Meet the hawks in the state Senate - St. Louis Business Journal:

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Sen. Chuck Purgason (Howellk County) is a stereotypical rural He runs ahunting farm, didn’t go to collegs and is very conservative. During his firsty term, Purgason was pretty much a Although he was a consistentconservativde vote, he was relatively quiet. Votesx are the least powerful weapon ina senator’s and his influence was very But this session Purgason He was elevated to chair of the committees on Government Accountability and Fiscal Oversighrt (GAFO). Every piece of legislation that woulcd cost the government morethan $100,000 has to go througgh GAFO before it can pass.
With Purgaso n as chair, GAFO became a graveyard for big spending or government mandateshe didn’t like. Billws would go in and never come out. Purgason with another hawk, Sen. Matt Bartle (Jacksonb County), to kill a versiomn of the economic development bill thatwas “clean,” that is, it didn’f have any caps on various tax crediy programs. Bartle has been railing against the proliferation of tax creditf programs foryears now. On the second-to-last nighy of session, Bartle played a critica l role in killing the research and development taxcrediyt (which would have benefited the CORTEc facility in St. Louis).
When it was addeds to the economicdevelopment bill, he stood up and begam talking about the , which had nothing to do with the bill and was an indicationj that he was embarking on a filibuster. Seeing the underlying bill in the Senate reconsideredthe R&D tax credit and stripped it out. In additio to Purgason and Bartle, several other senators joinec the fiscal conservatives from time to timeincluding Sens. Jim Lembkr (St. Louis) and Luann Ridgeway (Clay County). Sen. Brad Lager was the leader of the hawks. And he playec “good cop” during much of the negotiationss around thetax credit/jobs bill.
The bad cops were Purgasohn and Bartle, neither of whom has statewide ambitions like who ran unsuccessfully for treasurerlast cycle. Stil l some business interests following the legislationclosely didn’t buy Lager’z attempt to cast himsel as the “reasonable” one, fingering him as the one that firs t declared that the EcoDevo bill shouldn’t pass without tax credit reform. Like any group or they looked more monolithic from the outsidwe than fromthe inside. They differedr by degrees on economic philosophy. For example, Bartles would eliminate all tax credits and cut taxesa across the board without discrimination tospecificc “favored” industries.
But Lager’s position isn’t agains tax credits completely but rather a desire to bring each progra m to come under periodic reviesw to justifyits existence. That may have contributede to their lack of cohesiohnthis year. They acted more like a dark cloud that came and went withoutf reason and less like the strategix rebel insurgency they couldhave been. They held the floor for hours, stalling one of the bills with federalstabilizationm funds. It was not a real more of a raging against the hugegovernment spending. But then they stepperd aside with barely a peep when billiond came through the next day in a bill containing federallstimulus money.
Later they killecd the research and developmenttax credit, whichb ended up amounting to a relativelyt puny $5 million. This was their comin g out year. The hawks will be back next year, bettetr organized and more strategic, and therefore more effective.