2025 Government Outlook: Alex Riley

Only 28 nonbudget bills were approved in the last legislative session. Will we see more action this year?
One thing that is always important to keep in mind when talking about the overall slowness of the legislature is that Missouri is just an incredibly diverse state – geographically, also culturally, and in many other ways, too. Most bills that pass are because a handful of Republican factions and a handful of Democratic factions join together in a bipartisan way. The past couple of years, division has been even stronger because of challenging personalities we’ve had, particularly on the Senate side – though there’s plenty of blame to go around. A lot of those folks are gone. There’s a group of people coming in energized and wanting to enact policy that’s good for the state. That’s going to give us some momentum going into this session that we haven’t had. Legislating is always challenging, and it’s supposed to be slow; that’s what the founders of our country envisioned. At the same time, we do want to be functional and address the challenges that we face across the state.

What are the legislative priorities for 2025?
No. 1 is going to be on the crime-prevention side. Living in Springfield, the crime rates are not where we want them. That’s true in St. Louis, Kansas City, even rural areas. It’s going to be a major priority for the legislature and the governor going forward. There’s also going to be a lot of discussion over the next couple years on continuing to reduce the state’s income tax, hopefully phasing it out over time in a responsible way. Incoming Gov. [Mike] Kehoe talked about this a lot on the trail. If you look around and see the states that are crushing it economically, one of the common denominators is they don’t have state income tax – whether that’s a red state like Texas or a blue state like Washington. We want to set Missouri up as one of the leaders in the country.

The legislature has tried for years to address the lack of child care in the state. Will those efforts be renewed in 2025?
We’re trying to work with our child care providers to identify government red tape that is preventing additional child care opportunities. The budget is probably not going to be quite as flush with cash going forward, so I’m going to be a little more nervous to be passing big new government spending programs for much of anything. A big spending program on the child care side would fall into that. We’re going to have to give it a really close look to see if we’re going to be able to budget for that.

What are you hearing from your business constituents in terms of what they need to grow in Missouri?
One thing we hear quite a bit about is the need for court reforms – making reforms to the court systems to make them fairer when businesses are in court. Missouri is rated as one of the worst states for business when it comes to our court system. We want to make sure folks who are wronged have their day in court – but also that it’s a fair system.