CoMoBUZ Insider Briefing, May 1, 2026

Mike's quick, weekly no-nonsense look at civic affairs in Columbia and Boone County, Missouri. This week, Mike gets to the bottom of the story about the break-up between Boone Health and the Missouri Heart Center, has an update on Columbia Public Schools lawsuit to stop public charter schools in Boone County, the latest on the demolition of the Providence Rd. bridge over I-70, and a looming crisis over load capacity at the City of Columbia’s electric utility.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Boone Health says it can rebuild cardiology. The outgoing cardiologists say the problem is deeper than staffing. They say they lost faith in the hospital's finances, strategy, and ability to support a modern heart program. Thousands of patients are now caught in the middle. From Como Buzz.com, this is the Como Buzz Insider Briefing, a weekly look at the decisions, documents, and debates shaping Columbia and Boone County. I'm Mike Murphy. This week, what the Boone Health Cardiology Rupture says about the hospital's future. Also ahead, Columbia's public schools asked the court to void Boone County's charter school expansion. And in the receipts, Columbia's electric capacity problem is no longer a future issue. It's here now. We begin with Boone Health. Up to 20,000 cardiology patients in mid-Missouri are now caught in the breakup of one of Boone Health's most important medical service lines. Missouri Heart Center's physician partnership is dissolving. The cardiologists who have long anchored Boone Health's heart program are largely going their separate ways. A few may remain at the hospital. Others are expected to practice elsewhere. For patients, that means uncertainty. For Boone Health, it means the loss of a longtime cardiology platform. And for Columbia and Boone County, it raises a larger public question. Can a county-owned hospital system still trying to stabilize after its break from BJC Health rebuild one of its core specialty lines quick enough to protect continuity of care? Boone Health says it can.com spoke with Heart Center cardiologists over the weekend. None agreed to speak publicly, citing fear of retaliation or legal action, but the count they gave was consistent. They say the breakup was not simply about money, non-compete agreements, or private capital. They say they lost faith in Boone Health's direction, financially, strategically, and clinically, and no longer believe the hospital could make the decisions needed to keep a modern cardiology program strong. Boone Health rejects that framing. Boone later emphasized that the contracts were ended without cause. CEO Brady Dubois used that language to argue that Missouri Heart chose to walk away despite the hospital's efforts to preserve care. The physicians now say that wording was a mistake. Their account is that without cause meant to avoid publicly disparging Boone health. They say they did not want to lay out the hospital's internal weaknesses in a termination letter. They now say they had plenty of cause in which they had been more direct. The timeline matters. The cardiologists say they believe they were on solid legal footing in defending themselves against Boone's noncompete claims. But they also believe they could take six to eighteen months to get a court ruling clear enough to remove the risk. Hart and Vascular Partners, the Illinois-based business support firm the physicians had been counting on, was not willing to move forward under that cloud. That pushed the physicians back to Boone Health with a fallback proposal. They say they offered to extend the existing operating agreement month to month or even longer while the legal and business issues played out. They say Boone Health was not interested. If that account is accurate, it helps explain why a dispute that might have been slowed down or negotiated instead hardened into a full rupture. The bigger issue is why the cardiologists want it out. Their explanation is not simply that the hospital leadership was difficult. It's that Boone's financial condition, its unresolved search for a strategic partner, disputes over imaging and technology, and broader concerns about hospital operations led them to conclude that they could no longer tie their future to Boone's. Boone Health has been trying to prove it can stand independently since its 2021 separation from BJC. There's been progress. Boone posted positive EBITDA in 2025 for the first time since the split. Boone's own finance leadership has said long-term stability depends on moving from a negative operating margin to a positive one. That's the kind of margin that supports technology, capital replacement, recruitment, and growth. Boone also has had a cushion. But here now, by March 2026, according to Dubois, the process was still in diligence. Publicly, Boone has described that effort in positive terms. But among people close to the hospital, focused discussions with Mercy are believed to have stalled. For the cardiologist, the unresolved partner search appears to have become part of the concern. A hospital still losing money from operations and still searching for a partner does not look settled. It looks transitional. Then there's this issue with imaging. Modern cardiology depends heavily on advanced imaging. Imaging helps drive diagnosis, it guides treatment, it produces referrals, it also shapes the economics of the service line. The physicians say Boone was not moving aggressively enough to maintain state-of-the-art cardiology capacity. They connect that to the hospital's financial limitations. They also connect it to control