BUDGET CAUSES TAXPAYER INDIGNATION

KENNETT, Mo. -- Next month, Missourians will read headlines in their local newspapers proclaiming the end of this year's session of the General Assembly along with a wide assortment of messages of self-congratulations by those who have participated in its progression from budget officers to state law.

Missing from this litany of political pontification will be any complete understanding of the billions of dollars our state intends to spend beginning July 1 on a variety of programs, ranging from expanded testing of the ability of fourth-graders to read with comprehension to planned excursions of state employees to various vacation locales to acquaint bureaucrats with the enjoyment of living it up on taxpayer money while appearing to look interested.

Except for the brave and valiant legislators who serve on budget and appropriations committees and who for the most part dig into the insignificant as well as the significant items of 16 departmental budgets, the official you elected to serve in the General Assembly knows little to nothing about budgetary details.

The experts are the few who pursue their thankless job hour after hour during the session, often while their fellow senators and representatives are off attending a lobster fest sponsored by some organization with a real attachment for state money, grants and gifts.

This isn't a perfect way to spend taxpayer money but it may be the only way in which our constitutionally designated fiscal watchdogs can presently give the required approval to annual budgets.

There is a danger, however, in reading what our state agencies are seeking and what they are eventually handed by their so-called legislative monitors, which for want of a better description should be called Budget Bulimia. It's a common enough disease since it afflicts some of our brightest and ablest lawmakers and, even more importantly, becomes law even if the spending bills are enacted by a majority of just a single vote.

Budget Bulimia is most common among those who have made it a practice to read annual budgets over a period of years and are able to detect significant changes from one year to the next.

These changes occur most frequently when the state's economy is either in the dump or is on an artificial high as it has been in recent years, thanks in large measure to investor gullibility and-or lack of market and product savvy.

Investment houses have grown wealthy in the Dot-com Era, but so have federal and state governments, Missouri included. As a matter of fact, our state budgets have doubled during this market heyday, thanks in some unknown measure to profits from IPOs and other Wall Street gimmicks.

Now that some common sense is beginning to prevail about the worth of stock and the year-end profit total, Missouri's fiscal year 2002 budget may experience some rough sledding in the months ahead, but the estimates are already in and will soon become reality.

Some of these realities are worth mentioning, if only because the trauma is less if there is some warning beforehand.

As an example, most Missourians would have preferred a much earlier warning their highway plan was in considerable financial difficulty before newspapers broke the bad news.

In the next budget Missouri will soon be living under, the state is proposing some unremarkable corrections in the Missouri Department of Transportation's spending and is proposing that the agency's revenue no longer be diverted to all kinds of programs, including many under the direction of the Highway Patrol. This transfer of funds accounts for an average $150 million a year, and while ending this transfer won't resuscitate the highway plan, it can complete numerous projects filed under "Not Yet" in the transportation agency's filing cabinets.

Gov. Bob Holden's proposed budget further suggests the optimistic view that as long as Missourians continue arresting drug addicts and throwing them into newly built prisons and as long as the state maintains its pinch-penny policy on addiction treatment, the smoke cloud hanging over our state from pot, heroin and meth will disappear.

Earlier budgets reflected the state's policy to get tough on drug violations, throwing thousands of addicts into prisons yet to be built. Missouri followed policies originated by New York and California, and both of these states have now recanted and are giving far greater attention to expanded treatment programs to reduce crime.

I'm sorry to say Missouri has failed to demonstrate similar enlightenment. Haven't those who have read this pending budget picked up on the fact that the state is treating 9,000 more addiction sufferers than the total population of all of Missouri's old and new prisons combined? In just looking at these two sets of figures, hasn't anyone in the state Capitol noted the disparity of funding for both services and tax dollars spent for these two categories?

Apparently not.

If the totals are not changed in conference, addiction programs by the state will receive less funding in the budget starting July 1 than they are receiving at this moment. Requests for money for new, needed addiction programs have been slashed even as new corrections dollars have been approved in order to furnish two new prisons now on line.

Adequate funding is certainly required for state prisons. They protect the public and get dangerous criminals off the street. They also house men and women who have been sent away because they were addicts, a solution our state officials seem to believe is rational.

Budgets have a way of establishing and continuing programs, even when they are wrong or outdated. We had all better pray that someone in the state Capitol reads the details of the one that will soon become law.

Otherwise Missouri will spend the next 12 months wandering in the wilderness.

~Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.