Interview with Jamie Howard, candidate for Missouri’s 60th House District
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Democratic candidate Jamie Howard is running for Missouri's 60th state House District. He is looking to unseat incumbent Dave Griffith. He supports abortion rights and Amendment 3, which would reverse Missouri's abortion ban in the state. Affordable housing is a focus of his campaign.
Nia Hinson: Just tell me a little bit about yourself.
Jamie Howard: Yeah. So I'm a veteran. Missouri Army National Guard, former law enforcement officer, and then today I serve on the Jefferson City Human Relations Commission; as well as the River City Habitat for Humanity board of directors. And I also help run Jeff City's independent bookstore, Downtown Book and Toy.
Hinson: Why are you running?
Howard: So, I guess really my journey up to this point kind of started in November of 2020. I was working for the Sheriff's Department and I was injured in the line of duty. And while I was recovering, I made the decision to go back to school and work on my education. So, I graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in medical coding in 2022 but even after that, I still kind of felt called back into public service. So, I decided to spend some of my free time at the state Capitol to kind of see, what our state government and action looked like and like, see if maybe I could find my spot there,
looking for somewhere to be involved again.
Hinson: How has your campaign been going so far? We're a little over two weeks until election day. What have you been kind of hearing from voters when you've been out campaigning?
Howard: Our response has been really good. We've been out multiple days a week knocking on doors, making phone calls, text banking. So far, we're having an extremely positive feedback. Our response looks great. Our involvement in the community is good. It really feels like we've, we've done the work this year, and we don't have a lot to look back on and say we would have wished we would have, you know?
Hinson: What would be your first priority if you were elected?
Howard: I guess first priority is tough. I have what I guess I call my top five. They're priorities that focus on boosting our state and local economies, things that I feel like our current [Republican] super majority has lost focus on. So, things like tackling the affordable housing crisis, affordable child care, investing in education quality, affordable health care and protecting reproductive rights, like IVF and birth control. Things that not only boost our economy, but make people want to either stay, or have the ability to stay, or move back to the area where they call home. But it also encourages businesses to move to the area because businesses want to move where they have a stable, healthy workforce where they can you know, they have a well educated workforce that they can rely on. It's something that I've talked to our local Chamber of Commerce about. Something that we really agree on is that when you are able to bring more people into the workforce and create a more diverse workforce, you're able to create a more diverse employment base for the local economy, and that's good for everybody.
Hinson: When you kind of I mean, you kind of just spoke to it a little bit but when you kind of look at your platform, what are some of the things that you stand for?
Howard: If you really want to get down to it, my campaign is focused on the issues that are important to the people in my district. Every single thing that I focus on is something that people have said, "This is what's important, what are you going to do about it? If I'm going to vote for you, what are you going to do about it?" So, it comes back to focusing on sitting down and doing the research and coming up with policy decisions and having something to give to people to say, "Hey, these are the issues that are important to all of us, regardless of if you're a Republican or Democrat." If I'm elected, you know, I don't care who you voted for. I want to help. I grew up in a split family. My father's side of the family was our conservative Republicans. My mother's side of the family are very old school Democrats. So, I don't see the need to split the voters that way at the end of the day. When the election is done, we got to focus on the policies that are going to help all of us, and that sometimes looks like setting the political rhetoric aside and saying, what does the work look like? How do we get developers involved? How do we get local organizations involved? How do we make sure that we are progressing these issues forward without hammering our taxpayers? Because right now, we have a very upside down tax system in the state of Missouri. The Republican Party has focused a lot on cutting important resources and cutting corporate profit taxes to 0% which is harmful to our communities. It puts the tax burden back on working class families. And it also makes us rely heavily on sales taxes, which is what heavily impacts lower income and middle income families.
Hinson: What are your thoughts on Amendment 3?
