Gary Nodler, the Missouri Senator representing Carthage, Jasper County, Newton County and Dade County, took over one of the most powerful positions in state government this summer as Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman, and that means changes in the way he represents his constituents.

The new legislative session begins at noon, Jan. 9. Gov. Matt Blunt will give his state of the state address, outlining his priorities for the session at 7 p.m., Jan. 15.

Nodler said he sees potential advantages and disadvantages to his new role, but overall, his constituents will benefit as the Missouri General Assembly prepares to return to session.

 "In my previous role, my job was to be a fierce advocate for the parochial interests of the constituents of the 32nd Senatorial District," Nodler said. "It was to try to get as many resources for my district as possible, to try to correct inequities in funding for various areas. While I may still have some of those concerns, the reality is that the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee has a responsibility to structure this budget to meet the interests and needs of all the people throughout the state, wherever they may live. So my view of the budget cannot be as parochial as it has been in the past. It has to be a state-wide perspective.

"The downside is, yes, I cannot advocate as aggressively for the interests in my district as I have in the past. The upside is I really don't need to because the departments and agencies and programs and providers really are going to want to show the value of their budget area to me within in my district anyway, so it balances out."

Nodler said the budget process will determine exactly which of the proposals from the governor and lawmakers will become state policy. Gov. Blunt has proposed expanding eligibility for Missouri HealthNet, the program that replaced Missouri Medicaid last year, a program called Insure Missouri to help low-income families obtain health insurance, and other proposals dealing with education, health care and illegal immigration.

"The appropriations process will determine the real shape of Missouri HealthNet, because the eligibility and all of that will be determined in the appropriations process," Nodler said. "We'll have some impact on the Insure Missouri proposal. Clearly the implementation of Senate Bill 389 is now an appropriation function and the completion of the foundation formula rewrite is an appropriation issue, so a lot of the legislative activity has shifted from the authorizing legislation to the appropriating function."
Nodler said the state will have the resources to meet it's obligations this year, but looking forward, he sees problems.

"The question is whether the growth in revenue is sufficient to accomidate all the expendature commitments that have been made," Nodler said. "We certainly will be within our resources for 2008 and it shouldn't be a problem to be within our resources for 2009, but 2010 is shaping up to be a more challenging year to keep spending within the constraints of the available revenues, but we will in fact have more revenues in the succeeding years than in each of the previous ones.

"There's several things that happen in 2010. One of them is that we are phasing in over a six-year period of time, eliminating the income taxes on both social security and state and federal retirement benefits. That phase in has a cumulative affect on the revenue balance. In addition to that, we have in the last year as we have begun to impliment Missouri HealthNet, we have had some eligibility expansion that takes more dollars to complete and we have made major commitments to education, both K-12 and higher education, that have a compounding affect on the budget. What makes 2010 more difficult is that we are reaching a third step in spending increases in all of those areas, except K-12 and that will be a fourth step in spending increases."

Even as lawmakers deal with those issues, other issues, such as transportation funding, loom on the horizon.

"It's not that revenues are going to shrink, it's been that the building program that's been rather robust over this five-year period, is as a result of bonding," Nodler said. "The bonding funds will be gone, the revenue stream is essentially the same as it was before and I think it's clear that that revenue stream is not adequate to maintain the highway system structure that will have been put into place in 2010, I think that's a fact."
Nodler said the solution to the trasportation funding problem rests with the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission and its ability to communicate its dilemma to the people, who will have to vote on any funding increase.

Nodler said the other hot-button issue of this past fall, illegal immigration, is another issue where the solution rests outside the state legislature.

"The immigration issue, I think, is a very high profile political issue, but the remedies, the meaningful remedies, are primarily at the federal level," He said. "I think the state of Missouri will seek to do the things that can be done appropriately by the state to respond tp the wishes of the people that we do something about attempting to enforce immigration laws within our state, so I would expect there will be a legislative proposal on that. I don't know what shape that will take, but really that problem has to be solved on a federal level."