken any laws.

They have said in the committee hearings that they have met every obligation the state has put on them.  And they have. And they sure don’t want the state to update any laws that make one of their obligations be that dollars be worth dollars.

They say they provide thousands of Missourians with jobs.  And they do.  Not nearly as many as they used to—which they don’t talk about publicly—but they do provide thousands of jobs that pay millions and millions of dollars in wages and benefits.

They pay a lot of property taxes and in some places they pay for leases of city or county land for their boats in moats. Not much to sympathize about there. Those are costs of doing business.

Here’s another indication that the casinos don’t much care about anything but how many dollars they can take out of Missouri:

Last year, Missouri’s casinos had almost one-and-three quarters BILLION dollars in adjusted gross receipts (income minus payouts for the minority of customers who won anything).  And by the time they deducted the expenses the gaming commission forces them to report, the industry still had about $820-million left, including the $56-million in windfall profits from the admission fees.

Here’s another example of how our casinos don’t really care for much more than taking as many dollars out of Missouri pockets as they can:

The gaming commission requires the casinos to report their charitable giving each year.   Last year the thirteen casinos donated about $940,000 to charities.  If asked, they’d probably point to that number with a lot of emphasis and pride.  They like to do that kind of thing.

But it’s not what they say. It’s what they DON’T say that is important in understanding their avarice.

The charitable contributions last year were just .00054% of their adjusted gross receipts.  Remember than .01 percent represents one penny per dollar.

One casino with more than $70-million in adjusted gross receipts in FY2018 reported charitable giving of $915.

Your observer seems to be the chief casino abuser, I guess, because I came back from a meeting at the Steamboat Arabia museum in Kansas City a year ago with the idea that Jefferson City would be a great place for the museum’s new home when the museum’s lease runs out on its city-owned building in Kansas City in 2026. And our working group thinks an industry that has taken advantage of our steamboat heritage to make billions and billions of dollars should help preserve the heritage of the steamboats.

If the plan that our working group has developed in the last year constitutes casino abuse, all of us willingly plead guilty.

So the casinos accuse of abusing them, of making them some kind of victims.  Read the numbers again. And think about who is—and wants to remain—an abuser.

The question then becomes: Who really is abusing the system: a citizens group that wants to use casino money to create something good—great—for our state or the group that wants to truck as much money as it can out of the state for its own enrichment?

The problem can be corrected.  All it takes is 82 courageous members of the Missouri House and eighteen courageous members of the Missouri Senate who will vote for boats that are not in moats but whose cargoes are instead in museums or are waiting under farm fields for their stories to be brought to the surface.

The casinos have made billions of dollars from the heritage of those boats.  Giving back a relative few million to honor the importance of steamboats to America—and to casino development in Missouri—isn’t going to make any casino executives jump off the top floor of Wynn’s in Las Vegas.

More later.

 

Vote for the boats

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Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist George Bernard Shaw said it in his play Back to Methuselah in 1949: “You see things; and you say “Why?”  But I dream things that never were; and I say “why not?”

I awoke one morning a few months ago thinking about a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, a museum that emphasizes the role of Missouri River steamboats as the lifelines to the American West.   It was a little while after our meeting in Kansas City at the Steamboat Arabia Museum where we talked about the museum’s future and its move to a new location where it can become a National Steamboat Museum.

There once had been some uneasiness about applying the “national” name to the museum— how a museum alongside the Missouri River could assume the “national” title for a creation that had such a profound impact on almost all of the nation’s navigable streams for most of the Nineteenth Century.  But that uneasiness went away when I remembered the Shaw’s remark about dreaming things that never were and asking “Why not?”

And that’s why we’re willing to buck some politically-influential big nay-sayers and the reason we hope members of the legislature will join us in a venture that requires some courage to make something great materialize for our city and for our state.

Why not put our National Steamboat Museum along the nation’s longest river system?  Why not put the museum on a hill overlooking the most challenging river that steamboats ever faced?  Why not display a boat or boats exhumed from their watery graves of a century and a half ago and more?  Why not a museum that represents the importance of steamboats to this nation’s greatest adventure—the expansion of our country from ocean to ocean?

