Governor Mike Kehoe signed HB 3231 (the Missouri Innovation, Public Safety, and Accountability Act) on July 9, one of twenty-two bills he signed that day. Most of its provisions take effect August 28, and the bill has been on Plat Street's radar since Issue 1 as a piece of pending legislation. It is now a live implementation clock, and the details that matter to district managers are buried well below the headline.

Each Missouri city is entitled to designate one innovation zone. The zone's incentive value is calculated against incremental state receipts (sales tax and income tax withholdings) measured above a baseline set by the twelve months immediately preceding the zone's designation. That timing detail turns designation into a genuine strategic decision: a city that designates its zone during a temporarily depressed economic period locks in a lower baseline and captures more of the subsequent recovery as "incremental." A city that waits until conditions have already improved gives up that arbitrage.

The bill also draws a hard boundary constraint that will surprise cities layering multiple financing instruments: areas already inside a super-TIF or a Missouri Downtown Economic Stimulus Act (MODESA) district are excluded from innovation zone designation entirely. Cities that assumed they could stack an innovation zone on top of an existing TIF footprint will need to redraw boundaries around the existing district rather than through it.

Beyond the zones themselves, the bill revives MODESA as an active tool, adds a Missouri One Start jobs incentive program (requiring salaries above $70,000 and at least three new jobs), creates a Missouri Opportunity Zone tax deferral mechanism, and (notably for rural-urban politics inside the state) requires every city designating an innovation zone to contribute 10% of its net-new state sales tax revenue to a newly created Rural Missouri Development Fund. The Senate carved out certain data centers from zone eligibility during negotiations. The bill passed the House 119–24.

Greater St. Louis Inc. lobbied for the bill citing the AT&T tower and Railway Exchange block downtown as candidate sites. Properties sitting in exactly the kind of extended vacancy Plat Street has tracked as part of the broader anchor-departure story. Whether St. Louis structures its zone around that block, and whether it does so before or after August 28 in a way that optimizes the baseline calculation, will be the first real test of how sophisticated cities are about the timing mechanic buried in the bill's design.

Watch line: Which city files the first Department of Economic Development application after August 28, and whether the filing sequence shows any city deliberately timing its designation around a depressed-baseline window.

Duplicate check: Closes the legislative thread from Issue 1 and Issue 4 ("On Governor Kehoe's Desk"); opens the implementation thread.