Interview with Dave Griffith, candidate for Missouri’s 60th House District

Republican Dave Griffith is well known in the 60th House District.

He's running for his fourth and final term representing the district in the Missouri House. Before that, he enjoyed a long career in media in Jefferson City. Griffith is anti-abortion, opposes stricter gun regulations and has a business-friendly platform.

Nia Hinson: Just to start tell me a little bit about yourself.

Dave Griffith: I've been in the House for the past six years. Before I came here, I was with the American Red Cross for six years as well and I had 29 counties I said grace over every morning. I was two counties short of going from the Arkansas border to the Iowa border. I was deployed five times with the Red Cross. I did three hurricanes and two Missouri floods.

When Mike Bernskoetter was going to turn limit out, I decided I was going to run for office, and it would be the time for me to do this. I resigned my position with the Red Cross and began my campaign and really enjoyed what I do here. I'm the chairman of the Veterans Committee. I've been the chairman for six years. I was the first Republican freshman to serve as chair of a standing committee. And so I think that a lot of my background in military and in the private sector, I think really helped me get to where I am today.

Hinson: And then you have been the state rep for the 60th District since 2018 is that correct?

Griffith: I was elected in 2018.

Hinson: Tell me why you're running again this year.

Griffith: I really have, I will term limit out after this year ... after this, after this next session but I really have some unfinished business to do. We really want to try to find, there are a couple of the Missouri Veterans Commission, I serve as a commissioner on the Missouri Veterans Commission. I'm really trying to find a more sustainable source of income and funding for the Missouri Veterans Commission. Every year the commission has to go through appropriations in order to get the money they need to survive. You can't have, any business that I know of can't really be sustainable for any period of time if they don't have a five-year plan, or if they don't have a 10-year plan. The Missouri Veterans Commission can't do that because they don't, they don't have the budget item listed as a line item in the budget every year to where they know they're going to get $50 million. And that's my goal, is to try and get them to where they get $50 million in the budget every year.

Then they have the gaming money and the marijuana money that they get would go into the foundation coffers, which is where it should be going in the first place, which would take care of deferred maintenance on the veterans homes and on the cemeteries. It also gives us an opportunity for us to increase the number of veteran service officers we have around the state. And now with the fourth initiative, with the passage of House Bill 1495 which was the veteran suicide bill that I got passed this session, signed by the governor, they're going to need additional income. We're going to hire additional people because in the statute, it says that they have got to provide a report to the General Assembly on July 1 of every year as to what they're doing to turn the tide on veteran suicide in the state of Missouri.

Hinson: Why is that so important to you?

Griffith: I think it becomes more important to you when you lose somebody and you lose somebody that you know, a really good friend. Last October, I had a very, very good friend of mine that committed suicide. He had a wife and three kids. His kids are all teenagers. I've got a letter from him on my desk. Was in that sack there that I keep because I talked to him two weeks before he committed suicide, and we were at the American Legion, and just had a beer together and just were talking, and nothing seemed to be wrong. And then when I heard about it, and it passed pretty quickly around Jefferson City, about what had happened, you start to question, why? You start to question, was there something I could have done? And I think that and I had a interim committee three years ago that dealt with veteran suicide and mental health, and we had families that came in that testified, and those are the people that I'm real concerned about. Those are the folks that are still here. Those are the ones that are asking why. Those are the ones that have to face Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays and events that they did all along ...

So I think when it is personal, then I think it changes your whole perspective. You look through a different lens than you did before. And I want to try to help those families. I want to try and help those I want to help the veterans, but in the long run, I want to help the families as well in trying to find the cause and effects in solutions and what we can do.

Hinson: We're a little bit under a month until Election Day [at the time of this interview]. Kind of how has the campaign been going and what have you been hearing from voters? You just talked about one of your main priorities obviously is helping these veterans but what would be your first priority if you are reelected?

Griffith: My first priority would be Senate Bill, or I'm sorry, House concurrent resolution, Joint Resolution 75 was what I had last year, and that is for 100% disabled veterans to get personal property tax exemption so they wouldn't pay personal property tax at all. I've talked with, talked with collectors, not only in my county, but in counties throughout the state and almost every person they're saying that's the right thing to do and that they would they would support that. We have roughly over 14,000 disabled veterans in the state of Missouri, and so the economic impact that's going to have on counties as far as schools and services go is going to be negligible.

But something that the bill actually passed in 2012 and when it was passed, the bill stated that you had to be 100% disabled and a POW. At that time, we only had 20 qualified that were 100% disabled and a POW. What my bill would do would be to change one word. You would change it from an "and" to an "or," so if you were a POW or you're 100% disabled, you would qualify for that. So, that's going to be that, would be my No. 1 priority.