who owns the technology, who bills for it, who captures the revenue, and who shapes the future of the program. Boone's lawsuit against the cardiologist shows why this matters. Under agreements that began in 2016, Missouri Heart had exclusive rights to staff Boone's inpatient and outpatient cardiology services. It also handled management, oversight, billing, and collections for the cardiology line. That makes this dispute look less like a simple physician departure and more like a fight over the future architecture of cardiology at Boone Health. From Boone's perspective, bringing cardiology in-house could mean more control, more continuity, and more retained revenue. From the physician's perspective, Boone's reluctance or inability to modernize fast enough was evidence that they needed a different model. The question now moves from theory to reality. Boone says it will keep care moving while building a new in-house cardiology practice. That's the hospital's public pledge. The outgoing physicians are deeply skeptical. Boone is not replacing one retiring doctor. It's trying to replace a long-established specialty platform. That includes physicians, staff, workflows, patient trust, operational systems, and institutional knowledge. That concern is sharpened by the fact that Missouri Heart Center itself is dissolving. The group is not moving as a single unit to a new home. The doctors are largely scattering. Some may stay in Columbia, some may remain at Boone Health, and others will practice elsewhere. The human impact is the easiest part to understand. Patients who thought they had an established heart doctor may now have to determine where the doctor is going, whether records will follow smoothly, whether appointments will be kept, and whether Boone's replacement system will be ready when the old agreement ends. For many patients, cardiology is not routine care. It involves trust, history, and risk. There is also the governance question. Dr. Jerry Kennett is both the founding partner of Missouri Cardiovascular Specialists and chairman of Boone Health's elected board of trustees. Kennett has said he stopped attending group meetings, raised concerns with partners individually, recused himself from Boone-related votes, and resigned from Boone's board of directors before the litigation was filed. Those steps may have been necessary, but when a county-owned hospital loses a core specialty line tied to a physician group connected to the chair of its elected trustees, citizens are entitled to understand how conflicts were managed and whether those steps protected public confidence. That's where this now stands. Boon Health may prove it can recruit, rebuild, and maintain care. The hospital may prove that outgoing doctors underestimated its ability to respond, and the doctors may prove they saw the weakness earlier and more clearly than the public did. But the test is no longer internal. It will now be visible to patients. On May 6th, the Missouri Heart Center agreement ends. By then, Boone Health must show whether its replacement plan is real, whether patients have clear guidance, whether records and appointments are protected, and whether the hospital can sustain a complex heart program without the group that long anchored it.com. Now two more developments on the briefing board, Boone County Charter Schools and the next major I-70 disruption. Item one, Columbia Public Schools moves to void the Boone County Charter Expansion. Columbia Public Schools is asking a Cole County judge to void Missouri's new Boone County Charter School expansion and stop the state's approval of a proposed frontier charter school in Columbia. The district filed an amended petition last week in Cole County Circuit Court. The filing broadens CPS's constitutional challenge to Senate Bill 727. That's the 2024 education law that opened the Boone County to charter schools. The case now directly targets the State Board of Education's April 14th vote approving Frontier School's application to open a charter school in Columbia for the 2027-28 school year. That approval is the immediate trigger for the new filing. The thrust of the lawsuit is not over the virtues of public charter schools. CPS argues the law is unconstitutional because it was written in a way that applies only to Boone County. The law allows charter schools in a school district located in a county with more than 150,000 but fewer than 200,000 residents. The lawsuit claims Boone County is the only Missouri County in that population range. The district argues that makes the provision an unconstitutional special law. In Missouri, lawmakers generally cannot pass local or special laws regulating public schools when a general law could apply. The petition also argues the population bracket is temporary. Boone County has just over 184,000 residents in the 2020 census. The filing says the county currently has about 194,000 residents and is expected to cross 200,000 residents within a few years. That matters because, under the plaintiff's argument, the law was not only written for Boone County alone, but may eventually apply to no county at all. The lawsuit also raises a second constitutional issue. CPS says lawmakers failed to follow Missouri's notice requirements for a local or special law. The amended petition alleges the Boone County Charter Provision was not published in Boone County at least 30 days before introduction, that proof of publication was not filed, and that the notice was not recited in the bill. That's a procedural argument, but it could matter. The district is not only challenging what the legislature did, it's