tomcat not finding maven-project dependency

Right Click on your web project in Project Explorer -> select 'Properties'. Under project properties, select 'Deployment Assembly'.

The Deployment Assembly property page shows the content that will be published as a assembled artifact by Eclipse to the server. You need to tell Eclipse that you want all your Maven dependencies to be published too.

To do that, click 'Add' button, then select 'Java Build Path Entries'. Click Next and select Maven Dependencies. This will publish the Maven dependency JAR files to the lib folder when Eclipse publishes your project to WST server.