Janet Thompson has been a Boone County commissioner for 12 years, but she doesn’t think her work is done.
In particular, Thompson hopes to spend the next four years helping people who are incarcerated get access to mental health and substance abuse treatment. She also puts a high priority on expanding the availability of affordable housing in Boone County, increasing access to education and keeping juveniles out of the criminal justice system.
Thompson, a Democrat, is running for a fourth four-year term as a commissioner representing District II, which covers the east side of Columbia and roughly the northern half of Boone County.
“I think Boone County deserves its elected officials to be people who want to build up rather than to tear down,” Thompson said. She added that elected leaders should be “people who encourage education, who encourage people to develop and to thrive where they are and whoever they are.”
Thompson, a longtime public defender before becoming county commissioner, faces a challenge for her position from Republican Cheri Toalson Reisch, a state representative who is completing her fourth and final term in the General Assembly.
Early life and career
Thompson was born in Michigan and moved to Boone County when she was just 1 year old. She earned a law degree and a master’s degree in Spanish from the University of Missouri. She served as a public defender for 25 years before being elected commissioner in 2012.
Thompson said she was encouraged to run for the Boone County Commission by colleagues she worked with. Barbara Hoppe, who was a member of the Columbia City Council at the time, and then-Associate Circuit Judge Deborah Daniels pushed Thompson to run.
The reason Thompson keeps running for reelection, she said, is she feels she hasn’t finished the job yet. Many of the projects she prioritizes aren’t new. In fact, she has been working on some of them for the last 12 years.
Continued work
Thompson said one of her major priorities is the overwhelming amount of people with mental health issues in jail.
“There is an overrepresentation, in every jail in the country, of individuals with mental health challenges and substance abuse challenges,” Thompson said.
Thompson said she is working on how to get people out of jail, when it is appropriate for the community, and connect them with resources, including working with in2Action, a reentry program for formerly incarcerated people.
“Janet is a public servant first, politician second,” said Ann Dieterle, director of Calvary Episcopal Church, who has worked with Thompson. “She exercises leadership in an authentic way that springs from who she is.”
Thompson also said she would continue to prioritize two county projects, the Upward Mobility project and Upstream Youth Mapping.
The Upward Mobility project is a data-driven housing study that Thompson hopes will shed some light on how to direct resources to help increase housing affordability and availability.
Upstream Youth Mapping, which Boone County will start this fall, is a project that seeks to lower the chance of children entering or reentering the juvenile system.
“If you can do one thing to change the trajectory of a kid’s life, it is high-quality early childhood education,” Thompson said.
Challenges and opportunities
To Thompson, the American Rescue Plan Act, also known as ARPA, represents both a great challenge and a great opportunity. Through ARPA, the federal government distributed $35 million in COVID-19 relief funds to Boone County.
All of the money received through ARPA must be committed to projects by the end of this year, or it will be sent back to the federal government. The money then has to be fully spent by the end of 2026.
“We definitely don’t want to see any of that money going back to D.C.,” Thompson said. “We want all that money to be spent here in Boone County.”
The ARPA funds will be put toward storm water management, sewer systems, water systems, broadband, housing, food insecurity, education and health care.
Measured success
Thompson measures success from both looking at data and hearing personal stories.
The Boone County Children’s Services Fund was implemented the same year Thompson was elected to the Boone County Commission. The program was initiated by a citizen petition and allows for children in grades K-12 in Boone County to receive a mental health evaluation twice a year.
One year, a fourth grade teacher reported that a student in their class had developed a plan for suicide.
“Had that evaluation not happened, and had the teacher not gotten resources for that kid, that kid would be dead,” Thompson said. “That kid would have died by suicide in fourth grade. Sometimes a program is succeeding because a kid is still alive.”
It’s the small stories on the personal level, Thompson said, that make an impact and are most important to her.