But as far as the campaign goes, we're 28 days away from the election [as of this interview]. We continue to work hard. In the six years that I've been running for office we've knocked over 30,000 doors and talking with voters, talking with constituents. I would guess that probably over 20,000 people in Jefferson City have got my cell phone number. And when I talk to them at the door I tell them I said "f you got a question, or if you don't like the way I voted on something, you can always call me and if I don't answer the phone, then leave me a message because I return every phone call." And I do, I return every phone call, good or bad. I mean, I know there are some phone calls I get that are not going to be pleasant, they're not happy but I think I owe it to them to be able to explain why I vote the way that I do.

And I vote bipartisan there, I don't always vote party line. If there's issues that one of the, I think one of the advantages we have in the House is we've got a computer on our desk, and so I've got an issue I'm going to vote on, I can go to the county clerk's website, and I can look at the last election as to how my voters voted on a particular issue. I remember that there was one we had, it was in 2019, I believe it was that we were going to try to repeal something that the voters had said they wanted. And I went on the website and saw that my voters indeed supported that. I didn't agree with them, but they supported it. So, when it came time to vote, I voted with my constituents because over 70% of them had voted yes that they wanted the expansion of Medicaid. And and I so when I voted, if you ever been in the chamber, on the board there's either it's green, it means yes and red means no and in yellow, it means present. And so I voted no.

And I was sitting in a cluster of my Republican colleagues, and they said "Dave, look at how you voted." And I said, "what do you mean?" They said "well, you you voted no." And I said "well, first off I'm colorblind, so I can't see whether it's red or green so," but I went on, I looked at what my voters, how they voted, and I'm not going to be the one that's going to tell them I'm smarter than they are, that you don't have all the facts, which I don't believe they did. But it's not for me to make that judgment, right? And so I now, if it's close, if it's 50% or 51% or 52% I mean, I'll vote my conscience and I can explain that. But when it's overwhelming in one way then I stand with them.

But I think the knocking doors is the key to winning any election. And I think talking with the folks and being sincere with them, and telling them that you listen to them, that they've got a voice.

Again, another really good example is when COVID hit and a lot of employers laid off some people. I had a gentleman that works at Capital Plaza Hotel and he'd been there for I believe 11 or 12 years and he lived just about a mile away from my house and he was let go. And he was trying to get he said, for the first time in his life he was going to have to draw unemployment and he had made every effort. And so it was getting, I mean, they had a savings that they could fall back on, but the savings was getting depleted and he needed help with the Department of Labor to get his unemployment checks. And so I made, I called our liaison with the Department of Labor and Employment Security and told them what the situation was, told them what his name was, his phone number, where he lived, and within four days, he had all of his checks back and had his back checks as well. Is that right? No, it's probably not right because he was making phone calls and didn't get a response. But I think as his representative, that it's my job to be his voice and to be able to try and get something done.

So, those are success stories that I like to tell because I think it shows that if you build relationships with folks, especially in this building, you can be you can be effective. I've gotten 16 bills passed in the six years I've been here. Most all of them are up on the wall there but I've got three more that are sitting right over there that I'm going to get framed. I'm not sure where I'm going to put them yet, but I may have to recycle some of those that are on the wall but it's not really about the number of bills that you get passed, but really what's behind the bill that's hanging there.

The first bill I got passed was House Bill 547. And House Bill 547 was really a result of my last deployment, Hurricane Harvey down in San Antonio, Texas. I was serving as a government liaison and I had two counties that I was, that I was in charge of. And in Texas, everything's big. The counties were big and the county judge was like the king of the county. Nothing happened in that county without that judge's approval. And so I got to... Gonzales County was one of those two, the counties that I had, and I got to be pretty good friends with that judge as well as his administrative assistant. And I went in one day to give them an update on service delivery that was going to be happening in their county. And his secretary said "today is the happiest day of the month". And I said, "why is that?" He says "today is graduation day, we're going to graduate 32 veterans from our veterans corps." These are veterans that found themselves on the wrong side of the law. They had pretty much given up on society and they felt like society had given up on them, but they could go through this 18-month-long program to where they had to take a pee test every week, they had to have meetings, they had to do the counseling. There's just a benchmark of things they had to do in order to graduate from that. But once they graduated, their record was expunged. So, they were given a second lease on life.

And so I said, the first bill that I'm going to I want to get passed is going to be a bill to mandate, and that's a word in this building that people don't like, but to mandate that every circuit court in the state of Missouri has a Veterans Treatment Court. And I gave them those, that was passed in 2019 and I gave them until Aug. 28 of 2021, I gave them two years to get it done. And so now every circuit court in the state of Missouri has got a veteran treatment court and it's just made a real, real difference in a lot of veterans lives. I've been to seven graduations and truly, they say there's not a dry eye in the place and there isn't, because these are, these are men and women that felt lost. They felt like they couldn't do anything and now they're sober, they're clean, they're productive citizens of the state.

