Missouri lawmakers will be focusing on University of Missouri operations this summer, the House and Senate leaders told reporters Wednesday.
Senate President Pro Tem Ron Richard, R-Joplin, said he and House Speaker Todd Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, expect to have appointees named to a special MU review panel within the next week to 10 days.
Lawmakers this spring created the eight-member University of Missouri System Review Commission to look at all MU operations - especially rules and regulations, administrative structure, campus structure, auxiliary enterprises structure, degree programs, research activities and diversity programs.
The resolution creating the commission gave Richardson and Richard four appointments each - and specified the commission members be experts "in governance, management and finance, school leadership, instruction, and law."
After a "thorough review" of the system, the commission is to prepare a report detailing any recommended changes and deliver it by Dec. 31 to the legislative leaders and MU president.
"We're going to spend some time making sure we get the right set of people on that," Richardson said Wednesday. "It's a critical priority for the state and, I think, the University of Missouri."
Richard is taking recommendations from all the senators, Democrats and Republicans. "I'm just going on resumes and what we think are good, quality people who have the best interests of the institution," he said.
After campus protests last fall, Richard told reporters in January the Senate would not consider any Nixon nominees to the MU Board of Curators - and that promise was kept.
The nine-member board has only six voting members and three vacancies, plus an unfilled, non-voting student curator's spot.
The state Constitution allows the governor to make interim appointments while the Legislature is out of session and have those appointees begin work immediately.
"College - especially the University of Missouri and, especially, the flagship campus - is vitally important to this state," Nixon told reporters recently.
"I will be looking forward to filling up the Board of Curators so they can accelerate the processes to get new leadership formally on the campus."
But those appointees still must win Senate confirmation next January, unless the new governor elected in November, replaces them with other appointees.
Richard said Wednesday whoever is proposed for Senate confirmation next year, "I'm going to expect an answer on how they're going to restructure the governanceand what they're going to do about this whole University of Missouri tendency of having faculty run the system, and not the Board of Curators.
"So there better be a plan of reform, or they're not going to get (confirmed)."
In addition to MU issues, Richard said the Senate will have three interim committees operating this year, while the Legislature is out of session: "One on veterans and certificate of need, one on utilities and one on pharmacy benefits and Medicaid."
The Medicaid committee mostly will look at the expanding costs of pharmacy in the Medicaid program, he said.
"Sen. David Sater is a pharmacist, and he says there may be some waivers that he can apply for," Richard said. "So we're going to find out - whatever we can save would be helpful, because (Medicaid) sucked up $300 million this year, and a lot of that was pharmacy."
He noted Medicaid pharmacy costs "have gone up over 1,000 percent in the last several years - and we can't continue that."
Richardson said he's "really glad to see the continued interest in figuring out a way to deal with prescription drug costs," and he's "glad to see that's a priority for both chambers to try and address. It continues to be a significant cost driver of the state's Medicaid program, in particular a cost driver of the supplemental budget request we seem to get every year for Medicaid."
He agreed the Senate's three committees involve "three good policy areas to consider. They are obviously (subjects) we spent a lot of time working on this year, and I think they will be things we come back to."
Richardson said he still is considering what interim committees the House might have.
"We will have some in the coming weeks as we transition from this session and (begin) looking forward to the next one," the speaker said. "We are kind of in the early stages of identifying what we want those to be."