Others have not been reluctant to use the “national” designation in connection with steam boating.  Cincinnati, on the Ohio River, has the National Steamboat Monument, a sixty-ton replica of the original paddle wheel from the “American Queen” (a modern tourist boat built in 1995) that towers forty feet off the ground, with a series of twenty-four metal smokestacks to symbolize the importance of steam in early river travel and the importance of riverboats to Cincinnati’s history.

Jeffersonville, Indiana—across the Ohio River from Louisville—has the Howard National Steamboat Museum in the 1894 mansion of steamboat captain James Howard (a museum that, appropriately, has survived a 1971 fire caused by an explosion of its steam heating plant).

Marietta, Ohio has the Ohio River Museum that includes a twenty-four foot long model of the sternwheeler “The Pioneer,” and a collection of artifacts from steamboats in three buildings.

The Clifton Steamboat Museum in Beaumont, Texas is a 24,000 square foot museum that includes steamboat history as well as artifacts from various wars in which Texans have participated.

Irvington, Virginia’s Steamboat Era Museum includes the pilot house from the steamer “Potomac,” built in 1894 and disassembled in 1938.

And Marion, Arkansas has The Sultana Museum that commemorates the disaster that struck the steamboat Sultana in 1865, an explosion of boilers and fire on a 367-passenger capacity boat packed with 2,300 passengers, mostly paroled Union soldiers just released from Andersonville and Cahaba Confederate prison camps. Only five-hundred of those passengers survived.

But nowhere is there a museum that honors the steamboats that fought the nation’s most dangerous river, a river on which the average lifespan of a steamboat was only three years. And in honoring those boats and those who built and operated them, wouldn’t we be honoring steamboat history in general?

The dream is for a museum that houses at least one exhumed steamboat. The whole thing. But maybe more. We’ll know when we dig down to others. The museum also would provide a window on the people we were in the early days of the frontier through the years until railroads had so penetrated the West that steamboats were no longer essential to the survival of frontier communities and the movement of the frontier toward the Pacific Ocean.

Some parts of the museum already exist; the steam engine from the “Missouri Packet,” the first of about 400 boats to sink in the Missouri River when it went under in 1820, the two-hundred tons of cargo recovered from the exhumed “Arabia,” and soon, the cargo of and perhaps the entire “Malta,” due for recovery this winter if fund-raising can be completed.

Introductory displays of the earlier history of steamboats on the Hudson, Potomac, and Ohio Rivers—among others—can provide the context for the main displays in the National Steamboat Museum which will take nothing away from the importance of existing collections and monuments but will instead bring the importance of steamboats and their era into sharp and dramatic focus complementing other facilities that highlight this often overlooked but vitally important part of the development of our nation.

Why the Missouri River?  Writer and epic poet John G. Neihardt, who canoed downriver from Fort Benton, Montana in 1908 wrote:

“The Missouri is unique among rivers.  I think God wished to teach the beauty of a virile soul fighting its way toward peace—and his precept was the Missouri.  To me, the Amazon is a basking alligator; the Tiber is a dream of dead glory; the Rhine is a fantastic fairy-tale; the Nile a mummy, periodically resurrected; the Mississippi, a convenient geographical boundary line; the Hudson, an epicurean philosopher.

But the Missouri—my brother—is the eternal Fighting Man!”

I have come to realize we can call it The National Steamboat Museum because—while focusing on Missouri River steamboats—it will be a tribute to all of the rivers, all of the boats that challenged them and won or lost, all of the people who invented, built, and operated those boats—and those who died in their disasters—and all of the people who rode them into uncertain futures that are our national history.

Their descendants not only will have a unique glimpse of their real-people ancestors. They might draw courage by knowing that progress is not achieved by sitting on a riverbank and watching the water flow by but instead is often achieved by having the courage to go against the current in search of better things.

Those of us who want to create the National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City do not lack the courage to face the heavy opposition of our casino industry to provide the funding for that museum as well as for a State Museum building and the transformation of the present state museum space into a visitor center that focuses on the history of the capitol and of state government, a place to learn about being a Missouri citizen. The casino industry, which has capitalized on (some say “has taken advantage of”) our steamboat heritage for more than twenty-five years, appears not to care about leaving funds in Missouri to accomplish great goals that will benefit all Missourians. The legislature can decide if its best to keep some of the casino’s annual windfall here for future generations rather than let it flow to casino corporate offices in Nevada and Pennsylvania.

