LEGISLATURE SHOULD EXAMINE HIGHWAY PLAN

So we have a five-year highway plan in place of the 15-year plan abandoned by the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission. That agency's chief financial official, Pat Goff, says MoDOT will spend $4.3 billion over the next five years, including $878 million in the current fiscal year. In an interview last week, Goff initially told this newspaper that the five-year plan was "overprogrammed," as was the case with the defunct 15-year plan. Later that same day, Goff told the same reporter this wasn't the case -- that funding is adequate and the five-year plan isn't overprogrammed by cramming in more projects than can be completed in the period. Current and former MoDOT officials have said the previous 15-year plan was overprogrammed by 10 to 15 percent.

Goff and other MoDOT officials stress that the new plan is a "rolling" plan, by which they mean that the list of projects will be updated annually. This is a reasonable approach as far as it goes. What gives us more pause is the whole approach of the five-year plan itself. This whole departure has been accomplished with far too little public scrutiny and essentially no input from the General Assembly. It is to this five-year plan, and exactly how MoDOT arrived at it, that lawmakers must address themselves when they reconvene on Jan. 6.