Missouri governor says he’s ready to go after six years in ‘pressure cooker’ job

JEFFERSON CITY — After taking over as governor amid a scandal in 2018, Republican Mike Parson hoped to bring stability to a state that had just watched the unsettling resignation of his predecessor.

But, in an expansive interview as he prepares to leave office, Missouri’s 57th chief executive said he remains in awe of how multiple crises unfolded during his tenure as chief executive.

Within weeks of taking over for scandal-plagued Republican Eric Greitens, the former state lawmaker and county sheriff raced to Branson in the aftermath of the sinking of a duck boat ride at Table Rock Lake that killed 17 tourists.

There was a flood, a drought, a crisis in the St. Louis prosecutor’s office and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There was so much turmoil when I first walked in these doors. The first big challenge was, ‘How do you stabilize that?’” Parson said. “I think at the end of the day, we did.”

Parson will leave the warren of offices overlooking the Missouri River on the Capitol’s second floor on Jan. 13, handing the keys to Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, a fellow Republican who has signaled he too wants relative continuity in 2025 by retaining a number of Parson holdovers to serve in his cabinet.

In a wide-ranging conversation with the Post-Dispatch, Parson said there were many incidents that no governor could have been prepared to face, including a respiratory virus that infected a third of all residents and killed 22,000 Missourians.

Like other governors, Parson faced evolving and often conflicting health advice, as well as members of the public split on masks, vaccines and school and business closures.

“It was one of the most difficult times I had,” Parson said. “It was just unprecedented.”

The governmental response to the virus wasn’t just a fight between a more relaxed approach in rural Missouri versus heightened health concerns in more populous urban areas, Parson said.

“Some people wanted mandates, some people didn’t and that was all over the state,” said Parson, pointing to examples that came from friends in his hometown of Bolivar.

“I remember people down home talking about churches, for example. I remember people calling me and saying you need to shut the churches down,” Parson said. “And that was people back home. You had that kind of pressure every day.”

The COVID-19 shutdowns sent Missouri’s unemployment rate skyrocketing, pushing beyond the 12% level in April 2020. But, through a combination of vaccines and businesses opening, the rate was down to 6.8% by July 2020 and 4.2% a year later.

“The whole time you’re fighting the virus you’re trying to keep the economy going,” he said.

Parson said his decision to not shut down the state was based largely on his experience of owning a Polk County gas station in his younger days. Small business owners need to pay loans, mortgages and employees.

“We made it possible for people to stay open,” Parson said. “I think looking back on it we did the right thing.”

It wasn’t smooth sailing.

In July 2020, Parson downplayed the risk of children contracting the coronavirus during school reopenings, insisting “they’re going to get over it.”

“These kids have got to get back to school,” he said at the time. “They’re at the lowest risk possible. And if they do get COVID-19, which they will — and they will when they go to school — they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctor’s offices. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.”

“We gotta move on,” he continued. “We can’t just let this thing stop us in our tracks.”

The blowback was harsh. Some health officials expressed concern about returning to schools because students could carry the virus home to older relatives.

“I probably didn’t do it as tactfully as I should have,” Parson now acknowledges. “It was pretty brutal. People came after me with both barrels.”

The governor’s approach to COVID-19 was similar to how he addressed other issues.

Often out of sync

Parson governed as a staunch Republican, eagerly taking up GOP talking points on guns, immigration and cultural issues. He signed a strict abortion ban in 2019 that went into effect in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

He won legislative support to give the nation’s lowest-paid state workers raises topping 25% to address an ongoing labor shortage in his administration, but he refused to sign any state worker employee union contracts during his entire tenure. Long waiting times for residents seeking state benefits were a frustrating feature of the Parson era.

Missouri voters also sent Parson and his fellow Republicans multiple reminders that Missouri is not a wholly red state when it comes to social service issues.

In 2020, for example, Missouri voters approved an expansion of Medicaid coverage after years of Republican opposition to President Barack Obama’s signature achievement of trying to fix the nation’s health care system. Parson opposed the expansion as a dangerous drain on tax revenues.

The administration slow-walked the voter-approved rollout until the Supreme Court of Missouri held the expansion amendment to be constitutional.

People began enrolling in October 2021, nearly a year after the matter was approved at the ballot box.

Expansion has proven popular. As of Dec. 6, more than 316,000 adults were enrolled to get health coverage. In all, there are nearly 1.3 million Missourians receiving health insurance through Obamacare.

In response to the Medicaid vote and other citizen-led petition drives, Parson says lawmakers must make it harder for residents to amend the state’s constitution. Republicans who control the Legislature were unable to raise the threshold for passage during a contentious spring legislative session and, by the fall, voters overturned the ban on abortion through an initiative petition.

Although Parson favors toughening the standards for passage of amendments, he also urged the Legislature to resolve problems before residents feel the need to make changes themselves at the ballot box.

“If you don’t take action … people are going to go to the initiative petition process because they get frustrated because nothing ever happens here and nobody is willing to come to a compromise,” Parson said.

