BOND CALLS ON SIERRA CLUB TO WITHDRAW ITS LAWSUIT

U.S. Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond hopes a petition drive will convince the Sierra Club to drop a lawsuit that could jeopardize federal highway funding for Missouri.

Bond visited Cape Girardeau Friday as part of his continuing statewide tour to promote the petition drive.

Standing atop the Diversion Channel levee just west of Interstate 55 near Nash Road, Bond said he and business groups in the state hope to secure 10,000 signatures.

Bond wants the Sierra Club and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment to drop their lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency.

The environmental groups want the EPA to hold up federal highway funding for Missouri because of air pollution problems in the St. Louis region.

Bond said that could jeopardize $600 million a year in federal highway funding for Missouri.

But Sierra Club officials said Bond's claims are false.

"He knows that state highway funds won't be impacted, but he continues his scare tactics to rally support for his political agenda," said Ken Midkiff, director of the Missouri Sierra Club.

Midkiff said the suit seeks only to withhold highway dollars from the St. Louis area until a plan is in place to address the air pollution problem in St. Louis.

Midkiff aired his views in a prepared statement faxed to the Southeast Missourian.

Midkiff said the lawsuit is intended to force metropolitan St. Louis to come into compliance with the federal Clean Air Act.

"This is not a popularity contest. "This is a federal lawsuit that will be determined in a court of law," he said.

But the Sierra Club would have found no friends among the Cape Girardeau area officials who gathered on the levee Friday.

Bond was joined at Friday's press conference by officials of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, Associated Industries of Missouri, the Missouri Farm Bureau, the Missouri Highway Corridor Coalition and the Missouri Transportation Development Council.

Those groups are helping circulate the petitions.

Bond said he has a message for the San Francisco-based Sierra Club. "Get out of our business," he said. Let Missouri proceed with efforts to improve the state's highways.

Nowhere are construction dollars needed more than in Missouri, he said.

Poor highway conditions have contributed to the deaths of more than 5,000 people in Missouri from 1992 to 1996.

Bond said Federal Highway Administration data ranks 50 percent of Missouri's major roads as poor or mediocre.

Lloyd Smith, U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson's chief of staff, also spoke against the Sierra Club lawsuit.

Emerson is backing a House bill, patterned after Bond's Senate bill, that wouldn't allow highway funding to be taken away from states for Clean Air violations.

Smith said the current lawsuit threatens the health and welfare of Missourians and jeopardizes economic development.

"This lawsuit would be devastating for business in Missouri," said Barry Orscheln, chairman of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce.

Charles Kruse, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, said his organization played a leading role 75 years ago in the "Get Out of the Mud" initiative to secure funding to improve Missouri roads.