CoMoBUZ Insider Briefing, June 5, 2026

Mike's quick, weekly no-nonsense look at civic affairs in Columbia and Boone County, Missouri. This week, Mike shares some opinion about the city of Columbia’s failure to engage with the public before walking it into the need for a one-cent sales tax increase, explains Amendment 5, the proposal to phase out the state income tax, and reviews the Columbia Police Department’s newly-issued 2025 report.  

Transcript

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Columbia City Hall says public engagement is central to how it operates. But the test of engagement is not what leaders say after a plan is already moving. The city has a real public safety need, but those needs are now wrapped inside a much larger affordability problem. And residents are being asked to decide on the most sellable part of the story without first getting the full bill.com, this is the Como Buzz Insider Briefing, a weekly look at the decisions, documents, and debates shaping Columbia and Boone County. Then, coming up, three candidates are now in the race for Columbia's fourth Ward City Council seat. This week we begin with trust, not the kind of trust City Hall talks about in speeches, the kind residents either have or do not have when government asks them for more money. And right now, Columbia City Hall has a trust problem of its own making. He said it's central to how the city operates. He said residents deserve to understand how decisions are made, how priorities are set, and how public input is reflected in outcomes. If engagement is central to how Columbia operates, where was that engagement when the city was moving towards one of the largest household cost decisions residents have faced in years? Where was the honest public conversation about the proposed one cent public safety sales tax? Where was the full discussion of utility rate increases, police and fire staffing, pension obligations, city spending growth, cash reserve pressure, and possible budget cuts? Where was the process that said plainly, here is what city government costs, here is what public safety needs, here is what utilities require, here is what could be delayed, here's what could be cut, and here's what all this means for a household trying to live in Columbia. That conversation did not happen, and that is the point. Last week, Como Buzz published a five-part series called When City Hall Gets It Wrong. The series examined the proposed public safety sales tax, the pressure on utility bills, the city's financial condition, public safety needs, pension obligations, and the broader affordability problem now facing residents. The conclusion is not that Columbia has no public safety needs, it surely does. Police staffing is a real issue. Fire staffing is a real issue. Facilities, equipment, technology, and pension obligations are real. A growing city cannot pretend those costs don't exist. But real needs do not excuse evasive leadership. In fact, real needs require more honesty, not less. This is where Mayor Barbara Buffalo bears special responsibility. City staff can prepare budgets, department heads can advocate for their needs, the city manager can recommend a path forward, but the mayor is elected to represent residents, not staff, not the organization, and not the preferred city hall narrative. During the mayoral campaign, the city was already discussing revenue options. Public safety tax ideas were already part of the conversation inside city government. But when challengers raised the issue, Buffalo leaned on careful language. The city was not proposing a tax increase right now, she said. That may have been technically defensible, but it certainly was not candid. When a city is already studying revenue options, when the case for a public safety tax is already taking shape, and when the financial path is already pointed towards a public vote, not right now, is not real transparency. It's cover. And this matters because residents do not experience city finances the way City Hall organizes them. A resident does not live in the general fund, the water utility, or the electric utility, or the solid waste fund, the public safety fund or the capital improvement plan. A resident lives in one household budget. A sales tax increase hits at the register. Utility increases hit at home. Power cost adjustments hit the monthly electric bill. Fees, rates, taxes, transfers, and deferred infrastructure costs all end up at the same place. The family budget, the retiree budget, the small business budget. That is why the public safety sales tax cannot be viewed in isolation. The city's preferred message is public safety, and that is not false. The proposed tax would fund public safety. Police and fire needs are central to the proposal, but it's incomplete. Public safety is also the most political powerful way to sell the tax increase. City Hall knows that. Nobody wants slower fire response, nobody wants fewer police officers, nobody wants unsafe facilities or underfunded emergency services. But voters deserve the whole story. They need to know how much of this is new public safety investment and how much of this is general fund relief. They deserve to know how the city arrived at this point after years of staffing growth, spending growth, and delayed reckoning. They deserve to know what options were rejected before City Hall asked residents for more money. That is what engagement would have looked like. Instead, the city has treated engagement like a communication strategy. There are summits, surveys, strategic planning exercises, town halls, civic programs. Some may be useful, some may be sincere, but they are not a substitute for inviting the public into the