Missouri secretary of state cuts jobs as budget feud with state Senate escalates

Yahoo

03-06-2025

Sen. Denny Hoskins, R-Warrensburg, walks away after briefly talking to Sen. Mike Cierpiot, R-Lee's Summit, following the Senate's adjournment in 2024 (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent).
Almost two dozen employees in Missouri State Archives and the State Library are on paid leave and will lose their jobs at the end of the month because of a politically motivated budget cut targeting Secretary of State Denny Hoskins.
Twenty-two employees — 17 in the archives, five in the library — were told Friday that they did not need to return to work Monday. The employees are being paid through the end of the month, — the final month of the current budget year — but according to Hoskins could not be retained because of 'budget restrictions enacted by the Missouri General Assembly.'
However, the Republican lawmakers behind the cut say it only targeted unfilled positions in the office and there was absolutely no financial reason for Hoskins had to lay off any staff.
Hoskins, a Republican, is former state senator and has been secretary of state since January. While in the General Assembly, he tried repeatedly to cut job slots he said had been unfilled for months or years, arguing that agencies that had functioned without filling some jobs didn't need the help.
Hoskins was also a member of the Missouri Freedom Caucus, which fought harder with the GOP majority leadership than it did against Democrats. State Sen. Mike Cierpiot, a Lee's Summit Republican regularly tussled with Hoskins and the Freecom Caucus, punished him earlier this year with a budget amendment cutting 25 of the office's authorized personnel strength of 267 full time equivalent employees, or FTE, and $680,000 from one of the funds that helps pay salaries.
In the last full year under Hoskins' predecessor, only 204 of those positions were filled. The office has not used more than 215 of its full time slots for at least eight years.
At the time the cut was made, Cierpiot said it should not require any layoffs.
In a statement to The Independent, Rachel Dunn, spokeswoman for Hoskins, claimed the office had no choice.
'The General Assembly did not cut vacant or flexible FTE authority,' she said. 'It explicitly eliminated 25 FTEs from our budget, meaning we were required by law to reduce filled positions to meet that mandate. These cuts were not based on current vacancies but on a hard reduction in authorized staffing levels.'
The employees were given leave with pay to allow them time to seek new jobs, she wrote.
'This was done out of respect for their service, and to give them time to plan next steps with dignity, rather than executing immediate unpaid terminations,' Dunn said.
The $19.6 million budget approved for Hoskins' office operations includes $11.6 million in general revenue and $8 million from other funds. In addition to the archives and library, the office is the state's chief election authority, the repository of records establishing every business and not-for-profit in the state, and the regulator of securities brokers and sales.
Lawmakers give Hoskins — and every other statewide elected official — complete flexibility in determining whether each dollar is spent on payroll or the expense of maintaining the office.
And in each of the past three years, the office has returned about $3 million unspent to the state treasury, including $300,000 to $400,000 of general revenue.
There was enough money and enough flexibility for Hoskins to retain all his employees, Cierpiot said. The budget change, he said, did not mandate layoffs.
'If Secretary of State Hoskins thinks that he needs to pull back the number of people working at the archives, that's his decision,' Cierpiot said.
State Sen. Lincoln Hough, a Republican from Springfield who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said there is no reason Hoskins should have terminated employees.
'I can't understand a financial reason,' Hough said, 'that there isn't ample personal service dollars within the 100% flexibility that the Secretary of State has to continue paying not only all those folks, but I'm sure they're still flexing some other dollars associated with the vacant FTEs.'
The problem with looking to the flexibility within the office budget for money to retain the staff is the limited nature of some funds. Money collected to regulate securities can only be spent on that function, Dunn said, and there isn't enough general revenue to cover the cut in the dedicated funds that support the archive and library functions.
'The legislature cut both the FTEs and associated appropriations,' Dunn said. 'Previous administrations had kept many unfilled FTEs on the books, but unfilled FTEs don't always have funds associated with them. When the legislature cut both unfilled FTEs and payroll funds, our hands were tied.'
The archives is one of the office's most public-facing functions. It stores and preserves records from the most important to the most mundane and is used for historical and genealogical research. It is also the only part of the office to have regular evening and Saturday hours.
The archives for example, is where the original document for Gov. Lilburn Boggs' 1838 order that Mormons 'must be exterminated or driven from the state' is stored, as is former Gov. Kit Bond's 1975 order rescinding Boggs' directive.
Online collections include territorial and state censuses, every volume of the Revised Statutes going back to 1825, and service records for soldiers and sailors from the War of 1812 through World War I.
The archives will have 43 employees after the cut, and the library will have 11, Dunn said.
'The Missouri State Archives are a vital part of our shared history and cultural legacy,' Dunn said. 'These cuts will have lasting impacts on public access, preservation, and the historical transparency Missourians deserve.'
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