challenging how the legislature did it. The third major piece of the amended petition focuses on Frontier. The filing says the State Board of Education purportedly approved Frontier's application on April 14th. CPS argues the approval was unconstitutional and unlawful because it depends on the Boone County provision the district is asking the court to strike down. The timeline is important here. According to the amended petition, CPS received notice in November that Frontier had applied through St. Louis University to open a charter school in Columbia. In December, the filing says CPS was told St. Louis University had withdrawn its sponsorship application after the district identified procedural and substantive deficiencies. Then in March, CPS says it received a notice that Frontier had filed a second application, again seeking to open a charter school in Columbia, this time for the 2027-28 school year. CPS objected in an April 6th letter to St. Louis University and the state board. Eight days later, the state voted to approve the application. The district argues that vote changed the case. The petition says the issue became immediate and concrete once the charter application was filed and approved under the Boone County Law. In plain terms CPS is arguing this is no longer a theoretical fight over a statute. It is now a live dispute over whether a state approved charter school can open in Columbia under a law that the district says should never have been valid. The funding question is another central part of the case. The amended petition argues that SB 727 treats Boone County differently from the rest of the state. It says Boone County charter schools are exempt from separate state aid mechanisms that apply elsewhere. The plaintiffs argue that means Boone County school districts would have to absorb the financial impact of charter schools without the same additional state support provided in other parts of Missouri. That is one of the reasons this case matters beyond the legal theory. If Frontier is allowed to open, public education dollars could follow students from CPS or other Boone County districts to a charter school operating outside the local district governance structure. The lawsuit frames that as a financial and governance harm. CPS says public money generated through taxation would be diverted under an unconstitutional law. The district also argues local voters would lose some control because publicly funded schools would operate in Boone County outside the elected local school board system. Then there is also a practical question buried in the legal filing. The amended petition says the Boone County provision is vague because it does not clearly define what it means for a district to be located within the population bracket county. That matters in Boone County because some school district boundaries cross county lines. The plaintiffs argue this could create arbitrary outcomes over which districts and which students are covered. The case is now moving quickly. A status hearing was held Monday in Cole County Circuit Court. The next hearing is scheduled for May 11th before Cole County Associate Circuit Judge Emily Fretwell. That hearing will help determine how soon the court may address the district's request for declaratory and injunctive relief. For now, the practical question is straightforward. Will the court allow the Boone County Charter Expansion and Frontiers Columbia approval to move forward while the constitutional challenge plays out? Or will the judge step in before the proposed charter school gets closer to opening? That's the next major turn in a case that now sits at the intersection of school choice, local control, state power, and public education funding in Boone County. Item two on the briefing board, Providence Road Bridge Demolition moves closer. The Providence Road Bridge over I-70 in Columbia is now expected to come down in late May or early June, creating one of the next major traffic disruptions in Columbia's stretch of the I-70 rebuilding project. Kopinsky said MODOT expects to lock in the final schedule with Emory Sapp and Sons construction team within the next week or two. He said the state is trying to time the closure around school schedules and other major traffic demands, including the World Cup traffic to and from Kansas City. The goal is to find the least disruptive weekend possible. Here's Kapinski.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

The Providence Road Bridge, we are looking for the end of May. So we we're looking at the last week of May or the first week or two of June. We plan to lock that in about a week or two with the Emory SAP team, and we will let everybody here know as soon as we get that locked in.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