hardest decisions before the direction has already been shaped. Real engagement is risky. Residents ask uncomfortable questions. They challenge assumptions. They want to know why public safety was not prioritized sooner. They want to know why utility bills are rising at the same time the city wants a sales tax increase. They want to know what City Hall is willing to stop doing before asking families to pay more. Those are not hostile questions. Those are the basic questions of self-government. That is why Sea Wood's speech matters, not because the words were wrong. The words were right. But the conduct does not match the language. Columbia's leaders still have time to make a better case, but that requires more than calling the tax public safety and asking residents to trust them. It requires the whole bill. It requires the full set of trade-offs. It requires naming what can be cut and what cannot be cut, what can wait and what cannot wait, and what the total burden will be on the people who live here. It requires treating residents not as the final obstacle to a city hall plan, but as the people who own the government. That is what engagement means. Anything less is message management. So as this tax debate moves forward, the question is not only whether Columbia needs more money for police and fire, the question is whether residents can trust the process that brought the city to this point. And on that question, Columbia has a lot of explaining to do. Columbia residents know the difference between being consulted and being managed. You're listening to the Como Buzz Insider Briefing from Comobuz.com. I'm Mike Murphy. Now let's move from City Hall's tax debate to two other stories shaping the civic landscape this week. First, Columbia's police say violent crime eased again in 2025, even as staffing remained tight. Those numbers matter because they complicate the public safety discussion. They show improvement in some of the most serious crime categories, but they do not erase the department's staffing problem. Police Chief Joe Schlute wrote that one of the department's most pressing priorities remains staffing. Patrol is the backbone of the department's response system. Those officers handled more than 41,000 calls, wrote more than 10,000 police reports, made more than 16,000 traffic stops, and recorded more than 4,400 arrests. Median patrol response time was 14 minutes in 2025. That was down from 16 minutes in 2024. So the picture is mixed. Violent crime is down slightly, murders are down, firearm-related crime is down, response time improved from the prior year, but the department is still trying to operate with a significant number of unfilled patrol positions. The report also shows the department leaning more heavily into technology and specialized units. CPD expanded its use of flock cameras, axon systems, and ballistic evidence tools. It launched a public-facing crime data dashboard. It continued its homeless outreach team and created a parks unit. The homeless outreach team made 301 arrests in 2025. The parks unit was created to provide a visible police presence in city parks and trails. Those details are important because public safety is not just about crime totals. It's also about capacity, response, technology, homelessness, parks, traffic, and public trust. And that is why the annual report will likely become part of the larger debate over what Columbia wants from its police department and what residents are willing to pay to get. Second, Amendment 5 is now one of the biggest statewide fights on Missouri's August ballot. At first glance, this sounds simple. Do you want Missouri to phase out the state income tax? A lot of people hear that and think, well, sure, who likes income taxes? Who wouldn't want to keep more of their paycheck? But that's not the whole question. It may not even be the most important question. The real question is this if Missouri gets rid of the income tax, what replaces it? Who pays? And how much authority are voters going to give the legislature to rewrite the tax code after the election is over? That's why Amendment 5 is already becoming one of the most heavily contested ballot issues in Missouri. The measure will appear on the August 4th primary ballot. It was placed there by the legislature, not by an initiative petition. Governor Mike Kehoe supports the general idea of phasing out the state income tax, and supporters argue Missouri needs a more competitive tax structure. Their argument is that states without income taxes, states such as Texas, Florida, and Tennessee, have grown faster, attracted more people, and attracted more business investment. That is the sales pitch. Supporters say Missouri should stop taxing work on income and should move toward a tax structure that encourages growth. They say the phase out would be tied to revenue growth, so it would not happen all at once, and they say local school funding would be protected. That's the argument for it. But the opposition says voters need to look past the phrase income tax cut and read the rest of the amendment. Because Missouri's income tax is not a small piece of the state budget. It is the biggest piece. Critics say it brings in roughly $8.5 billion a year and supports roughly two-thirds of the state's general revenue budget. That is the money used for schools, Medicaid, higher education, prisons, public safety, mental health, services for seniors and people with disabilities, and the basic functions of state government. So if that money goes away, the state has three basic options. It can cut spending, it can raise other taxes, or it can do some combination of both. And that is where the fight over Amendment 5 really begins. The official