Pair of candidates square off for District 133 seat

 The candidates for District 133 of the Missouri House of Representatives are incumbent Melanie Stinnett, a Republican, and Democratic challenger Derrick Nowlin.

Stinnett is seeking her second term. According to past Springfield Business Journal reporting, she founded an independent pediatric speech therapy clinic, TheraCare Outpatient Services LLC, which was later purchased by The Arc of the Ozarks. She also founded the nonprofit Include Ozarks, which serves families with special needs.

Nowlin works in land surveying and engineering, contributing to key infrastructure projects like the U.S. Route 65 and James River Freeway interchange, according to his candidacy website. His LinkedIn page notes he is employed by Springfield Sign and Neon.

What follows are excerpts from their five-question candidate interview, conducted by the Informed Voter Coalition, of which Springfield Business Journal is a member. The complete video of the interviews is on SBJ.net/election2024.

Proposition A, which will be on the November ballot, establishes a $13.75-per-hour minimum wage by 2025, which would be increased by $1.25 per hour each year until 2026, at which point, the minimum wage will then be $15 per hour. It also requires employers to provide one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. Do you support Proposition A? Why or why not?

Stinnett: I think this is a complex issue this year because we have such significant inflation, and people don’t feel like their wages have caught up necessarily with inflation, but as a small-business owner, I have concerns with, you know, kind of laying out government regulations for where those things have to be. I think it’s a challenge when we increase those wages, especially in our service-based industries, like health care, that results in likely higher costs for communities. So it would be a concern to me to look at that.

Nowlin: I do support Proposition A. Anything that is helping working people, I am all for it – always have been. You know, people in this state generally are not being paid enough. When people work, they need to get paid a living wage. This is a step towards that, and I think the basic leave is also an important part of that because I’ve known too many people personally, and I’m sure a lot of us have, that if something happens with them, or one of their family members where they do require medical care, they don’t have the ability to take off work – and having access to health care is a completely different issue altogether. But again, it comes back to for too long, in this state, the policies and the priorities have not been looking out for the normal person out there, the person that works for a living. And frankly, the middle class in this country’s not gotten a raise in 40 years as far as that goes. It is time that we start paying people more and that we do start taking better care of the people that work for a living. There’s been too many policies that are heavy towards the very wealthy and the well-connected in this state, and instead of talking about things like let’s get rid of the corporate tax cut, we need to start talking about things like let’s pay people more – let’s pay people more. I strongly believe that when we pay working people more that a rising tide lifts all boats. Working families, working people, they’re the backbone of my district. They’re the backbone of this state. And it’s time that we start treating them and paying them the way they deserve to be paid.

What are your budget priorities for the upcoming year, and what would you like to see funded specifically for your district?

Stinnett: So a lot of the funding things that I have focused on have been related to individuals with disabilities, as I’ve already mentioned, but also maternal health. And so I, in my first year, helped to ensure we had some funding for doula services and a pilot project here in Springfield that then now has turned into the state determining that our Medicaid program should cover doula services and ensuring that women have access to that. We know that those services can help to decrease C-section births and increase pregnancy outcomes. So those are the types of things that I’ll continue to work on – kind of finding those spaces in our community and in our state where we are lagging on making a substantial difference and putting money in those spaces to make a difference for those individuals.

Nowlin: First of all, we need to increase funding for public education, and that would definitely affect my district. We have a lot of wonderful public schools in my district, and I’m a strong proponent of public schools. Right now, Missouri is currently 50th in the country as far as the share that Jefferson City, our state government, spends on public schools. Do I realistically think we can go from 50th to first? No, but anything’s better than 50th, and you know that impacts our schools, our teachers, the staff, the resources they have. When we invest in public education, we are, first of all, we’re setting up our kids for a lifetime of success. And we’re also investing in the future of our state, and to me this seems a no-brainer, and so we need to increase public education funding, including a teacher pay. Again, we need to increase funding to the agencies that run some of the health and family services in the state. You know, we just had a hearing last week where there is a bunch of money being left on the table with our education system here in Missouri. Same thing: it’s all priorities and policies that are coming out of Jefferson City, and we really need to fit those. And one last thing, there’s a lot of infrastructure money that we have, thanks to the federal government, being spent in Missouri. I want to make sure that first of all southwest Missouri gets our fair share of that money, then it’s spent wisely. But more importantly, the 133rd. Because we actually do have a lot of ongoing infrastructure projects that need to be completed and also some future projects that need to be planned for and started.