STATE DUMPS ROAD PLAN

Missouri's 15-year plan for highway construction was scrapped in favor of shorter-duration planning at Friday's meeting of the Missouri Highway Commission in Jefferson City.

Also given tacit approval was issuing bonds to propel highway construction in the state.

A shortfall of federal money to the state combined with planning mistakes by the Missouri Department of Highways and Transportation contributed to the decision to drop the 15-year plan, said Highway Commissioner John Oliver Jr. of Cape Girardeau.

Oliver, vice chairman of the six-member group, made the motion to dismiss the 15-year plan. The program had been in place since 1992.

"We made some mistakes and some wrong assumptions by planning more than one to two years ahead," said Oliver, "and it made us look foolish."

The 15-year plan based spending on 90 percent of what was promised by the federal government. The first year, however, the government gave Missouri only 76 percent of what was promised, starting the 15-year program with less money than planned.

Each year since, federal funding has never reached what was promised.

A three-year planning period will replace the 15-year plan, with a re-examination of priorities at the beginning of each year.

"We approved the concept of a short-term implementation plan, the object being to pick those Proposition A projects in the state and get them under way," said Oliver.

Proposition A projects are funded by a taxpayer-approved 4-cent fuel hike enacted in 1987. In recent years the Proposition A projects slipped behind the improvements in the 15-year plan, resulting in the highway department's decision two weeks ago to back off the 15-year plan projects and accelerate those funded by the proposition.

One aim of the shorter time span, Oliver said, is to get the non-Proposition A construction projects in rural Missouri "if not completed, at least under contract."

"And those will be clearly the ones in outstate Missouri that will benefit the public wellbeing," he said.

Included in that group are the Nash Road improvements south of Cape Girardeau and part of Highway 60 from Sikeston to Poplar Bluff.

Oliver said the shift from the 15-year plan "is a real opportunity for the department to put into practice a lot of the concepts they have been teaching in terms of quality improvements."

The revision of the state's road program is the first departure from a policy in place since the department was founded, Oliver said.

"This is a great opportunity to shed some of the tunnel vision and some of the artificial barriers that have been in the department since 1926," Oliver said.

He blamed the shortcomings of the 15-year plan on the highway department's structure.

"That is proof that life in the 1990s is too complicated to be dealt with by a 1926 structure," said Oliver.

"When the object is to, say, build a road from Cape Girardeau to Vanduser, and there are only one or two hoops to jump, that structure worked fine. But when there are 30 different inputs telling you how that road is to be built, it won't work. That's essentially what was wrong."

The concept of issuing bonds was approved on the condition the highway department would retire the bonds. Oliver said cost savings in the department could contribute to paying the bonds.

Joe Mickes, the department's chief engineer, has pushed for bonds to speed construction.

If bonds are issued, it would be only the third time since the department was founded the financing was used.

Bonds were last used to build roads in 1928. Since then the department has built roads on a pay-as-you-go basis.

State officials said a definite cost would have to be known before approving bonds for highway construction.