Families from last May's tornado still don't have roofs. Still don't have answers. Still don't have a timeline. That is not a natural disaster. That is a governance failure, and I intend to name it exactly that way on the floor of the Missouri House.

They took over your police department. They are coming for your schools next.

Governor Kehoe signed HB 495 on March 26, 2025, handing control of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department back to the state, overturning a voter mandate that passed in 2012. That transition is still playing out right now, during this campaign. The voters of this city said no. The state did it anyway.

The same pattern that was used on the police department is being applied to St. Louis Public Schools. I know that pattern. I am going to name it every time it shows up and I am going to fight it with everything I have, because what happens to this city's institutions gets decided in Jefferson City, and District 79 deserves a voice in that room that does not flinch.

They want to eliminate the income tax. Your rent will pay for it.

The Kehoe administration is pushing to eliminate Missouri's individual income tax. That tax generates $8.7 billion a year, which is roughly 65% of everything the state runs on. To replace it, they would have to raise the state sales tax from 3% to 11.5%. Combined with existing local taxes, families in this district would be looking at a combined sales tax rate approaching 17 to 19% on everything they buy.

Here is the trade they are offering you: they give you back maybe $125 a month in income tax savings. They take $333 to $500 a month from you in higher costs on every grocery run, every utility payment, every purchase you make all year long. Families in this district who spend nearly everything they earn pay sales tax on all of it. Families earning $350,000 who save and invest large portions of their income never pay sales tax on that money. The income tax elimination is a wealth transfer dressed up as tax relief.

And it does not stop at the checkout line. Higher construction costs get passed to landlords. Landlords pass them to renters. In a district where most residents rent, that is a second hit that no income tax savings check comes close to covering. Missouri is already staring at a $2 billion general revenue shortfall for FY2027 before this proposal even lands. The schools, the health services, and the community infrastructure this district depends on sit at the bottom of that cliff.

I will not vote for a tax scheme that makes working families pay for wealthy people's relief. That is not a nuanced position. That is a line.

They are building more jails for our children.

Missouri Senate Bill 888 was signed into law in 2026. In plain English, here is what it does.

It gives prosecutors the power to send teenagers to adult court without a judge as the primary gatekeeper. It creates a new criminal database that follows children into adulthood even when their records were previously sealed. It removes early release options and adds mandatory minimums to the most serious offenses. It gives counties the power to impose a sales tax of up to 1% to build new juvenile detention facilities. Your money at the cash register, funding more jails for kids.

The fiscal analysis puts the implementation cost at $870 million by 2029.

Here is what the racial data shows. Black youth in Missouri are already tried as adults at nearly double their share of the youth population. Nationally, Black youth are 5.6 times more likely to be placed in a juvenile facility than white youth, and that disparity is at an all-time high as of 2023. SB 888 expanded every tool that produces those numbers without adding a single new accountability mechanism to address any of it.

I sat in a juvenile courtroom at eleven years old. I know what that room costs a child. I know what it costs a family. I know what it costs a community when those children are processed by a system designed to move them through rather than fight for them. I will go to Jefferson City and fight this law because the children in this district are not raw material for a corrections pipeline. They are our future.

The families who built this district are being pushed out of it.

Displacement is a policy choice. It does not happen by accident. It happens when blight designations get applied to neighborhoods without community consent. It happens when speculative developers acquire land, let it deteriorate, and wait out the families who have been there for generations. It happens when tenant protections are weak and evictions are fast and affordable housing gets replaced with development that was never meant for the people already there.

I will fight for just-cause eviction standards, community land trusts that take land off the speculative market permanently, and a reformed blight designation process that requires active community consent before any private developer can use that designation to take what this district built. The families who survived last May's tornado and still do not have roofs or answers or a timeline deserve that fight too. That is not a natural disaster we are still waiting on. That is a governance failure, and I intend to name it exactly that way on the floor of the Missouri House.

They want to re-refer Amendment 3 and undo a vote you already cast.

Missouri voters made a decision. The legislature does not get to keep asking until it gets a different answer. I will oppose every procedural and substantive effort to revisit what the voters of this state have already resolved. A voter mandate is not an advisory opinion. It is a decision.