Weekly Newsletter from the Capitol House panel votes to re-impose state control of STL police The House Crime Prevention and Public Safety Committee voted 20-4 on Feb. 23 to advance a bill putting the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department back under state control. The measure, House Bill 702, is part of an ongoing effort by Republican lawmakers to exert more control over St. Louis and its Democratic-dominated municipal government. It passed on a straight party-line vote. A state-run Board of Police Commissioners had governed the St. Louis department for more than 150 years, but the state’s authority ended when 63.9 percent of Missouri voters approved a statewide ballot measure in 2012 restoring local control. Proposition A, as it was known, passed in every Missouri county but one. The original state takeover of the St. Louis police department resulted from Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson’s efforts to take Missouri out of the Union and join its fellow slave states in the Confederacy after the outbreak of the Civil War. At Jackson’s behest, the legislature enacted legislation in late March 1861 stripping the pro-Union St. Louis city government of authority over its police force and giving it to a state-run police board to prevent officers from being used against Confederate sympathizers. Jackson quickly appointed secessionists to the new board and, on April 12, 1861, board President J.A. Brownlee issued a series of orders restricting the activities of St. Louis’ Black population, both slave and free. Those orders included a ban on all “assemblages of negroes,” the suppression of saloons or public houses “kept or owned by negroes,” a requirement that no church attended or officiated by “negroes or mulattoes” could open without permission of the police chief and a notice that all “free negroes” without a license to remain must leave the city within five days or “be dealt with according to the law.” Although Missouri’s pro-Confederate state government – including members of the St. Louis police board – were soon driven from office and the Civil War subsequently ended, state control of the city’s police department remained until voters intervened in 2012. With nearly half of its population consisting of Black residents and a Black mayor currently in office, proponents of St. Louis maintaining control of its police have noted some similarities between the current effort to restore state control and Gov. Jackson’s suppression of the city’s Black population following the original state takeover. The full House of Representatives is expected to debate the state control bill in the coming weeks. Senate endorses expanding post-partum Medicaid coverage The Senate on Feb. 21 granted first-round approval to legislation providing one-year of post-partum care for women and infants under Medicaid. However, the bill passed only after conservative lawmakers added language prohibiting women who receive abortions from receiving coverage and also delaying the expanded benefits from taking effect until the number of existing Medicaid recipients is reduced. At present, Medicaid provides just two months of post-partum care, which health care advocates have long contended is woefully insufficient to serve the needs of low-income mothers and babies. The bipartisan push to expand post-partum care under Medicaid received a boost following the U.S. Supreme Court’s elimination of the constitutional right to an abortion last summer. With abortion now outlawed in Missouri in nearly all circumstances, the demand for post-partum care is expected to significantly increase. Although conservative senators who traditionally have opposed expanding Medicaid for any reason are now more amenable to extending post-partum care, they demanded restrictions be added in order for the bill to advance. However, critics contend those restrictions likely don’t comply with federal Medicaid requirements. A second vote is required to advance the measure, Senate Bill 45, to the House of Representatives. Bill seeks to allow utilities to pass on nuclear plant costs The House Utilities Committee on Feb. 22 heard legislation that would allow investor-owned electric companies to charge existing customers for the planning and construction of future nuclear power plants. The bill would circumvent an existing voter-approved law prohibiting companies from passing on costs until after a new facility is online and generating power. For more than a decade, Ameren Missouri has been seeking to repeal or amend the state’s “construction work in progress” law as a precursor to possibly building another nuclear power plant in the state. Ameren operates Missouri’s only existing nuclear facility, in Callaway County. Voters enacted the CWIP law in 1976 with 63.1 percent support as construction on the Callaway plant was underway. House Bill 225 would carve out an exemption to the CWIP law for proposed new nuclear plants. Supporters say charging customers upfront for a project’s cost is the only way to make it financially feasible. Opponents said shareholders – not consumers – should bear the costs and associated risks of building a new nuclear facility, especially since the legislation would not require a plant to actually be built for a company to recoup its planning expenses from customers. The committee took no immediate action on the bill. Senate grants final passage to $627.15 million spending bill The Senate voted 29-4 on Feb. 22 to grant final passage to a $627.15 million supplemental appropriations bill for the final months of the 2023 fiscal year, which ends June 30. The bill now goes to the governor, who is expected to quickly sign it into law so an 8.7 percent pay hike for state workers included in the measure can take effect March 1. For many years, Missouri has ranked dead last in the nation in average state government employee pay. Although the largest percentage bump in state worker salaries in at least several decades, the pay raise authorized in House Bill 14 just barely keeps up with inflation and doesn’t charge Missouri’s worst-in-the-nation status. Other spending authority in the bill includes $275 million for disaster aid grants, $148.71 million for matching grants to federally qualified health centers, $20 million to bolster security at local schools and $3 million for the Wood Energy Tax Credit Program, among other items.