Term-limits lead Mo. lawmakers to exit early

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- With term limits bearing down, two Missouri lawmakers have resigned from office within the past two months to accept positions that hold more long-term potential.

The early departures of Reps. Dennis Wood, R-Kimberling City, and Ed Wildberger, D-St. Joseph, will result in special elections next February to select replacements for the final few months of their terms.

Those elections likely will cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars. Add it to the term-limit tab.

In the past eight years, Missouri has spent around a half-million dollars on special elections to replace lawmakers who left office early for other jobs as they neared the end of their maximum allowed time in the legislature.

Put bluntly: "People jump ship when they know that term limits are going to knock them out," said Thad Kousser, a political science professor who has researched term limits and is a visiting scholar at The Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.

Missouri is one of 15 states that limit how long people can serve in state legislatures.

Voters in 1992 approved caps of about eight years each in the Missouri House of Representatives and Senate. The clock started ticking with the 1994 elections, meaning it wasn't until 2002 that most veteran House members and some senators were barred from seeking re-election. The deadline hit in 2004 for the remaining senators.

Missouri's cost for special elections varies depending on the jurisdiction and whether there are other ballot items, which allow costs to be split with local governments.

Depending on how much time passes between a lawmaker's resignation and a special election, some of those election costs could be offset by the salary savings resulting from a vacant office.

Missouri's number of special elections rose during a roughly eight-year period after voters passed term limits. But the number of special elections that occurred during the most recent eight years (in the era of term limits) is comparable to the total for the eight years immediately preceding the passage of term limits.

Even without the pressure of term limits, some lawmakers left early for other jobs.

"If we have the same number (of special elections), term limits is a convenient excuse for `I'm tired of this and I can't take it any more and I want something with more security," said Greg Upchurch, a St. Louis attorney who was chairman of the Missouri Term Limits group that backed the 1992 initiative.

If there are additional election costs because of term limits, it's worth it for the sake rotating fresh faces into public service, Upchurch added.

According to the NCSL, about half the states elect replacement lawmakers while the other half use appointments to fill vacancies. To prohibit governors from influencing the partisan composition of legislatures, many of those states require the appointees to be of the same political party as the legislators who resigned.

Gross, whose early resignation triggered one of Missouri's more costly special elections, believes his former colleagues should consider some sort of appointment process for filling vacancies.

"They need to have a debate about it," Gross said. "But I think they need to find a way to do it cheaper."

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EDITOR'S NOTE: David A. Lieb has covered state government and politics for The Associated Press since 1995.