GOVERNOR SHOULD HAVE HAD A BARBECUE

Later this week I will travel to Jefferson City for the final days of the legislative session. It promises to be a circus -- as it always is at the session's close -- with several pressing issues still unresolved. Among the issues hanging in the balance is the governor's transportation plan.

Passage, if possible, would be by a razor-thin margin, thanks to the history-setting tax increase Gov. Bob Holden proposes to finance the project. Republican senators find the new taxes unacceptable, preferring to finance a transportation plan through budget cuts and use of money from the tobacco settlement that would otherwise go to lawyers who represented the state at exorbitant fee levels.

Already, the battle over these issues has sparked fireworks between the governor and Senate leader Peter Kinder of Cape Girardeau. More are expected, especially after one Republican alternative failed to pass yesterday, giving the governor some hope that his plan might still make it through the Republican-controlled Senate.

Another issue still to be resolved is legislation proposed by Cape Girardeau's state Rep. Jason Crowell, which would require future governors to fully disclose inauguration financing.

This became an issue only after Holden promised full disclosure of his record $1 million inauguration party, the highest in the nation this year, then decided to hide behind a private committee he established to organize the event. An investigation by The Associated Press has revealed that the committee is $417,000 in debt.

Holden says he will focus on raising the money after the session closes, but he didn't want the effort to distract him now. He also dismissed Crowell's ethics amendment, which passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support, as "not a serious effort to change anything, just to make a point to me."

Apparently, more important to Holden than confronting the serious potential conflicts of interest involved in raising unlimited amounts of money in secret from people with interests before the state is the legacy he hopes to have established in putting on the country's most extravagant governor's party.

"This was not some backyard barbecue," he told The AP. "I think we changed dramatically the tenor of the atmosphere of inauguration in Jefferson City that no future governor will be able to change back."

Someone, please, rein the governor in before he damages himself further on this particular issue.

Popular prom photos

Thanks to prom photos from Cape Girardeau, Jackson and Notre Dame high schools, the semissourian.com Web site established new records for traffic last week. And the daily traffic has subsided little since the new peaks. Apparently, the prom photos attracted new users to the site, many who are continuing to visit on a regular basis. Overall, traffic for the month of April is on pace to smash the previous all-time high for a month by nearly 100,000 page views. (Of course, this isn't all that surprising since the site has set new monthly highs for the past eight months in a row.)

To give you a sense of the breadth of semissourian.com users, in the last quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2001, more than 80,000 different people visited the site. Of this group, nearly 25,000 visited on a regular basis. There is no other local site that comes close to these numbers.

Hospital development

For decades, Cape Girardeau and the surrounding area have been served by two excellent hospitals. After merger plans were blocked by the state attorney general a year and a half ago, Southeast Missouri Hospital and St. Francis Medical Center renewed competition with even more gusto than before. The immediate consequence has been increased investment by both institutions in providing exceptional new services.

A couple months ago, St. Francis announced it would offer neonatal services, previously served exclusively by Southeast. Yesterday, Southeast announced it is acquiring property, located near Mount Auburn Road and Highway 74, for future expansion to the west. The flurry of activity bodes well for the entire region.

Jon K. Rust is co-president of Rust Communications.