So, yeah, I like what I'm doing. Term limits are a thing where I, I don't have a choice that I won't be able to run anymore, which I think it's good. At first, I didn't like it, but now I think it's a good idea where we can bring new people in, new ideas in, and it keeps it fresh. And I think that's a good thing for Missouri.

Hinson: Talk to me a little bit about your thoughts on Amendment 3 and do you think that the initiative petition put on the ballot needs to be replaced or changed at all?

Griffith: Well, I think first I want to talk, before I talk about Amendment 3, I want to talk about the initiative petition process. I think that, and I've said this for the last six years, when I'm talking with voters at the door or people that come into my office, I think anytime we change our constitution, we need to be very thoughtful about how we do that. We need to, if we have 450,000 people that can sign a piece of paper, and they can file that piece of paper and they can get an amendment that's put on the ballot to change our constitution, I think it's wrong. I think it's wrong because we have a state -- we're a state of over 6 million people, so we have 450,000 people that are being a voice for those 6 million that may not reflect what their thoughts are.

With regards to Amendment 3, I think that it's gone too far. I think Amendment 3 is a misnomer, it's misnamed. It's not about women's health. It's about abortion, plain and simple. And I think that I'm pro-life. I think that the baby doesn't have a voice in this. The man, it takes two people to make a baby and the man doesn't have a voice in that as well. But this particular, this petition, if you read and go in-depth at this petition, anybody could perform an abortion. I mean, you could perform one. You could set up your own shingle and on your, in front of your office, or get an office and you could do it. And if something went wrong and the mother died, there's no legal recourse for you.

And I think that that's, it's wrong on so many levels. I've been against abortion for all my life. As a matter of fact, my wife, when we found out that we were pregnant with our daughter, the doctor ... we'd only been married for two months. And he said "you know, you really don't have ..." because this was in 1973 when Roe vs. Wade passed. And he says, "with the law now you can abort this baby. You don't have to keep this baby if you don't want to."

And I just, I look back at my daughter over there when she was born, and think that this is a life that may not, we may not have had in our life if we, if she had made that choice. And I think that just the way that this is done, where you can have an abortion up until the day before the baby is born, that's a viable human being. And we're saying, they're saying it's just, it's just tissue. And it's, it's more to that than me. For me, and I've always been an advocate for alternatives for that. I think the pregnancy health center we've got here in town, I've been a big supporter of theirs where we're trying to work with mothers that have an unplanned pregnancy as to what they're going to do and how they can get support for that. So, there are alternatives to to abortion. And I believe, I believe we need to explore those. Should there be exceptions? I think so. I think that a lot of my Republican colleagues are straight line and say no, but I think if there's incest or rape, I think that those are justifiable reasons. But for a mother just to decide that she didn't want to have the baby, I'm totally against that.

Hinson: So, we talked you know, a little bit about your stance on abortion, we've talked about one of your priorities is helping veterans. What are some of the other things that your platform stands for?

Griffith: Well, I think that as I said earlier, I think being a voice. I mean, I've got, I have many of my constituents, not a whole lot of them, but many of them are blind and the blind pension fund, there's a trust fund where they receive the pension and occasionally they have to renew their paperwork. And that paperwork is sent out by certified mail. And so the postman will put a notice on their door, a written notice on their door. They need to go to the post office and pick up their certified mail. If you're blind, you can't see your door. You can't see that there's a notice there. So, many of these have lost an interruption in their services because they didn't know they had to go down to the post office and get their paperwork and file it and get it.

What my legislation will do will be to change that from certified mail to First Class mail, so the mail goes directly to them. Many of them have got scanners that can read their mail for them. It's a very simple thing that can be done, but it's a statute that is going to be sent by certified mail, and I've worked with the Department of Revenue for the last two years. I've worked with the Department of Revenue to try and get this changed because of the issues we have with the other side of the building, with the Senate, that bill just never got a hearing over there. So, I'm going to continue to work on on that as well.

I also have a constituent, it's a mother and daughter of a young lady that was killed by a drunk driver. And, we're looking at changing the DWI laws in the state of Missouri to where it's got more teeth to it. To where, if you kill somebody while you're drunk and you're driving, there are some mandatory sentencing requirements that will be made after you've done it. Your license is suspended for 30 days, and you can get a hardship license. So, the hardship license says you can go from your house to your work and your work to home, and that's all you can do. I know for a fact that many of these, they've got hardship licenses, are driving wherever they want to go. And I want to work with the Department of Revenue to get that changed where they either have to have an ignition device, where they have to blow into the ignition in order to get it started, see if there's alcohol on their breath. I want them to be able to not have a license until they go to court. I think that'll speed the process up for this, for this mother and daughter. They had to wait a year and a half before it finally went to court. From the continuous that go on, and I'm not saying the games that are played in court, but that's what it feels like if this your if your loved one that was killed.

