A group of renegade GOP state lawmakers whose quarrels with party leaders defined years of Missouri legislative inaction appears to be ripping apart over a plan to fund stadiums for the Chiefs and Royals.
On Friday, state Sen. Rick Brattin stepped down as chairman of the Missouri Freedom Caucus just days after voting in favor of $1.5 billion in tax incentives to finance new or renovated stadiums. He noted the stadium vote in the statement announcing his resignation.
The group had vowed to oppose the funding scheme, which it decried as a “handout to billionaire sports team owners.” But Brattin, a Harrisonville Republican, and state Sen. Brad Hudson, a Cape Fair Republican who is also a Freedom Caucus member, voted in support of the plan after a provision was added making changes to local property tax bills.
On Monday morning, state Sen. Nick Schroer, a Republican from Defiance, was announced as the new chairman.
The response from conservative activists after Brattin’s resignation was swift.
Some accused Brattin of betrayal, while others argued he was duped by the inclusion of language allowing the stadium funding to survive even if a court tosses out the property tax provisions.
“For several years, discussion in (Jefferson City) revolved around conservatives exposing moderate and liberal Republicans by getting them on bad votes that showed who they were,” Bill Eigel, a former Missouri Senate Freedom Caucus leader who is running for St. Charles County executive, posted on social media. “Gov. Mike Kehoe changed this dynamic. He is getting conservatives to vote as badly as the moderates.”
Jim Lembke, a former GOP state senator and adviser to the Freedom Caucus, said the group is “void of any leadership and has lost all credibility. They should disband and join the uniparty that runs Jefferson City.”
Tim Jones, state director for the Missouri Freedom Caucus, said during a radio appearance on Friday that he advised senators to vote against the stadium bill and was surprised when two members of the caucus ended up supporting it.
“In the light of day, there’s some buyer’s remorse. There’s some regret,” Jones said, though he later added: “To his defense, (Sen. Brattin) thought he was doing the right thing to protect the interest of his constituents.”
Brattin defended his vote on social media, posting a video saying that while the deal wasn’t perfect, he was determined that “if we’re going to be giving handouts to millionaires and billionaires, we need broad-based tax relief for people.”
“To me,” he said, “this was a massive win. On the stadium, they were going to get the votes, whatever it took. So I tried to weigh this out and make lemonade from the lemons we were given.”
Brattin’s chief of staff was less diplomatic, accusing Eigel of treating politics like a game.
“He’d rather chase likes on social media than deliver real wins,” Tom Estes, Brattin’s top legislative staffer, wrote in a now-deleted social media post. “It’s pathetic, and just one more reason he’s never been an effective leader.”
The war between the Freedom Caucus and Missouri Senate leadership raged for years, creating so much gridlock that fewer bills passed last year than any session in living memory — despite Republicans holding a legislative super majority.
Tensions cooled this year, with term limits pushing key figures on both sides of the fight out of the Senate. The detente led to a much more productive session, marked more by partisan squabbling than GOP infighting.
But the Freedom Caucus’ history of using procedural hijinks to upend legislative business made its opposition to the stadium bill an existential threat to its success, forcing Republican leaders to take demands for some form of tax cut seriously.
In the statement announcing Schroer’s new leadership role, did not mention the rifts within the group. He vowed to push an alternative agenda.
“We will not bend,” Schroer said. “We will not back down. The Missouri Freedom Caucus is here to fight — and we are just getting started.”
If approved by the House and signed by Kehoe, the legislation passed by the Senate would allocate state taxes collected from economic activity at Arrowhead and Kauffman to bond payments for renovations at Arrowhead and a new stadium for the Royals in Jackson or Clay counties.
The cost is estimated at close to $1.5 billion over 30 years.
Both teams have expressed interest in leaving Missouri when the lease on their current stadiums expire in 2030, and Kansas lawmakers have put a deal on the table that would use state incentives to pay for up to 70% of the costs of new stadiums.
The Kansas deal expires on June 30.
In order to win over Democrats, who were skeptical of the plan and still upset with how the regular legislative session ended last month, Kehoe agreed to increase the size of a disaster relief package for St. Louis from $25 million to $100 million.
To quell any possible Freedom Caucus uprising, Kehoe allowed the inclusion of a provision in the stadium funding bill requiring most counties to put a hard cap on increases in property tax bills.
In 75 counties, tax bills would not increase more than 5% per year from a base amount, or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. In 22 others, including Brattin’s home county of Cass and Hudson’s entire seven-county district of southwest Missouri, no increase in the basic bill would be allowed.
The bill includes exceptions for newly voted levies and the additional value from improvements.
Many of the larger counties of the state, including Boone, Greene, Jackson, St. Louis County and the city of St. Louis, were excluded from the cap provisions. Franklin, Jefferson and St. Charles counties were put under the zero percent cap.
With the concessions, Kehoe stitched together a bipartisan coalition to get the stadium bill out of the Senate. There were 12 Republicans and seven Democrats voting to send it to the House on the 19-13 vote. Three of the chamber’s 10 Democrats joined 10 Republicans in opposition.
Eigel, who fell short to Kehoe in last year’s GOP primary for governor, poured cold water on the deal, arguing residents will never see any tax relief.
He points to language added to the bill after it cleared committee stating it is the “intent of the General Assembly” that if any piece of the legislation is eventually ruled invalid, “that provision shall be severed from the act and all remaining provisions shall be valid.”
“Kehoe’s guys snuck in a clause that will allow the property tax provisions of the bill to be stripped out by courts while the billionaire stadium bailout remains whole,” Eigel said. “When conservatives missed it in the final reading after being assured by the sponsor it wasn’t in there, the disaster was complete.”
A spokeswoman for the governor’s office didn’t respond to a question about the severability clause.
Brattin keeps hearing from people who say he “sold out,” he said, but he still believes the bill that passed the Senate was a win for Missourians.
“I just wanted to give some clarity to this,” Brattin said in his social media video. “Whether you agree or disagree, this is where my heart is on this.”
This story was originally published by the Missouri Independent.