Howard: I am absolutely in support of Amendment 3. I actually just did an article with the News Tribune here in Jeff City about that. To really summarize it you know, I've studied health care. Part of my my education with the University of Cincinnati, was studying OBGYN care and learning the difference in in that kind of care and what abortion care looks like. Miscarriage, management care, it's all tied together. And that right now, Missouri has the most strict abortion laws in the country, with absolutely no exceptions for rape and incest. And that causes us to have some of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the country. These laws don't protect anybody, and they're not fair to the doctors who have trained for years to handle these issues, and they're being punished by politicians who have absolutely no medical expertise whatsoever. We have to protect people's individual rights and people's access to privacy when it comes to health care decisions. It's just none of the government's decisions when it comes to what somebody makes privately in their doctor's office. That's a personal decision.
Hinson: Do you think that the initiative petition that was put on the ballot needs to be replaced at all? I know there's been some talk about some of the language used in that. Do you see any issues with it?
Howard: I don't. My opponent has tried to point out a few different things to make arguments against Amendment 3. And you know, I've had to fight back many times to say that "That's not how ballot language works. That's not how legal language works." One of the big things that they've tried to say is that this amendment allows for anyone to perform an abortion without legal recourse. That's not what that section of the bill says. It prevents politicians from coming after like family members and friends who help somebody make those decisions. It has nothing to do with the people who are performing that care. It still has to be done by qualified doctors, and they are still held to the same federal and state standards of care and management.
Hinson: I want to shift to talk a little bit more about school safety and kind of we've had some recent threats. There's obviously been the school shooting at Georgia at Apalachee High School. What are your thoughts on how we can keep students safe in schools?
Howard: Yeah, that's one thing that we've kind of talked about is there's a few issues that both me and my opponent agree on when it comes to this" That mental health is an issue in Missouri, and the state isn't doing enough to fund mental health services from the ground up. And it's something that we need to go back to investing in from the community level up; because the resources and the gaps aren't there. I've talked to people who ... I would say the biggest struggler for people who are standing in the gap between somebody who's struggling, whether it be with violent or suicidal thoughts, and the systems in place where there's just not enough space or resources. So, that's something that I feel like me and Republicans both agree on, that we can do work on. But something else that I that I try to really reiterate is that the the state of our current gun laws are very recent. And there was, there was a time in our state where we championed bipartisan laws that both respected the Second Amendment while keeping our communities much safer. And I think the common-sense solution is to go back and reverse some of these extreme measures that we've taken in the last few years where we've heard Republicans talking about respecting five-year-old Second Amendment rights to carry firearms in public and start having real discussions about common sense laws. You know, training, making sure that people are mentally sound, and the people, the right people, are able to get have their hands on firearms, while keeping the wrong people from having their hands on firearms. We need to make sure that domestic abusers aren't able to get their hands on firearms. We need to make sure that we have the resources and the systems available for when somebody is feeling suicidal, that we can actually help them and not just leave them alone. You know, there are a lot of things that we can do that we can look at without just covering your ears and say, "it's just the way it is." Which, is something that we've heard from our vice presidential candidate and it's not true. It wasn't true in the past, and it doesn't have to be true in the future.
Hinson: Do you think that there needs to be stricter security in schools?
Howard: That's a tough question. I know that there are arguments on both sides of that. The the more intense gun control crowd would say that we need to have stricter measures, but we also need to keep the guns from ever getting to the schools in the first place. But the other side of that is that the guns are in the community already. They exist and we should have some kind of focus on how to, how to do that safely. But that's not really a conversation that I would want to have, or a decision I would want to make without having school administrators involved in saying, "what does your district look like? "What does safety in your school look like?" Because I don't think... I grew up in rural Missouri and now I live in Jefferson City, I have for... the last seven years, six, seven years. What would work in Randolph County won't necessarily work in Jefferson City. So, it's conversations with individual districts. And what do you need? What does safety look like for you? So, you know without having school administration, school administrators and teachers on that conversation, I don't know that I have a good solution to give to blanket it.
Hinson: Is there anything else that you wanted to add that people should know about you or about your platform, or anything that I missed?
