By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
A child care tax incentive package that failed in the last days of the last legislative session will return in the next Missouri legislative session.
State Rep. Brenda Shields, a Republican from St. Joseph, has pre-filed her bill from last session that provides a series of tax credits both to offset the cost of child care and to encourage investment in child care.
“There’s no way the state can take this on themselves. I don’t think there’s any way that parents can take this on themselves,” Shields tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “Right now, infant care costs more than sending your child to college. So, we have to help bring that cost of care down. And I truly believe that if we can solve the child care crisis in Missouri it will be the number one economic driver that we have for the state.”
Shields gets support from Gov. Mike Parson who says the package simply ran out of time last session. Parson believes the bill can pass this year.
“But it’s also a political year,” Parson tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “We know generally during that time a lot of things don’t really happen.”
Parson says a lack of child care is one of the most important issues in the state.
“It doesn’t matter where you’re at, people are struggling one to get day care, two to afford day care and then just making sure they can stay in the workforce,” according to Parson. “If somebody’s not taking care of that kid, mom or dad is staying home, which means they’re not going to work or grandparents have got to be available and that’s hard to do, too, because a lot of them are still working. It’s a big issue out there and we need to try to get something done about it.”
Shields’ legislation contains three tax credits and incentives. It proposes giving individuals and businesses a tax credit for investing in child care facilities. Businesses would receive a tax break for helping employees offset the cost of child care. A child care provider would receive a tax credit and be allowed to retain eligible payroll tax withholdings to invest in their business.
Shields says she changed the language in her bill only slightly after receiving feedback in the previous legislative session.
Part of the reason the legislation got caught up in the end-of-the-session drama, according to Shields, is because she got a late start.
“We didn’t want to introduce it until after the governor’s State of the State address, which put us three to four weeks into the session,” Shields says. “It had to get through the process of the House and we did get it over to the Senate side. By the time we got it over to the Senate side, it was really towards the last week, week-and-a-half of session.”
Once the bill got to the Senate, it ran into a filibuster on unrelated topics. Two state senators, upset that their legislation wasn’t moving, held the floor and killed a lot of legislation, including the child care tax package.