HOLDEN'S SILENCE ON LEGAL FEES IS DEAFENING

With all the goodies Gov. Bob Holden wants to give to Missourians, you would think he would look for ways to squeeze every dime to fund his wish list.

Indeed, Holden has presented himself as something of a fiscal conservative in some regards, but he continues to display his tax-and-spend colors on other costly programs.

The most obvious example of his disregard for the people's money is his refusal to take a stand on the obscene fees Attorney General Jay Nixon wants to pay his hand-picked tobacco lawyers.

Right now there are two major budget crunches in state government. The first is how to pay for the gap between spending and revenue in the current budget year that ends June 30. The second is how to cover everything that has been thrown into the budget for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1.

The legislature already has approved stopgap appropriations to make up nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, the difference between spending and state income, in this year's budget. There are a variety of reasons for the big gap, and check-writing goofs last year -- while Holden was state treasurer -- lead the list.

To help pay for this year's spending, the legislature finally gave in to Holden's demand that a big chunk -- $127 million -- of the yet-to-be-received tobacco settlement funds be used. This, of course, flies in the face of the pretense that the tobacco settlement was to repay the state for expenses related to health care for tobacco users. With a stroke of the pen, Holden will send $127 million of the tobacco settlement to programs that have nothing to do with tobacco-related costs.

Which brings us to the fees for Nixon's tobacco lawyers.

The attorney general hired a stable of lawyers to handle Missouri's tobacco lawsuit just as a national settlement was being resolved.

Under his contract with those lawyers, they would be paid $250 an hour because the case was settled before Jan. 1, 1999. But Nixon, in a generous gesture, announced the lawyers would instead receive a percentage of the settlement -- hundreds of millions of dollars -- even though they had little to do.

Meanwhile, a deal was struck with the tobacco companies to decide the lawyers' fees by arbitration. This process is expected to award $150 million to $200 million to the lawyers, an exorbitant amount considering the fact that the national tobacco settlement was pretty much a done deal by the time they were hired by Nixon.

Senate Bill 454, in the Missouri Legislature, would put any arbitrated legal fees into a trust fund and allow a special panel to determine how much the lawyers should get, with a cap of $500 a hour -- twice the amount the lawyers would have received under the original contract.

The rest of the arbitrated legal fees would go to the state's general-revenue fund to help pay the freight of state government.

Given Governor Holden's budget squeezes and the need to find revenue to pay for everything he wants, wouldn't it seem reasonable that he would see the arbitrated legal fees from the tobacco settlement as a gold mine?

After all, he has already committed $127 million of the settlement itself to pay for state government's fiscal blunders.

But Holden has been silent on the tobacco legal fees. There hasn't been a peep from the state's chief executive officer on the silliness the attorney general is trying to spring on Missouri taxpayers.

Why?

The legislature has the Missouri Supreme Court on its side in deciding how the fees to Nixon's lawyer buddies will be set. The court ruled last year that those lawyers are state employees. Moreover, the court said, the clients those lawyers represented are the taxpayers of Missouri.

It would seem the governor of all those clients would want to see them get the best deal possible regarding legal fees. In the process, he would have millions more dollars to pay for his pet projects, because it is highly unlikely any of the tobacco settlement will ever go into the pockets of those clients, where it belongs.