Two vie for gubernatorial candidate’s former House seat

Two candidates for Missouri House District 132 – Democrat Jeremy Dean and Republican Stephanos Freeman – will face off in next month’s general election.

The candidates are running for the seat being vacated by Rep. Crystal Quade, who is term-limited and cannot run for her seat again and instead is the Democratic candidate for governor.

Excerpts from the interview were conducted by the nonpartisan Informed Voter Coalition, of which Springfield Business Journal is a member. A video with all five of the questions candidates were asked is available at SBJ.net/election2024.

Dean has worked in the health care field, most recently as an office coordinator in an OB-GYN clinic. For the past year he’s worked in operations at the Drew Lewis Foundation Inc., according to his LinkedIn profile. Dean’s first bid for public office was in an unsuccessful campaign for Springfield City Council in 2023.

Freeman has worked for Cargill, Burrell Behavioral Health, Amcon Distributing Co. and Springfield Public Schools, according to VoteSmart.com. He ran for the District 132 seat unsuccessfully once before, in 2022.

In this excerpt, candidate responses are compiled side-by-side for ease of comparison, but the interviews were conducted separately.

Amendment 2 will appear on the November ballot, and if passed it will legalize and regulate sports wagering in Missouri. Do you support this amendment? Why or why not?

Dean: I would need to read the amendment a little bit more to give a full answer on this. What I will say specifically is that I do support the legalization of sports betting in the state of Missouri. However, I do also believe that municipalities, local government, should have the right to regulate them at their discretion for whatever is important to the people that live there. I’m also a pretty staunch advocate for local control, believing that people who are closest to the people there should have the right to make those decisions. And so as I learn more about that specific amendment and get through the reading of all that, I can definitely make a more informed decision. But depending on that criteria specifically is what’s going to lead my vote in that one.

Freeman: Sports betting? I think it’s marketed in the wrong way. I don’t know if it really needs to be in the constitution, but quite frankly that’s not an issue I particularly care about, and I don’t think most of my constituents do, either.

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

Dean: Housing. It’s one of my No. 1 priorities. We see a massive decline in the housing that we have in Springfield. We have a massive shortage – about 9,000 units was the last figure that we were given – and right now we don’t see a lot of infrastructure and stuff like that happening within the 132nd. We need things all the way from no-barrier shelters to help get a holistic approach at our unsheltered crisis that we have going on here all the way to middle-income housing, low-income housing to high-income housing so we can continue to attract college students and keep them here after they graduate. So the main thing that I want to see is to get a grasp on the housing crisis that we’ve got going on here, and that’s what I’m going to fight for.

Freeman: One thing in particular: Now, OTC has its skills program that young people can go through SPS and Missouri State has one through agriculture, the Darr organization over there, and one’s for agriculture; the other one’s for tech skills. The thing is, though, in order for kids to get involved in these programs, which would give them more skills or at least get them to find out what their aptitudes are, they have to win their respective lotteries, and to me that’s ridiculous. That’s the kind of thing I think, be it Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, whatever, I think anyone would think that’s reasonable that those are the type of things that kids need, and that’s actually one of my No. 1 priorities right there is making sure the kids can actually learn something that’s useful to themselves and useful to society as a whole, and that is something that’s practical and something that’s applicable to their everyday lives.