MISSOURI WATCH: A LOOK AT THE FOLKS WHO RUN THE COMPANY STORE

Writing week after week about Missourians whose names are most often linked with the political events of the moment can lead to lapses of memory. I confess to this journalistic sin, committed by others in the Fourth Estate, for we tend to focus on where the biggest news is occurring and on the personalities making the biggest waves in Jefferson City.

In shorthand, this means that the public is often misled into believing that the only events occurring in the state Capitol emanate from the best known, sometimes notorious, political figures, and that nothing else is happening of any importance. The truth is, the best known personalities in Jefferson City are often the least productive and have only a slight influence over the vast bulk of the work being done on behalf of the public.

Legislators, for example, receive far more publicity than their actual contribution to the operation of state government warrants. It's quite true that the 197 members of the Missouri General Assembly are empowered to enact laws and are charged with the oversight of the state's multi billion-dollar budget, but we often forget that these men and women are merely part-time workers, though many devote longer hours to their jobs than they're paid for. Without detracting from their contribution to our state, the truth is lawmakers are more visible and widely publicized than others whose work is more important to the welfare of the public.

Legislators, more often than not, are publicized because of the political nature of their jobs, and anyone who writes about Jefferson City for any period of time eventually realizes there's a vast difference between the affairs of politics and the conduct of state government. And if Journalists aren't careful, they will fall into the trap of paying more attention to political events than governmental operations. Let me, for the moment, turn a few rays of light on state officials who, while less known than the political types, are significantly more important to the 5.2 million men, women and children of the State of Missouri.

A splendid example is a fellow named Gary Stangler, whose official title is simply Director of the Department of Social Services. You don't often see his name in the morning paper, but the truth is that Dr. Stangler spends more money than any state official in Missouri, nearly $4 billion every year, which is about 30 percent of all the money expended by Jefferson City. Gary was appointed to his job by John Ashcroft, and to the credit of both men, Gary began doing his job and John let him. When Ashcroft turned the keys over to Mel Carnahan, some of us held our breath, hoping against hope that anyone as capable as Gary would be retained. To the credit of the incumbent governor, he was, and Missourians have benefited greatly from his retention. An official in Uncle Sam's Department of Health and Human Services recently told me that, in his opinion, Missouri had the best welfare director in the nation. I agree completely.

Walk a short distance over to the Department of Revenue, and although you probably don't know her name, the director of this proverbial political hot potato is Janette Lohman. She runs her office with a degree of efficiency that is greater than most micro managed private corporations ever achieve, and she does it with a minimum of fuss and almost totally unnoticed. If you don't believe this is a rough agency to manage, recall some of the snafus reported in years past under other directors. This department has become a sterling example of governmental efficiency, even though it's still under the patronage system.

Walk across the Capitol lawn to the red brick courthouse just across the street and you'll find a real fixture of Jefferson City. He holds the unglamorous title of Clerk, and even though it's still the Supreme Court, the title hardly describes the value of Tom Simon to the state's large judicial system. If there's a missing grave site in Missouri, Simon is the one to contact, for he knows where most of the state's bodies are buried. His influence on Missourians' court system is vast and incomparable.

The "Two Marks" in the Division of Budget and Planning are a splendid team: Director Mark Ward and Assistant Director Mark Reading. You don't see their names in the paper very often, but these two relatively young men are the real powers behind state budgets, creating the rules every department must live by and submitting closely inspected budget requests that meet the standards of even the tightest-fisted taxpayer. Their work is made all the more difficult by some of the foolishness now going on in Washington, making it all but impossible to compute how many federal dollars will be flowing into Missouri over the next 12 months. Comptrollers of huge private corporations don't face the obstacles these fellows do, yet they are both efficient and dedicated---at about one-tenth the salary of their counterparts in the private sector.

The best kept secret of the Carnahan administration may be a director who has the all-but-impossible assignment of housing, curtailing and hopefully rehabilitating the fastest growing segment of the state's population: the Director of the Department of Corrections. At a time when crime has become pervasive in every community in the state, Dora Shiro has the job of keeping these criminals behind bars, maintaining discipline in crowded cellblocks and offering some degree of rehabilitation that has remained elusive throughout prisons all over the country for decades. Talk about an impossible job, but under Shiro, it seems possible. All walk, no talk.

There are many others that deserve mention. Some have literally died at their desks, performing their duties as they suffered from cancer. There are others whose excellence of service goes unnoticed: Ralph Kidd in Legislative Research, Dick Hanson in Office of Administration, Tom Sullivan in Economic Development, Lee Capps in Personnel, Russ McCampbell in Education, Mari Ann Winters in Highways, John Solomon in Mental Health, Thelma Werner in the House of Representatives office, Jeanne Jarrett of Legislative Oversight, Secretary of State's Steve Ahrens, Dave Lendt at Missouri University and. ...

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