The state budget also grew exponentially during his tenure, some of that due to an influx of billions of dollars in federal funds.

As he leaves office, Parson contends that a series of income tax cuts also helped boost the bottom line.

“Yes, the budget has ballooned during this administration. There’s no doubt about it,” he said. “It’s because revenues went up. If you put money back in people’s pockets, the general revenue and the economy grows.”

Picking the ‘right people’

Parson’s relationship with the Democrat-controlled St. Louis region was sometimes testy over Republican opposition to tightening the state’s loose gun laws and ongoing threats to put the city’s police department under state control.

“I set out early on to make sure the people of St. Louis realize I just wasn’t some old country boy from southwest Missouri and I was just going to take care of things back home,” Parson said. “For the state of Missouri to do well, St. Louis must do well.”

“You’ve got to be part of finding solutions. Sometimes when you get involved it becomes controversial,” he said.

Parson said he never imagined he would be in the middle of a fight over the St. Louis city prosecutor’s office when he was first sworn in.

“I didn’t even know it was my job to pick the circuit attorney of St. Louis,” Parson said.

In 2023, Parson appointed Gabe Gore, a civil attorney, to rebuild the city prosecutor’s office following the abrupt resignation of embattled Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner.

Gore, then a partner at the high-powered and politically connected Dowd Bennett law firm, served on the Ferguson Commission following protests over the 2014 death of Michael Brown and worked as an assistant U.S. attorney prosecutor in the 1990s.

“That was a big selection. You could tell he cared about the city,” Parson said of Gore.

Parson also had the unprecedented opportunity to appoint four people to statewide office to fill vacancies when the officeholder ran for higher office and left the post open.

He elevated state treasurer Eric Schmitt to attorney general to succeed Josh Hawley. Hawley and Schmitt are now both U.S. senators. Parson named Scott Fitzpatrick, a state representative, to succeed Schmitt as treasurer. Fitzpatrick is now state auditor. The governor named his general counsel Andrew Bailey to succeed Schmitt as attorney general and lawyer Vivek Malek to succeed Fitzpatrick as treasurer.

“I really tried to pick people who were good for the jobs,” he said.

All four ran for election after their appointments and voters gave them easy wins on Election Day — a result Parson says means that he chose the right people.

“I think the people of the state said, ‘You did a pretty good job,’” Parson said.

There also were controversies inside the Capitol and outside.

At the height of the pandemic, amid concerns about the ongoing spread of the virus, former House Speaker Rob Vescovo informed Parson’s office that he would have to deliver the annual State of the State speech to an empty House chamber.

An enraged Parson received permission to give his speech in the Senate chamber. Two days later, a fuming Parson fired off a letter accusing Vescovo of engaging in a “purposeful and disgusting scheme to embarrass” him.

“Instead, Wednesday became an insider stunt and petty show of arrogance and political power,” Parson wrote.

Dealing with the media

In 2021, Parson accused the Post-Dispatch of hacking into a state website despite evidence that his own administration’s computer shortcomings had left personal information about Missouri teachers available within a few mouse clicks on a state-run website.

He never apologized for the accusation after prosecutors declined to press charges.

Parson also raised eyebrows for pardoning Central West End attorney Mark McCloskey and his wife, Patricia, in 2021 for brandishing guns at protesters who were moving through the neighborhood. He also was criticized in 2024 for pardoning Britt Reid, the son of Kansas City Chiefs Coach Andy Reid, who had been in prison for a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a 5-year-old girl.

His decision this month to commute the prison sentence of former police detective Eric DeValkenaere, the first Kansas City officer ever convicted of killing a Black man, was, as expected, highly controversial. But Parson also was widely praised for granting clemency to Patty Prewitt, who had spent 40 years behind bars for her husband’s 1984 murder.

“It wasn’t like we liked all the stories anyone wrote, but you’re not in the business of writing everything I like,” Parson said.

“You have to learn to deal with the media. From Day One, we tried to establish a role with the media. And for the most part we were able to do that,” he said.

Parson said Kehoe will hit the ground running next month. He hopes the former senator and Jefferson City businessman will address the state’s child care industry, which has not recovered from the pandemic. A key to solving the problems lies with Kehoe navigating divisiveness among Republicans, who have been unable to overcome differences in the state Senate, leading to a record-low number of non-budget bills going to Parson’s desk.

“I think he’s got a really good foundation to build on,” Parson said. “If there is one thing on the table that I didn’t get done … you’ve got to do something about the day care situation in the state.”

“It is a huge issue for everyday people out there. There’s just a lack of it,” Parson said.

As he heads back to Bolivar, a city of 11,300 people, his small cattle operation and home to Southwest Baptist University, Parson said the last six years were more intense than many can imagine.

“The worst part of the job is time. You just have very little time,” Parson said. “I missed my family. I missed a lot of ball games. It is a pressure cooker every day and it just never stops.”

But, he said, “We got about everything done that we started out to do. I’m looking forward to going home.”