MISSOURI HIGHWAYS

To its credit, the Missouri Highway and Transportation Department, under the leadership of Chief Engineer Joe Mickes, has weathered some pretty stiff fiscal realities in recent months. Now the department faces more rough sailing as it sets course on a three-year $2.6 billion road and bridge plan that must pass several funding reefs.

The department was shaken a few months ago when it faced facts and conceded that an ambitious 15-year plan, to be financed in large part by increases in the state's motor-fuel taxes, was unattainable due to unrealistic projections and cost overruns. As a result, the highway planners scrapped the long-range plan and replaced it with an easier-to-manage three-year plan.

The scaled-down plan is still ambitious: 300 miles of new four-lane highways, 80 miles of additional lanes for existing roads, 60 miles of new or improved two-lane highways, 100 new or rehabilitated bridges and 3,200 miles of resurfacing.

The barriers to achieving even this three-year plan cannot be ignored. For one thing, the highway department is looking to the federal government for nearly half of the total cost, including the release of about $1 billion that is being held up in the federal Highway Trust Fund. Meanwhile, efforts to balance the federal budget within the next seven years don't portend any open spigots on the cash flow from Washington.

Another $500 million of the new three-year plan would come from a proposed bond issue for highways and bridges. The last time Missouri voters approved highway bonds -- and also the first -- was in 1921 when they backed the Centennial Road Law that allowed hard surfacing of mostly gravel and mud roads that crisscrossed the state at that time. Since then, Missourians have preferred to pay highway bills as they were incurred, mostly through increases in fuel taxes, even though Missouri still in on the low end of such taxes nationally.

While the three-year plan also looks for some $850 million from existing state revenue, the backbone of the plan is the bond issue. Highway officials have been visiting communities around the state testing the idea and speaking on its behalf. These officials point to an important consideration: Savings that will result from scrapping the 15-year plan and creating the new three-year plan are expected to be enough to pay off the bonds over 15 years.

It won't be easy to sell the new three-year plan. Missourians traditionally are touchy about going into debt and doing it in such a way that it feels like a tax increase. But the highway officials are looking for ways that allow existing highways to be kept up and for needed new improvements to get started.

Now is the time to put all the sailing charts on the table and let Missouri's taxpayers get a close -- and complete -- look at what they are going to be asked to approve.