A National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, Missouri?

Why not?

Join us in making what never has been—-

be.

Notes from a quiet street (composed on a cold and dreary March day)

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Think the “me too” movement is new?   Consider this report from the Union Franklin County Tribune of December 12, 1913:

“Because Mike Kincannon of Joplin, a patrolman on the police force, told the wife of a prominent railroad man to ‘go home and get some clothes on’ when he saw her on the street wearing a slit skirt, his resignation was demanded by Chief of Police J. H. Myers.  Complaint of the patrolman’s orders to the woman were filed by the woman’s husband.”

(Isn’t that a little intriguing? Some creative writer could take that story and structure various narratives stemming from at least two questions: Why was the woman (especially a married woman) wearing a “slit skirt” on the street in those days?  Why did the husband complain? And what happened to Kincannon after that? What did HIS wife tell him after hearing of the comment? This, my friends, is a potential short story on the hoof.)

000

By now we all should have learned to consider March with suspicion.  December was a plunge into the darkness and cold of winter. January was the depths but that faint light in the distance was February which, while still not pleasant, at least raise hopes with the realization that it was a short month and by the end of it men would be playing baseball and racing cars again. Then comes March and we inevitably expect more of it than it deserves. Even the spring solstice on March 21 does not bring lasting relief.  Although April is considered the “cruelest month,” it nonetheless brings us greening grass and budding trees and the promise of May. Let us be patient and tolerant of March.  It cannot help itself.

-0-

We were talking to a friend the other day who has heard confident predictions that President Trump could be elected for four more years in 2020. “The chances are good that he’ll get the nomination as long as political parties have ‘Winner Take All’ or ‘Winner Take Most’ primaries in which someone with thirty percent of the vote gets one-hundred percent of the delegates,” she said.  “If political parties had proportional primaries, conventions might be worth paying attention to again. The 2016 Republican convention sure would have been if the primaries had been proportional in awarding delegates.”

I didn’t ask her when she’d start wearing a MCGA hat—Make Conventions Great Again.

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Governor Parson knows that we can’t keep letting our roads and bridges turn to rust and rubble.  That’s why he’s out banging the drum for his bond issue proposal.  He really doesn’t have much of a choice, given voter resistance to any kind of a fuel tax increase that might keep a school bus or two from winding up in a creek.  But there’s a cost that does with issuing bonds.

All of us who ever borrowed money—whether it was to buy a car, a house, a daughter’s wedding, or to pay some backed-up bills—knows that we’ll have to pay off those loans.  And making payments on loans reduces the amount of money in our general bank account, limiting our choices in buying food, taking vacations, buying some nice things from time to time.

Because we as citizens refuse to pay for it now, we’ll pay for it later.  A long time later.

But somebody has to do something to keep school buses out of creeks.

-0-

The city council in Jefferson City passed a resolution Monday night urging every citizen of the town who comes in contact with members of the legislature to tell them how much it would mean to the city to build a national steamboat museum here. Legislative employees, landlords who rent space to lawmakers, businesses that serve them food and libations, stores that sell them clothes or tires—anybody who sees a legislator needs to get in their ears about passing the bills financing this museum project, says the resolution in so many words.

Yes, I instigated it.  Not sure how the Missouri Ethics Commission will handle registering an entire city as a lobbyist but if it does figure it out, I’ll pay the ten dollar registration fee.

 

I am a lobbyist

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I don’t think I have violated any laws, present or proposed. I’ve been out of the legislature for four years (actually I was never a legislator but I was inside the doors for four decades as a watchful presence at the press table or in the press gallery), which is beyond most legislator-lobbyist regulation proposals. It’s rare that reporters put on this hat although there have been a few who’ve done some special work for short periods of time.

For most of January some people, most notably the remaining members of the press corps from my days among them, have tried to figure out what I was up to.  But now that the steamboat museum bill has been introduced, that mystery has been cleared up.

I have become one of “them.”