So, yeah, veterans are a big priority for me. But there's also other issues that I've got constituents bring to me. Cosmetology is one of them. There's currently you have to... you have to have a separate license to be a hairdresser than doing nails. So, a simple fix would be to combine those two to where you don't have to have two licenses. That can be one license because it'll save you money. It'll save you time, it'll get people into the workforce a lot faster. So, small issues for many people on the outside looking in, but for those folks, they're big deals.

Hinson: The last thing I want to talk about is kind of, what is your stance on gun rights? You know, there was the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia. There's been a bunch of school threats kind of circulating around Missouri and in the country, just what are, what are your thoughts on that?

Griffith: I think we get back to the root cause. And I think the root cause of all of this is mental health. I think that many people want to say, especially with young people. "How can you have access if you've got, if you have guns at home, how can a young person get access to those guns?" I've got many guns at my house but they're all in a gun safe and they're locked up. When my grandkids would come over, I put every gun that I have in that gun safe so it was no chance for them to even find it. Now, when they're not there, I do have guns, a gun out and accessible. But I think that if we get back to the root cause of what it is, I think much of it is issues they have either at home, issues they have at school. They're being bullied at school, they're not doing well at school, and they're feeling frustrated. I think mental health issues are where we need to get the core reason of what's causing these.

And once we get to the core reason and we can treat it, there are a lot of signs and some of these that we've had recently, there were signs, visible signs that teachers, that counselors, that people understood. Some were parents even called to say, "I'm concerned about my child." And one here recently even said "my child took a gun with him, and I think he may have brought it to school." And that child killed four people before they finally got to him. So listening and watching the effects, kind of what states some of our children are in, I think are some of the ways we can prevent that. We're not going to solve the problem completely. But I think that if we had more counselors in schools, we have an avenue where kids could go and felt safe, that they could go to somebody and talk to them and tell them what's going on.

I'll give you an example of how this is being handled in the military. In every unit in the National Guard, they have a suicide prevention officer. It doesn't have to be an officer. It can be a non-commissioned officer, but if somebody that's assigned to that, to each company or to each battalion, I think it's down to a company level now, to where that suicide prevention officer needs to know their people. And when I say know them, I mean it's more than just knowing that they're married, they have three kids and two dogs, and you know where they live. But it's knowing them to the point where, when you talk to them and they talk to you, and they look you in the eye and you can tell there's something going on with them, and you can you know them that well, just by their actions and by their words that they're speaking that something's happening with them.

Are we gonna be able to get to get to that level with kids in school? I hope so. I mean, I think a lot of our teachers get to know who their kids are so well that they can tell if there's something going on. But then the next step is a hard one, and that is having the courage to be able to step forward and have that conversation. I'm a big football fan and last year, during the Super Bowl, during the playoffs, there was a commercial that was on. It had been on your station. They opened up, and they had people that were standing there just looking in the camera, like they're trying to find the right words. And they had four or five people that they went through. Then they came back, and those same people are looking in the camera and they're saying, you know, "I'm here to, I'm here to help you. I'm here to listen. I'm your friend. I love you. I care about you, what's going on" and then you shut up and you let them talk. And that was one of the most effective commercials as far as suicide prevention that I had ever seen.

That same scenario I think can be put forward when it comes to our kids, when it comes to the school shootings. I was disturbed about the number [of school threats] Ashland had two within two weeks. Hallsville had, Blair Oaks had one. Russellville had one. I mean, these are all communities in and around Central Missouri, where we're saying "this kind of thing doesn't happen here." It can happen anywhere. And we need to open our eyes and try to find ways that we can listen to these kids and deal with what they're dealing with because it's not easy. My grandkids are all grown now. Well, the youngest one's 19 now. But when they were growing up, they faced many of those issues but their parents and as their grandparents were there to support them and listen to them.

Hinson: Anything else that you want to add that's important that people should know?

Griffith: No, I think, I think probably one thing I want everybody to know is to vote. There's something wrong when we are excited about 30% of the vote turning out for a primary election, or 20% of the people. You got 20% of the people that are making decisions for the entire community and for the entire state. I think we need to get excited, when we've got 90%. Still, 10% the people that decide not to vote.

I represent 38,000 people in my district. Of those 38,000 people, 21,000 vote. So, that means 17,000 people that are in my district choose not to vote. And if you were to sit and talk with them and ask them why they say "well, my I'm just one person." Well, I've got colleagues that are here in the House, that some of them won their election by 11 votes.

So, when you're out knocking doors, one thing they told me right from the very beginning, when you're at the end of the day, when you're tired and your feet hurt and you want to go home, knock one more block and talk with more people, as many people as you can. But I would encourage people to get out and vote, and that your voice does mean something. We're fortunate in this country to have the right and the privilege to vote, and we need to exercise that privilege.