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Senate Appropriations uncovers new info on stadium funding

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – The Senate Appropriations Committee met Monday afternoon to further examine tax credits issued by various agencies, departments and commissions in the executive branch, and in the process, uncovered conflicting info on the stadium funding issue.

Executive director Bob Miserez testified on behalf of the Missouri Development Finance Board, which granted $15 million in state tax credits last August to the unofficially abandoned St. Louis stadium project. Miserez said that the credit specifically used to grant that money to the project was the Infrastructure Development Tax Credit, which usually has a cap of $10 million per calendar year. It requires three different members of the governor’s cabinet to sign off on any amount which exceeds that $10 million.

One of the three to approve the stadium proposal was Doug Nelson, the commissioner of the Office of Administration, Miserez said.

Nelson has previously, in hearings with the House and the Senate, denied any involvement in the process for allocating funds or being part of the decision-making process to allocate funding for the St. Louis stadium and expressed his objectivity to the any part of the proposal. Sen. Rob Schaaf, R-St. Joseph, and Committee Chair Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, both expressed some surprise at the development that Nelson apparently had played a role in the stadium project.

Schaaf held a special hearing last August that amounted to a near two-hour long interrogation of Nelson in an attempt to get some insight into Nixon’s plans, which mainly looked into the legality of Nixon’s ability to unilaterally extend bonds for the Edwards Jones Dome on a new stadium.

The committee also heard from the Department of Agriculture; the Department of Health and Senior Services; the Department of Insurance, Financial Institutions & Professional Registration; the Department of Natural Resources; the Department of Revenue; the Department of Social Services; and the Department of Economic Development about the tax credits that those departments offered.

Schaaf noted that the tax credits offered by all of those departments combined for just over $1 billion in state funding, which Schaefer said could cut into general revenue.