Yes or no to a sales tax increase: Jackson County voters to decide in November for funding of medical research
The Jackson County Legislature voted on Monday to put a half-cent sales tax increase before voters in a measure that, if passed, would raise $40 million a year for local health research institutions.
Jackson County voters get to decide on November 5 whether sending $800 million in sales taxes over its 20-year life to institutions like Children’s Mercy Hospital and the University of Missouri-Kansas City is a good idea.
The measure has the backing of institutions like the Civic Council of Greater Kansas City, which is pushing for the sales tax as a means to form a translation research institute in Jackson County to bring big-name researchers to Kansas City with a charge to find treatments for various human diseases and disorders.
The Jackson County Legislature’s vote was not unanimous; it passed 7-2 with Greg Grounds and Bob Spence voting against it.
Grounds expressed reservations about taxpayer funds financing an election that would primarily benefit institutions like Children’s Mercy, St. Luke’s Health System, UMKC and the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute. The cost of that election will be reimbursed from sales tax proceeds if the meaure passes.
Spence, a cancer survivor, didn’t think research financing was the county’s purview.
“I don’t think this is the business the county should be involved in,” Spence told a packed crowd in the basement of the Jackson County Courthouse Annex in Independence.
Objecting in absentia was the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance. That group sent out a message Monday wondering why there was a sales-tax effort for medical research instead of mass transit, a concept originally envisioned for a sales-tax vote in Jackson County and elsewhere.
Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders had spent years laying groundwork for an eventual sales-tax measure to fund a wide-ranging mass-transit plan in the Kansas City area, but the project never came to pass. That opened a window for the medical research tax.
“This new tax proposal fails to recognize the importance of what Jackson County has been doing over the past three years,” KCRTA’s statement reads. “Mike Sanders’ energetic regional transit proposal is in a time-out. This is not a time to redirect our community’s focus to another interest. How can we expect to attract these talented young health care researchers to a town that won’t invest in the kinds of urban amenities that these people will demand?”
Still, Sanders appeared delighted that the Jackson County legislators put the medical research measure on the ballot for voters to decide.
“This has more potential than any project I’ve seen,” Sanders told reporters afterward.
