ANOTHER HIGHWAY CONFERENCE IN JEFF CITY

If you are confused about what is happening to highway plans in Missouri, you're not alone. Consider:

-- The Missouri Department of Transportation, when asked recently to provide the Southeast Missourian with a list showing the amount of money budgeted for each of the highway department's 10 districts in the now defunct 15-year plan and in the new five-year plan, took several days to come up with the numbers. And then it said it couldn't release those numbers until they had been reviewed by a legislative oversight committee -- even though this newspaper, not the committee, had requested what you might expect would be readily available figures.

-- Legislators and other state officials appear to be uncertain about the future of the state's transportation needs, even after a group called the Total Transportation Committee met for months to develop recommendations that have pretty much evaporated into the political fog in Jefferson City. That group's aim, apparently, was to create statewide interest in new taxes to pay for transportation projects that went far beyond good highways -- new taxes at a time when tax-refund checks are being mailed.

A special conference has been called by Gov. Mel Carnahan for Wednesday and Thursday of this week to get folks together to talk about -- what else? -- transportation needs. It can only be assumed that the conference will focus on projects beyond 2003 when the current five-year plan, already in place, is completed.

As readers of this newspaper well know, a lot of attention has been paid to waxing and waning of Missouri's transportation plans. It is of some interest that this is the only newspaper in the state that has been delving into tax funding of transportation. Every inquiry leads to another set of questions, and those answers raise more questions. Perhaps most interesting of all has been the lack of figures and other data at the tips of the highway officials' fingertips. This leads to the possibility that highway finances are, indeed, a mystery even to those who are responsible for spending billions of dollars a year.

And that is the crux of statewide transportation needs: money. Where will it come from? How much is there? How much do we need?

When the ambitious 15-year plan went into effect, the General Assembly increase the state's fuel tax by six cents a gallon. At the time, there was an understanding that more than half of the highway spending would go to rural areas, with St. Louis and Kansas City receiving less than half.

As reported by the Southeast Missourian, there has been a significant shift in the split for transportation spending. The urban share under the 15-year plan was 40.5 percent of the total -- 45.1 percent if you include that part of District 4, which includes both Kansas City and the fast-growing suburban area around it. Under the five-year plan, the urban share has grown to 49.6 percent -- 57.6 percent if you include the Kansas City suburbs.

In the minds of some Missourians, this is reason for concern, particularly if you consider that six of the eight non-urban highway districts are slated to receive less funding as a percentage of total spending under the five-year plan than they anticipated with the 15-year plan.

This shift means fewer rural road projects will be done, which means not only was the financing of the 15-year plan faulty, so were many of the promises made.

If this week's governor's conference on transportation expects to do anything worthwhile, it will need to find a way to restore confidence. Without some display of integrity, the conference's themes will ring hollow.

For starters, the conference might look at the six-cent fuel-tax increase that motorists continue to pay, even though the plan the extra taxation was to pay for has been scrapped. Then the conference might consider how a highway commission can scrap a plan put in place by the General Assembly. Good questions. Are there good answers?