Howard: I guess what I really want to hit is why I decided to run in the first place. Or going back to how I got here in the first place, and why I decided to run as a Democrat. You know, when I said I went to the Capitol in a lot of my free time to see how the government was functioning, what I ended up seeing is that our state legislators were not putting people first. And what I saw was just awful. I saw Republican legislators walking out of committee hearings when the public was talking. We saw when they said our state tried to set our state library budget to 0%, we saw Sen. Mike Moon arguing for child marriage. [Attorney General] Andrew Bailey talking about we need more teen pregnancy. I mean, these are extremist views. And when I was able to sit down and talk to some of our elected Democrats, their policies and where their heads were at felt more like common sense. We were talking about making things affordable, more affordable for working class families, making sure that mothers have support, making sure that families are able to plan for their future, making sure that IVF and birth control are protected so that families have the opportunity to plan ahead and not fall into financial sinkholes. Housing, it's just so basic. Childcare, you know, we're doing so little to help child care. Republicans have missed the child care payment deadline and that's going to cost working class families money. And that's a top priority for a majority of the state that's just not being focused on. So, I guess really when I get down to it, my campaign is common sense. I like to set aside the talking points and the rhetoric and get down to talk common sense. What are the numbers? How can we do this? What's good for our workers? What brings money back into our economy? What puts more money in people's pockets and what moves us forward? And it takes work and it takes planning, and it's something that I have been working on my entire campaign to have policies ready in place so if I'm elected, I'm ready to go Day 1 to start fighting for these.
Hinson: I know I said that was my last question but you kind of sparked something. You talked about affordable housing, and I know that's been kind of a hot topic in Jefferson City. What in your eyes, wow can we fix that issue?
Howard: I would love to talk about affordable housing. So, the biggest things that we can do are to incentivize development: So, we look at like tax incentives for developers to say, if you're going to build affordable housing, we are going to... you can abate your taxes for five, 10 years. I think policies like that, while also relaxing our zoning or doing zoning reform. So a lot of cities, including Jefferson City, the housing areas are listed as single family buildings. That would need to change so that we can do town homes, duplexes, triplexes, mixed income housing, so multi-unit family developments in areas where it's profitable in the city. So, near downtown, near where industry is, places where people want to live, put near school districts, things that that bring more people back into Jeff City. But it also lowers housing costs. We've seen it in Minneapolis, where they've built the most number of homes in the Midwest out of any other major city, and they're also seeing the biggest drop in housing prices and housing costs for the people who live in the city. And I know that because of Gov. Tim Walz, they like to hammer that state a lot, but the numbers don't lie. You can be on whatever side you want to be on that. But the reality is, they they built more houses, they put more money in workers pockets, and they lowered the costs. And beyond that, we have local organizations here on the ground who are already doing the work. Me and my opponent have both talked about Habitat for Humanity. Me being on their Board of Directors, a big thing I want to do is have the state work with these organizations who are already doing it and say, how do we expand what you're doing? How do we make it easier for you? How do we make it more affordable? And how do we do more of it? And then the last big one, one that I've gotten from talking to developers in the area who are doing the work already is modernizing our infrastructure. A lot of Jeff City has some aging infrastructure. So, when you're building new developments, new apartment complexes, new housing, it costs money to replace that section of the public utilities so that it all matches up and it all flows. If we work with the federal government, with grants and as well as the state to help us modernize that infrastructure, it saves developers money and it's a long term investment for the city, it's good for all of us.
Hinson: Anything else you want to add? I think those are all my questions now.
Howard: No. I mean, I could go on and on and on, just trying to hit you know, the big points of it and some of the important things to consider when we're talking about it. But that's there. There are places that are already doing this, and they're already doing it affordably, and they're already doing it successfully. We have seen... we've we've seen it done. We can do it here and we can't, we just can't let this super majority that has reduced to political bickering hold us back anymore. We have to start moving, and moving forward. We got to start investing in our state. We have to start investing in our people, and we have to acknowledge that the policies that we've done in the last couple decades just aren't working. They failed. That's why our state is in the bottom of too many quality of life metrics, education spending per student and state employee pay, healthcare outcomes, maternal infant mortality. I mean, we can go on and on. We're falling behind. We're falling behind our Midwest and southern neighbors, and we don't have to be we have to elect leaders who are going to invest back into our communities.
