In 2024, Missouri lawmakers passed HB 2062, a 75-page omnibus bill that included an expansion of the state's 1998-era Historic Preservation Tax Credit program, the model program roughly a half-dozen other states have since copied. Late in 2025, a Cole County judge struck down the entire bill as unconstitutional. The problem was not the tax credit language itself. It was an unrelated provision barring homeowners associations from regulating backyard chickens, which violated Missouri's single-subject rule for legislation.

The whole bill fell, tax credits included, stranding real projects mid-transaction. A Boonville developer converting former Kemper Military School barracks into housing suddenly had a 10-percentage-point financing gap. A nonprofit in Independence that had just closed on the historic Englewood Theater, where Garth Brooks played his first paid gig per local lore, lost the tax-credit eligibility its purchase depended on. These are not abstract policy casualties. They are transactions that closed on one financing assumption and woke up the next morning with a different one.

HB 3080, sponsored by Rep. Louis Riggs, restored and expanded the program on the literal final day of the 2026 session, passing the Senate May 15. Governor Kehoe signed it July 13. The restored program expands eligibility to nonprofits, raises the credit from 25% to 35% for projects outside Kansas City and St. Louis, and creates a distinct category for large historic properties with a 35% credit and more than $60M in credits made available specifically for qualifying large projects, per the Missouri Chamber's separate reading of the bill.

That large-property category is why this matters directly for two properties already in this issue's Public Scope entries. The 909 Chestnut building (AT&T Tower) and the Railway Exchange Building are, per prior reporting, the only two Missouri buildings over 1 million square feet on the National Register. They are the specific intended beneficiaries of both this bill's large-property credit expansion and last year's separate law letting oversized-building credits spread across six years rather than concentrate in a single tax year. The legislative architecture is pointed at these two buildings.

The accountability angle is the single-subject rule itself. A constitutional provision designed to prevent logrolling produced a collateral damage event that stranded real projects for months. The legislature's response was not to stop logrolling but to pass the same provision again as a standalone bill. That fixes the immediate problem but does not address the structural vulnerability that created it: any omnibus bill in Missouri is one unrelated provision away from total invalidation, and the projects that depend on it have no recourse during the gap.

Source: Jefferson City News Tribune, May 31, 2026; Missouri Chamber of Commerce, June 12, 2026; Governor Kehoe press office, July 13, 2026; KSDK, May 16, 2026.