All right.

Good afternoon and welcome to the business session of May 26, 2022.

First order of business is to approve approval of business session minutes from May 12th.

So moved.

Second.

Seconded that we approve the minutes from the business session of May 12th, 2022.

All in favor.

Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Not opposed.

A second order of business is the state legislative wrap-up update from our uh lobbyist, and they will come up.

All right.

Use this room.

We will just share it.

Perfect.

And we decided that I would share this meeting for efficiency and I love it.

I love it.

Because 11 people declined.

Again, we have we're so excited and we're very popular.

So we appreciate those of you that are here today.

Oh, yeah, lots of folks here.

Councilman.

So thank you so much, Councilman Barnes.

Uh I'm Nancy Giddens, and I'm joined by Sammy Panitari and Shanna Cooper, and we represent the city and the council in Jefferson City.

And before I even get started on the doozy of the year that it certainly was, which I know that you all read the headline, so you have at least a bit of an insight.

I want to say thanks first and foremost.

Every Friday we have a call with the mayor staff, and they're dealing with us right out of the building.

They're dealing with a lot of questions, most of which thankfully didn't come to fruition, which we'll talk about from a topics perspective momentarily.

But I I can't thank them enough.

Uh Melissa and they they're so responsive, and I want to thank them for sure.

I also want to specifically thank Matt, Tammy, and Alan.

They are the ones that typically get the random emails at 2 30 in the morning asking specifics whether it's about tax or finance or language that Alan has reviewed before and could he look at this new language.

And their response is critical to our success.

And I I I I would be remiss and my my friends here would be remiss if we didn't give them a special shout out.

So thank you very, very much.

Now, delegation.

The last thanks I want to give is our delegation.

On average, we have an amazing, amazing delegation.

Our folks sit down there, sit on those floors and fight for us every day.

We come from a city and we view legislation and policy from a lens that's very different than that that we see in Jefferson City.

And I don't take lightly the fact that they've got to go on that floor and fight for us hours and hours on end.

And so as Senators Razor, Washington, we talked about them a lot last year being new and how how they've come to be really great senators.

Rizzo and Arthur and how they defend whether it's our tax policy or you name it, they they really get out front.

And I I can't say enough about them.

And I also want to give a shout out to Lieutenant Governor Kehoe.

One of the things that Sammy's gonna discuss momentarily is the FIFA bill.

Rarely do you get a bill passed the first year.

That bill did pass the first year for a lot of reasons, and one of which is Lieutenant Governor Skiho, Lieutenant Governor Kehoe's leadership on that front.

And I think that's a testament to to how he views the city and what what he hopes will, of course, occur with the soccer tournament.

So enough about that.

It was a doozy of a year, as we all know.

It was really, really slow before it got really, really fast.

It certainly ended better than it began.

We have a state where legislators can file how however many bills that they want to, from a nationwide perspective, we have more bills filed than anyone.

This year we had over 2300 bills filed, which is interesting, particularly when only 49 of those from a policy perspective passed.

There were 19 budget bills that passed, they're constitutionally mandated to be passed, so none of us really count those as far as past bill numbers.

So it was almost a record low.

The only time it was lower was the COVID year, where we worked kind of from afar and we were in and out, you know, a few weeks, a few weeks at a time.

So definitely a weird year, but that actually proved to be good for us.