RIVER CITY JOURNAL: HERE IT IS: THE SURE-FIRE SOLUTION TO THE ROUNDABOUT CRISIS

I had hoped we would be past the roundabout issue by now.

Indeed, it was my fervent wish that The River City of Roses Traffic-Go-Round and Memorial Circle of Weeds would have become something of a tourist destination by this time, joining such attractions as The World's Shortest River With a Waterfall on the campus of our very own university or The Gold-Plated Cement Creek and Rollerblade Track that runs the entire length of our metropolis.

To tell the truth, I honestly thought we would have full use of the roundabout long before the grand ceremonial tee-off and hush puppy-eating contest at The World Famous Downtown Golf Course and All-You-Can-Eat Catfish Buffet.

But I was wrong.

I wasn't even close.

There are lessons to be learned here. I can only pray we will heed whatever wisdom there is to be gleaned from all those rowdy roundabout haters.

One lesson is apparent to me already. It is based on years of observing human behavior in towns and cities and villages across this great nation. And I am going to tell you what I've learned.

If you want a bunch of riled-up people to attend city council meetings, you can do one of two things:

1. Pass a leash law for cats.

2. Announce you're going to build another roundabout.

If I thought it would do any good, I would tell you the easy way to solve this roundabout imbroglio. And it wouldn't cost anywhere near $100,000. But it wouldn't do any good. By now, any upstanding taxpayer knows no government solution is easy, and no government solution is cheap. By the time we even come close to a conclusion of The Great Roundabout Caper, I estimate we will have spent close to a million dollars, if you include the usual Fudge Factor and the necessary Reserve for Cost Overruns required by the City Code of Contracts and Engineering Guesswork.

Worse than the cost, though, is the specter of still more municipal mayhem -- stuff we thought we'd never live to see.

Shucks, if a roundabout is good for the civic constitution, what else can we do?

Plenty.

For example, I'm surprised there haven't been howls of protest over the city's new When-We-Say-Jump-You-Ask-How-High Taxpaying Procedure that -- I think I've got this right -- goes into effect at the stroke of midnight next Jan. 1.

If you haven't heard anything about it, the WWSJYAHHTP will require paying your city tax bill at City Hall from now on.

The good news is the city tax rate will be frozen at its current level.

The bad news is the city expects to rake in millions more dollars every year.

Here's how it works.

The line leading to the Pay Your Taxes Here window at City Hall will have hoops every 10 yards or so. If you get in line real early in the morning the day after your tax bill arrives in the mail, you probably won't have more than three or four hoops ahead of you.

You will, of course, be expected to jump through these hoops. Those of us who can no longer jump will have the option of going around a hoop -- after we add 10 percent to our tax bill. So walking around three hoops will add 30 percent to our tax bills. And if we wait too long to pay our taxes, the line will be really, really long, and we could wind up with 10 or 15 hoops, or 100 percent to 150 percent added to our tax bills.

The WWSJYAHHTP obviously gives the biggest advantage to taxpayers who owe the least -- folks who tend to be young (able to jump) and poor (10 percent of nothing is still nothing).

You probably think I'm making this up.

But I'm not.

When I went to see the pooh-bahs at City Hall to find out how in the dickens the WWSJYAHHTP came about, they were extremely frank.

This plan, they said, could have been easily avoided if the public had been a little more receptive to the latest trends in traffic geegaws.

In other words, they said, we can either stop bellyaching about the roundabout or we can jump through hoops until you-know-what freezes over.

The city fathers were just as nice as they could be when they explained all of this to me, so I don't think they're doing it out of spite or anything like that.

But I got the feeling, during my visit to City Hall, that city officials don't like it when people laugh at newfangled doodads like roundabouts.

Nosiree.

I got the impression -- and a pretty strong one -- that we can buck up and start driving in circles or the city planning department will unleash a whole bunch of new ideas on us. The WWSJYAHHTP is just the start.

They said something about one-way traffic on Broadway and turning Kingshighway into a pedestrian mall. I didn't quite catch everything they were saying about closing the William Street overpass at I-55. It's hard to keep up with everything being said by people who are gritting their teeth and smiling at the same time.

Folks, we better let the city brass have their roundabout.

I don't know about you, but I don't think we can stand many more municipal innovations. If we let them play with the roundabout, maybe they'll forget about all that other stuff.

What do you think? Are you ready to say something nice about your favorite traffic circle?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.