So MODAT is trying to thread a narrow needle. The bridge has to come down, but the timing of that work could shape how much disruption drivers feel in the first days of the closure. The Providence Road work comes as the St. Charles Road overpass is already closed. That means Columbia is not dealing with one isolated bridge project. It's dealing with a sequence of closures tied to the larger rebuild of I-70 through mid-Missouri. The reason Providence has to be replaced is pretty straightforward. The existing bridge does not have enough room underneath for I-70 to be widened to three lanes in each direction. The widening is the core goal of the project. So the state's choice is not whether to touch the Providence Bridge. The real question has been how to replace it, how much disruption to accept, and how much money to spend avoiding that disruption. Kopinsky said Modot and its contractor team considered other options. One idea was to build a new bridge beside the existing bridge and then slide the new bridge into place over a weekend. That method has been used elsewhere. It can reduce the amount of time a road is fully closed, but it's not cheap. Kopinski said that kind of bridge slide would have raised costs significantly and likely required more right-of-way acquisitions from nearby properties. Other ideas were also reviewed. Modot looked at whether it could create a tunnel style design or shift I-70s so the interstate would go over Providence Road. Kopinsky said those options became too expensive quickly. That's an important part of the public explanation here. The more complicated designs may have reduced some of the disruption, but they also would have consumed more money needed elsewhere on the long corridor project. That's the trade-off behind much of the I-70 work in Columbia. There are ways to make construction easier on drivers in the short term, but those options often cost more, take more land, or limit what can be built elsewhere. Kopinski said the project's design build process was intended to let private contractors bring forward practical ideas for letting the work get done faster and more efficiently. Design build means the state does not simply hand contractors a complete set of plans and ask for bids. Instead, the contractor team has more room to propose how the job should be built. Kopinski said the goal is to draw out private sector innovation and find the best ways to build the project to high quality as quickly as possible. In Columbia, Kopinski said, the public also sent a clear message early in the I-70 planning process. Residents and business owners wanted Modot to avoid taking property where possible. Kopinsky said people told the state, don't touch our property, don't touch the businesses. Use the money to build pavement and bridges, not buy houses and businesses. That helps explain why Modot landed on the more direct approach at Providence. Close the bridge, remove it, rebuild it to modern standards, and get it reopened as quickly as possible. That does not eliminate the disruption, but it limits costs and property impacts. In the meantime, traffic management will become more important. Kopinski said Modot continues to adjust signal timing around Columbia as drivers shift routes around construction.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

As traffic patterns stabilize and people adjust to some of the impacts, we are making signal timing adjustments. We are monitoring continually how traffic's moving through the area and trying to make tweaks.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Engineers are watching several areas closely, including I-70 and Highway 63, Broadway and Highway 63, and the AC grindstone area. He said even small signal changes can help, but there are limits. Adding green light time for one movement can take it away from another. So the next milestone is that final demolition schedule for Providence Road. Modot expects that schedule soon. Once it's set, drivers will know when one of Columbia's most important I-70 crossings will close, and the city will get a clearer picture of the next major traffic squeeze in the state's largest interstate rebuilding project. This week's receipts segment is about Columbia's electric utility. The receipt is a $175,000 consultant study that tells City Council members something they should have confronted years ago. Columbia does not have enough firm electric capacity lined up for the future. Key contracts are expiring, aging resources are at risk, the regional power market is volatile. Renewable energy helps, but it does not solve the central reliability problem by itself. This is not an argument against renewable energy. It's an argument against pretending renewable goals are the same thing as a capacity plan. Electric utilities have to answer two related but different questions. The first is energy. How much electricity a utility produces or buys over time? Wind and solar can contribute meaningfully to that. They can reduce emissions and lower fuel exposure. The second, though, is capacity. That's whether the utility can guarantee enough power when demand peaks and the grid is under stress. MISO, the regional grid operator, does not simply ask whether a city has bought enough renewable energy over a year. It asks whether the utility has enough accredited capacity to meet peak demand plus a reserve margin. Wind, solar, and batteries receive capacity credit based on how dependable they are during the hours when the grid needs them most. They do not count one for one. That is not politics, that is how the grid works. For years, Columbia's public conversation has been more comfortable talking about renewable percentages than firm capacity. Renewable targets are easy to explain. Capacity accreditation is harder. But utilities do not run on slogans, they run on resources that are available when needed. A Dynergy capacity contract expires in 2027. The model assumes that Sykston Power Resource retires in 2028. Other resources age out later. Demand keeps growing. Market prices are becoming more volatile. None of this should be a surprise. Water and Light staff have warned about capacity. The Water and Light Advisory Board has talked about capacity. Regional utility officials have warned that firm generation is getting harder to find and more expensive to buy. The difference now is that warning comes in a formal consultant presentation with charts, scenarios, and cost comparisons. That