No pay is involved.  This is a matter of passion and a desire to see something great happen to my city, the city where most of the important lobbyists live and have their work.

The public perception of lobbyists is that they are the manipulative shadows behind government, twisting the will of elected officials for their own purposes, sometimes lubricating the process with booze, broads, and secretly-given big bucks.

I think I always have recognized the persuasive power of good lobbyists; the rest of the negative stereotypes I don’t know about.  I have been too busy reporting on the actions of the lobbied and have had no time to look into the ways the lobbying is done.

Long ago, in the old Missourinet blog, I wrote that lobbyists don’t represent some malevolent power so much as they represent you and me.  Just about every organization you and I belong to, any business that we patronize—even our insurance policies, our barbers and hairdressers, whatever,  are represented in the halls of government.  Old person?  AARP has someone.  Concerned about justice for yourself and others?  The ACLU is there.  Want good education in Missouri?  Teachers’ organizations, superintendents’ organizations, higher education institutions all have lobbyists. Roads gone bad; bridges caving in?  Transportation interests have lobbyists.

Against something?  There are lobbyists for that, too.

They represent the competition of ideas. Some are good at it. Some, like me, are just going around doing what seems to be the right thing to do to get one thing accomplished and we’re doing it without sophistication and political muscle.  There is room in the hallway for the little guy.  It’s kind of intimidating to be one.  But on the other hand, I’m having a good time back in that world, albeit on the other side of the chamber doors, meeting and talking to people, chatting with folks I remember before my 2014 retirement.

I’ve worn my coat and tie more in the last month, I think, than I have in the last four years.  And it has taken no time at all to begin to chafe at the idea that once again I am living by someone else’s clock.  It’s also getting in the way of doing the final edit on the new Capitol history book that I want to get to the publishers before the first spring training baseball game.

But getting this steamboat museum funding bill passed is important enough to make me do this.

I have wondered about the ethics of lobbying.  ARE THERE ethics in lobbying?   Well, of course there are.  The National Conference of State Legislatures published an article in its magazine in May, 2013.

It turns out there is an American League of Lobbyists.  And as with every professional organization of which I have been a part, the ALL has its ethics code, published in the magazine.

A lobbyist shall:

  • Conduct lobbying activities with honesty and integrity.
  • Comply fully with all laws, regulations and rules applicable to the lobbyist.
  • Conduct lobbying activities in a fair and professional manner.
  • Avoid all representations that may create conflicts of interest.
  • Vigorously and diligently advance the client’s or employer’s interests.
  • Have a written agreement with the client regarding terms and conditions of services.
  • Maintain appropriate confidentiality of client or employer information.
  • Ensure better public understanding and appreciation of the nature, legitimacy and necessity of lobbying in our democratic governmental process.
  • Fulfill duties and responsibilities to the client or employer.
  • Exhibit proper respect for the governmental institutions before which the lobbyists represent and advocate clients’ interest.

As with many professional ethics codes, enforcement is difficult.  Lobbying, after all, is strongly aligned with the First Amendment. And that is why efforts to restrict legislators from becoming lobbyists is problematic.  Freedom of speech is protected. The right of people to peacefully assemble is protected. Petitioning government for a redress of grievances is protected. The protection of the free exercise of religion applies to lobbyists for the Missouri Baptist Convention, the Missouri Catholic Conference and other faith-based operations.  Maybe this is why legislation limiting legislators from becoming lobbyists carries no penalties.

I’m not sure what the ethics are when a lobbying firm has clients with differing viewpoints on an issue.  I don’t recall (but my brain is not as elastic as it was years ago) ever seeing the same lobbyist testify both for and against a bill because his or her clients differ.  I don’t even know if a lobbyist has an ethical obligation to notify clients with opposing views.  Maybe one of the folks I now share the hallways with will educate me.

Not that it matters to me, really.  I don’t have multiple clients, I have only one interest.   I do know that I sometimes wonder if I am a David among a bunch of Goliaths.

So, anyway, I have become a lobbyist.  Didn’t want to.  But in light of recent court decisions and the climate created by the adoption of the Clean Missouri proposition last November, I decided I needed to register so I could go around and talk to people about the steamboat museum.