ballot language says the amendment would phase out the individual income tax based on revenue growth. It also says it would modify sales and use taxes to eliminate the income tax and reduce local taxes. The ballot language says any increase in sales tax rates or expansion of the sales tax base would have to be offset by a reduction in the income tax rate. That sounds technical, but in plain English, it's a tax swap. Less income tax, more sales tax, or sales taxes applied to more things. And that is why opponents have started calling this the everything tax. Their argument is that Missourians may be told they're voting for a tax cut, but could actually be voting to shift taxes from income to consumption, from what people earn to what people buy. That matters because sales taxes hit households differently than income taxes. A higher income household can save and invest a larger share of its money. A lower or middle income household generally has to spend more of what it earns on groceries, utilities, car repairs, child care, medicine, home repairs, and everyday services. So if the state leans harder on sales taxes, the burden can fall more heavily on people who spend most of their income just to live. That is the core fairness argument against Amendment 5. There is also a local government argument. Missouri voters in 2016 approved constitutional protections against new sales taxes on services. A lot of business groups supported that at the time because they did not want the state to start taxing things like real estate services, accounting, legal work, car repairs, haircuts, child care, medical services, advertising, and other transactions that historically have not been taxed in the same way goods are taxed. Now, opponents of Amendment 5 say this measure could open the door to revisiting that wall. And that is why the Missouri Realtors are now in the middle of this fight. The Missouri Realtors Campaign Committee just put over $1.9 million into the campaign opposing Amendment 5. That money went to Missourians for fair taxation, the opposition committee. The timing is important. A pro amendment five committee, Missouri Promise PAC, received $1.9 million from Missouri Promise Inc., a nonprofit that has drawn attention because the original source of that money is not easy for voters to see. The realtors answered with $1 more, $1.9 million and $1 to the opposition campaign. So this is no longer just a statehouse policy debate. Now this is a multimillion dollar campaign, and voters should expect to hear a lot about it between now and August. The pro side will tell voters this is about eliminating the income tax, making Missouri more competitive, rewarding work, and forcing government to live within its means. The opposition will say this is a misleading tax shift, one that gives the biggest benefit to higher income taxpayers, while exposing everyone else to higher sales taxes, new taxes on services, or cuts to public services. Both sides are going to use simple slogans. Voters should resist that, because the hard part about Amendment 5 is that it asks voters to approve the concept now, while many of the biggest details would be worked out later by the legislature. That is why the official ballot language itself says the taxed impact is unknown. That line matters. It means nobody can honestly tell voters with precision exactly what they will pay five years from now if this passes. That will depend on future lawmakers, future budgets, future revenue growth, and future decisions about what gets taxed and what gets cut. So the voter question is not just do we want to pay less income tax? The voter question is, do you trust the legislature to remove the state's largest revenue source and replace it in a way that's fair, stable, and transparent? Coming up, the fourth ward race for Columbia City Council is now set. Three candidates filed before the deadline on Tuesday for the August 4th special election. David Sorrell, Sharon Gowaway Jones, and Ryan King are seeking the seat that opened when Nick Foster moved from the city. Sorrell is a former director of utilities for the City of Columbia. Goway Jones is an attorney, lobbyist, and chair of the city's Planning and Zoning Commission. King is a social services attorney and a U.S. Army Reserve Judge Advocate. This race matters because the fourth ward seat will be filled at the same time Columbia is wrestling with taxes, utilities, growth, public safety, and the city's larger affordability problem. The winner will not be joining a quiet council. The winner will step directly into some of the most consequential city issues in years. Como Buzz will be watching how each candidate talks about taxes, spending, utilities, growth, housing, public safety, and the relationship between City Hall and residents. The thought line this week is not complicated. Government can ask residents for more money. Sometimes it has to. Public safety costs money, infrastructure costs money, growth costs money, but trust also matters, and trust should be built before the tax proposal lands on the ballot, not after. It is built when leaders tell residents what is coming, what choices have already been made, what options remain, and what the total burden looks like. That is the conversation Columbia still needs. Not a slogan about engagement, not a narrowed sales pitch, a full accounting. You can read the full reporting and commentary at Comoobuz.com. We will continue tracking the public safety tax debate, the fourth ward special election, the police staffing picture, and the statewide amendment five campaign as the August ballot takes shape. For Como Buzz.com, I'm Mike Murphy. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.