has value. The public needs to see the trade-offs, but no one should pretend the study discovered the problem. The study documents the cost of waiting and the cost falls on ratepayers. If Columbia waits too long, it will not avoid a hard decision. It will make the decision under worse conditions. The city may be forced to buy capacity in a tight market, accept higher prices, rush into projects with fewer alternatives, and expose customers to more volatility. That means residents, small businesses, large employers, and low-income households carry the consequences in their electric bills. Delay feels cheap in the moment, but it is not. It is a financing mechanism for future pain. Columbia should keep pursuing cleaner resources. Wind, solar, storage, and demand response all have roles to play, but it is not serious to act as if renewable energy goals answer every reliability question. A renewable energy plan is not automatically a reliability plan. A carbon-free target is not automatically a capacity resource. And a battery is not useful at scale until it is available, affordable, connected, and accredited under the rules that govern the grid. The Missouri Public Utilities Alliance backed natural gas projects developing in places such as Marshall, Fulton, and Hannibal should be viewed in that context. They are not necessarily a betrayal of clean energy goals. They may be a practical hedge against a capacity market that is no longer cheap, forgiving, or predictable. Flexible natural gas capacity does not have to mean running fossil plants around the clock. It can mean having dispatchable resources available when the grid needs them. This is not an ideological surrender. It is insurance. Columbia had years to build a cleaner answer to the capacity problem. It did not. The city cannot now bet reliability and rate stability on the hope that the perfect clean resource appears fast enough, cheaply enough, and with enough accredited capacity to replace what's disappearing. The next step should not be another broad expression of concern. It should be direction. City staff should be told to pursue real capacity options with urgency, including bilateral contracts, battery proposals, demand side programs, and serious participation in regionable, flexible generation projects. The council should demand timelines, costs, risks, and decision points. And it should make clear that doing nothing is not an option. The public deserves honesty. If cleaner power costs more, say so. If capacity requires resources some residents dislike, say so. If waiting exposes the city to higher market prices, say so. The worst path is the familiar one. Reassure everyone, offend no constituency, postpone the trade-off, and let the bill arrive later. Electric reliability is a basic civic infrastructure. The resource plan gives the council a way forward and removes the last excuse. Columbia has already waited too long. Now it's time for the City Council to stop sitting on its hands. Coming up, one major item to watch next week is the Allegiant Air Agreement at Columbia Regional Airport. City officials are asking the City Council to approve an agreement that would bring new nonstop Florida flights to Columbia while putting up a $1 million revenue guarantee behind the service. The agreement is scheduled for first reading on Monday. That typically would put it up for discussion and approval at the Council's May 18th meeting. The deal would authorize City Manager DeCarlon Seawood to execute a two-year agreement with Allegiant. The airline is expected to begin service June 3rd with five weekly round trip flights from Columbia to Orlando and Destin. The important detail is how the revenue guarantees work. This is not a straight payment of $125,000 every quarter. It's a maximum guarantee. If the route performs well, Allegiant will need less support, perhaps no support. If it underperforms, public or community-backed funds can be used up to the agreed cap. The agreement also includes waived landing fees and facility rents, plus at least $125,000 in first-year marketing support. This is the second major airline incentive package to move through city government this year after the $1.5 million first-year guarantee for American Airlines new daily service to Charlotte. Together, the deals show Columbia is using public and community-backed money as part of a broader air service recruitment strategy that may produce more destinations and better service. It also raises questions about risk, transparency, funding, and how success will be measured. We'll be watching that as the agreement moves toward council action. The Boone Health story is the one to hold on to this week because it's about more than one medical group and one hospital contract. It's about trust. Patients trusted a cardiology system that has been in place for years. Doctors say they stopped trusting Boone Health's future. Boone Health is asking the public to trust that it can rebuild. That may be possible, but it's nothing resembling automatic. Because Boone Health is a county-owned institution, the public has a right to keep asking hard questions. How did this rupture happen? Could it have been avoided? What happens to patients, finances, and local control if Boone still needs a strategic partner? Those questions will not be answered in a single week, but the stakes are clear. For more reporting on Boone Health, Columbia Public Schools, City Government, Utilities, Transportation, and the decisions shaping Columbia and Boone County, go to Como Buzz.com. For Como Buzz.com, I'm Mike Murphy. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.