I have to file my first monthly expenditure report.  Zero.

But I’m in trouble.   I can’t remember my password that will let me fill out the form that tells the Missouri Ethics Commission I haven’t bought a darned thing, let along bought a legislator.

Bob Priddy, Lobbyist.  Never in my wildest dreams…..

 

A chance to do something extraordinary

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And a chance to BE something extraordinary.

Legislation has been introduced at the capitol that will save a major part of the history of Missouri and the American push west.

If passed, the legislation will establish the funding to build a new home in Jefferson City for the Arabia Steamboat Museum, opening after the museum’s lease runs out on the Kansas City-owned building that has been its home since 1991.

It is essential that this legislation passes if one of America’s unique museums is to stay in Missouri.

A museum in Pennsylvania has offered to buy the Arabia artifacts and move them there.  If somebody doesn’t act, Missouri will give away an irreplaceable resource.  Jefferson City is acting.

The development could change the way Jefferson City sees itself and the way the state and nation see Jefferson City.  Accepting it means accepting an incredible opportunity.  And a major challenge.

We should not underestimate that challenge.  Nor should we underestimate this incredible opportunity.

We know opposition to our plan is likely to be powerful because we are asking the casino industry to finance this program by adding to the “admission fees” paid by the casino industry to the state.

There is more than a steamboat museum in this funding package.  It also would finance construction of a new state museum building.  Every curator of the state museum since it opened in the early 1920s has said the space in the capitol is not adequate for the telling of the story of Missouri, its people, and its resources.

This proposal also would finance the creation of a special Capitol Museum and visitor center in the vacated capitol space that will detail the history of the Capitol and what happens in it and in state government.

This is a huge venture, the biggest thing our city has tackled, perhaps, since the construction of the present capitol.  The message has to be sent to the decision-makers: MISSOURI CANNOT FAIL to keep our history in our state.

You are looking at a display of some of the startling things recovered from the wreckage of the Arabia, which sank north of Kansas City in 1856—so quickly that everybody but a mule got off the boat safely but they left everything behind.

If you have ever been to the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, you recognize that display of items most of us never thought people on the western frontier were using five years before the civil war.  We hope in seeing that picture that you immediately understand why the opportunity to have that collection in a spectacular building on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River a few blocks downstream from the Missouri Capitol is such an amazing opportunity.  If you have seen the greatest single collection of pre-Civil War artifacts anywhere in America, you know why moving that collection here could be a transformative event for Jefferson City.

A small volunteer group of private citizens, city and state officials has been working with leaders of the museum to develop this proposal.  There is an urgency in arranging the financing for the new museum.  We can tell you that, because no movement for a greater museum has been shown in Kansas City, the museum leaders want to move the collection to the state’s capital city if we can find the funding. Owners of an outstanding site have assured us it will be available.

We are asking the legislature to pass a bill adding a dollar to the casino boarding fees they pay the state.  We expect the casino industry to strongly resist. But we are asking our lawmakers to determine what is better for the people of Missouri—spending those millions to create these museums or sending them to the home cities of the five corporations that own the state’s thirteen casinos.

This is an important point:  We can do all of this without tapping the state’s limited general revenue funds.  We can do all of this without a general tax increase.

Our proposal is even more significant because—

It includes the financing for another steamboat excavation, later this year, of a boat that sank fifteen years before the Arabia went under in 1856.   It is the Malta, which was headed toward a much earlier frontier with much different cargo when it sank near the present community of Malta Bend in 1841.

Why are these boats so special?  And why is a potential national steamboat museum for Jefferson City so special? Because nowhere else in this entire country will we be able to understand the humanity of the people who left so much behind, who risked so much of their lives, to go west.  Our state is the “Mother of the West,” and our Missouri River is the liquid highway that carried explorers, developers, statesmen and scalawags to the frontier.  We cannot come closer to them than we can when we see, with this cargo, how they really lived. 

From 1856 until 1988, when the Hawley family of Independence and some friends dug fifty feet down in a Kansas farm field (the river channel had changed a lot in the interim), the Arabia and its cargo had been sealed off from the deteriorating effects of light and air.  The same is true of the Malta, which rests 35-50 feet down in a farm field near the Saline County Community of Malta Bend.

