MISSOURI WATCH: BUDGET GROWTH REFLECTS SERVICE QUALITY

Warning: This column contains lots of dry figures and statistics, and if you are easily bored you should probably do something else.

Let me be the first to admit that, journalistically speaking, there probably isn't a worse way to begin a column you hope will be read by several hundred thousand Missourians. On the other hand, there is something called truth in advertising, and before federal charges are filed against me, I want to comply with the provisions of the law and warn readers they face impending boredom, not to mention extreme indifference.

Having complied, I trust fully, with all federal and state laws concerning fraudulent claims, we now turn our attention to something called the fiscal 1996 budget of the great state of Missouri. I can hear you yawning already.

I might as well admit it. I have a thing about state budgets. To some, perhaps everyone but me, they are boring, boring, boring, nothing more than mere pieces of paper with lots of numbers on them. They are drugs insomniacs crave but are often too weak to hold because of their sheer weight, which I might add comes to 3.1 pounds in the current model.

I first became addicted to budgets back in the early 1960s, when I suddenly realized that they were essential to improving the projects which I was most interested in at the time, namely the care, treatment and preservation of thousands of Missourians, some of them no older than 2 years old, who desperately needed care from a state agency that was then known as the Division of Mental Diseases.

Since back in those days the great state of Missouri was providing all of 78 cents to feed mental patients three meals a day, and was spending less the $17.5 million a year to care for nearly 100,000 mentally ill and retarded citizens, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the way tot improve the deplorable conditions and inadequate care these deserving people were receiving was to increase the budget of the agency. Thanks to the efforts of hundreds of Missourians, who ran the gamut from governors and legislators down to lobbyists and political ward heelers, the state's mental health activities today are financed to the tune of some $240 million.

Back a few centuries, when Lloyd Stark was governor from 1937 to 1941, the state spent less than $1 million a year for all of its activities, including public schools, colleges, prisons, the whole ball of wax. By the time Jim Blair had made it to the executive office, the budget had gone into the millions, but Blair did his best to keep his first budget, in 1957, just under $100 million. He was afraid he would be called a big, liberal spender if he went over that financial threshold. P.S. He didn't, but the General Assembly did.

As the state's economy did better, as tax revenue increased and as inflation became the man-who-stayed-for-dinner, the state's budgets grew higher and higher. Federal grants boosted the totals still higher, as did new tax levies, and by the time John Ashcroft became governor in 1985, we were talking $5 billion for budgets. All of these components combined so that by his third budget, Ashcroft was recommending state spending of $7 billion for fiscal 1988. He last budget called for expenditures of $9.3 billion.

Just the other day, Gov. Carnahan submitted a budget that calls for state spending of $13.2 billion, which comes within $239 million of doubling Missouri's budget in period of eight years. Actually, Carnahan's budget has increased proportionately at about the same rate as did Ashcroft's if the increases in federal funding are computed into the figures.

Ashcroft's third budget-in-office, fiscal 1988, provides and interesting set of figures when compared to Carnahan's third fiscal year, which he outlined just the other day before a foot of snow fell around the Capitol. Ashcroft's projected fiscal 1988 revenue was set at $3.4 billion for general revenue, while Carnahan's projection for fiscal 1996 for the same category is $5.7 billion. Ashcroft predicted $1.3 billion from the federal treasury, while Carnahan's projection of the same category is $3.5 billion. (A comparison of these two totals in an eight-year period will give the reader some idea of why Congress can't balance its budget.) In the third category of state revenue, which budget directors call "other funds," Ashcroft projected collections of $2 billion, while Carnahan's "other funds" figure is $3.9 billion, with the increase attributable in large part to a sizable increase in the state's gasoline tax, enacted back in 1992 and phased in over a three-year period.

The largest increase in state spending over this same eight-year period can be found in appropriations for local schools and public education. Ashcroft was able to gather up $1.7 billion from his tight-budget years, while recent tax increases have ballooned this figure to $3.2 billion for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Ashcroft did his best to send as much state money as he could round up to elementary and secondary schools, but a generally flat economy and increased demands for federal mandates and court desegregation orders kept his two terms in financially strained times. He usually got a bum rap from Democrats, who complained he wasn't spending enough on the essentials, but essentially Ashcroft is a fiscal conservative and, in my opinion, didn't deserve all the scorn.

What does all this have to do with you, the reader? For one thing, state budgets determine the quality of service you receive from Jefferson City. They set priorities that are never presented to the voters, so in a sense they are as important as elections in determining the direction our state takes each year. Budgets determine how well our children are educated, how many poor are fed, how many sick are treated, not to mention how many criminals are imprisoned and how public health is protected. The writer is sorry if this column bored you, but I thought there were some things you needed to know about your government. It is the price we pay for being good citizens.

~Jack Stapleton is a Kennett columnists who keeps tabs of state government in Jefferson City.