Power Profile: Senator Curtis Trent
Senator Curtis Trent represents the 20th Senatorial District in the Missouri Senate.
Senator Curtis Trent, R-Battlefield, considers it a privilege and honor to serve the people of the 20th Senatorial District as their state senator and appreciates the challenge of representing suburban and rural communities that have a variety of different needs.
He was raised near Ava, Missouri, as the fifth generation on a family farm, a farm he jokingly says was “mostly rocks and a few cows.” His parents were the first generation of his family to graduate high school, and his father was a Vietnam veteran and worked as a refrigerator repairman.
Trent became the first person from his family to graduate college, earning a degree from Missouri State University (MSU). Following his time at MSU, he then went a step further and graduated from St. Louis University with a law degree.
After graduation, Trent became the first full-time staffer for Congressman Billy Long’s campaign, a position which led to him being Long’s deputy chief of staff in Washington, D.C. Trent eventually returned to Southwest Missouri to become a lawyer, but says he felt the call to public service, which led to his successful campaigns as a Missouri state representative and then state senator.
“What happens in government is important and affects all of our lives,” Trent said. “Our system of government was very well-designed, but it requires people who want to be good stewards.”
Trent’s current legislative priorities are areas where he thinks government can best serve the citizens of Missouri and make their lives better. Those areas include education reform, tort and criminal justice reform and economic development.
He’d like to bring investment into rural Missouri to boost the economic growth of the entire state, and one critical component of that is infrastructure. “I very much believe in infrastructure as a prerequisite for economic activity,” Trent said.
“One of the advantages that Missouri has over other states is a low cost of living,” he added. “Maintaining a cheap, reliable source of electricity for Missouri businesses and families is a very high priority of mine.”
As legacy electric generation facilities are retired throughout the country, Trent sees electricity becoming a bigger part of the average person’s energy consumption, making electrical generation more critical than ever. “Electricity is a huge industry input, a huge economic input,” he said. “It can’t be understated how important it is to have reliable, abundant energy.”
The 20th Senatorial District has a diversity of energy needs but also energy production, as Trent noted: “You’ve got a large coal-fired power plant in the Greene County region, and then you’ve got wind farms in the Dade County and Barton County area.”
He sees diversity of energy production as an important part to maintaining reliability at a reasonable cost. “Ameren is a forward-looking company,” he said. “Increasingly, nuclear power has to be part of the conversation, and that’s an area where Ameren can lead the way and can make Missouri an energy leader in our region through the diversity of their energy portfolio.”
For more information on Sen. Trent, please visit his official Senate webpage at senate.mo.gov/Trent.