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Amendment 3 gets support of industry’s biggest voice in Missouri

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Business leaders threw their weight behind Amendment 3 at a press conference in Jefferson City Tuesday.

Ray McCarty, president and CEO of the Associated Industries of Missouri, and Dave Overfelt, the president of the Missouri Retailers Association, met with Yes on 3 for Kids spokesman Jack Cardetti and members of the media to discuss why advocates of businesses in Missouri should vote for what has become one of the most divisive amendments on the ballot this election cycle.

Ray McCarty, AIM President
Ray McCarty, AIM President

McCarty said that many businesses in the state suffer from a lack of an educated workforce and that starting education at an earlier age can translate to a greater ease of learning down the line. He said that many employers require additional training for certain jobs, like technical training, and that getting young kids more experienced with education translates as they grow up.

“Right now, my employers are having difficulty finding employees that are educated with the skills we need to be able to fill the jobs, particularly in manufacturing, that we have,” McCarty said. “Oftentimes that requires additional education beyond high school… What we found is Missouri is not educating our younger people before they have a chance to go to school.”

He points to numbers from a 2015 study by the National Institute for Early Education that show only 4 percent of Missouri children ages four-year-olds attend state-funded pre-school. Most of Missouri’s surrounding states have no less than 20 percent of their four-year-olds. Oklahoma sits at 75 percent.

That lack of investment in children, McCarty says, can affect the workforce and thus productivity.

“When it starts hitting our bottom line, we have problem,” he said.

Cardetti added that, in addition to those benefits, childhood education is usually accompanied by reading and math score increases in later years, but that it also had other societal benefits. Crime and incarceration rates and school drop-out rates decrease, and it reduces dependence on other social programs.

He said that because the General Assembly has not acted on increasing funds for early childhood education, citizens should take it into their own hands.

“We’ve seen for the past few years now that the Missouri legislature has not gotten serious about early childhood education and that’s why we need to get this done through initiative petition.”

Overfelt, on the other hand, said that his organization primarily favored the amendment because it would close a loophole in the Master Settlement Agreement that creates a marketplace that favors smaller tobacco companies.

“Not-so-little tobacco has been fighting it for years,” Overfelt said. “Retailers that want to work in the normal system, a fair an equal playing field, are at a bit of a disadvantage with what goes on in this state, the only state that gives advantage to the so-called non-participating manufacturers.

“We think that is a key part of this, to make everybody on the same playing field.”