The diggers of 1988 recovered two-hundred tons of merchandise that has been properly cared for so that visitors to the museum are looking at clothing, tools, food, household items, and other things that are as new today as they were when they were loaded on the Arabia in St. Louis a few days before the boat sailed past Jefferson City to its ultimate fate north of early Kansas City. That includes jars of canned fruit and alcoholic beverages bound for the two-year old community of Omaha City, population 1,500. The diggers opened a bottle of Champagne and found it still bubbly and tasty.  Digger Jerry Mackey tasted an 1856 sweet pickle and various canned fruits and pronounced them as good as they were when the lid was screwed on the bottle or jar in 1856.

The rushing waters of the Missouri River damaged the boat so extensively that only the boilers, the steam engines, paddle wheel mechanism, and part of the stern could be recovered from the boat itself. The cargo was mostly in the cargo hold. But several artifacts were still on deck.

The  Malta passed our town in 1841, a few days after Missourians of 178 years ago finished loading it with about 100 tons of cargo, some of which was to be offloaded at Westport Landing (now Kansas City) and sent by wagon to outposts on the Santa Fe Trail. The rest was bound for Indian trading posts and military forts upstream on the Missouri.

David Hawley, the Arabia museum president located the Malta a few years ago. It wasn’t easy. He talked to a school group.

And he thinks test borings that have confirmed the location of the Malta indicate it might be structurally complete.  If that is the case, he plans to lift the entire boat from that farm field near Malta Bend and preserve an entire 1841 Missouri River steamboat.

If it is raised it will be the centerpiece of the steamboat museum proposed for Jefferson City.

Can you understand the incredible opportunity that is ours for the taking if we are able to convince the legislature to pass this bill?  Can you understand what the construction of a Missouri Steamboat Museum—especially one that could develop into a NATIONAL steamboat museum could mean to Jefferson City and to our state?

David Hawley a few weeks ago created a speculative drawing of what the museum could look like. What finally materializes is likely to be much different but we have to start somewhere.  The brown object in the middle of the drawing is the Malta, which is 142 feet long.

David is a dreamer.  Ultimately he wants a national museum that would house cargo and six other boats that capture the great riverboat history of the Missouri River.  That history spanned 1820-1880.  By 1880, railroads had reached the frontier towns that had relied on steamboats until then.

The year 2026 will mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Jefferson City being the capital city of Missouri, the year that state government moved here from its temporary home in St. Charles.  It is also the year that the Arabia museum in Kansas City will close.  The lease runs out then. The city has offered no new location for the museum that already has outgrown its current quarters and will far outgrow them with the addition of the Malta. 

We—Jefferson City or some other city in Missouri, and the state of Missouri—cannot allow this incredible part of our history, the frontier’s history, America’s history to leave Missouri. We just can’t.

The calendar marks the time Missouri has to secure the contents of that museum and build a museum that will hold them—and more. The proposed legislation designates Jefferson City as the location.

2019-2026. It’s not much time.

Jefferson City is a city with a steamboat on its city seal.  It is a town with one of the oldest, if not the oldest, remaining Missouri River riverboat landing building still in use. It is a town that was sustained by steamboats until the railroad began regular operations thirty-seven years after the first steamboats passed this site.

Our area lawmakers who are sponsoring the bills—Rep. Dave Griffith and Senator Mike Bernskoetter and others from mid-Missouri—will be working to get the legislation passed.  But we, as a community, must help them.  Many people in Jefferson City rent rooms, apartments, or homes to our lawmakers.  Many more are their staff members at the capitol. Many of our citizens wait on them in our dining and drinking establishments or check them in and out of their motel rooms.  It is up to all of us to impress on our legislators how important this museum will be to our city and to us as a people.

We have only one registered lobbyist at the capitol. But we can have tens of thousands of lobbyists in the homes and businesses of Jefferson City who need to encourage lawmakers from throughout the state to “Vote for the Boats.”

We can do this. We can save this important heritage for our city, for our state, and for history. And for generations we will not know.

We must do this.

(photo credits: All pictures by Bob Priddy except the Malta, the YEP Malta Mural 2011 by Waymark)