MISSOURI WATCH: HORSE-AND-BUGGY STATE GOVERNMENT DAMPENS LOCAL CONTROL

Traditionally, state governments aren't reorganized and reformed until events literally demand change, and even when this occurs, the emphasis is usually on correcting a specific problem without taking into account other existing structural deficiencies.

Examples abound, but a recent one will suffice. When former Attorney General William Webster used the Second Injury Fund as a proactive section of his campaign for governor, he was creatively utilizing a function of Missouri government for his own personal and political benefit. Webster's abuse of the system, unforeseen by legislators in a more innocent age, should have been corrected long before a creative politician was able to use public funds to enhance private careers.

The Webster case should have created demands for badly needed structural changes in a multi billion-dollar state government that directly affects the lives of millions of men, women and children in Missouri. Unfortunately, any demands for reform were muted, with public attention riveted not on shortcomings of constitutional government in Jefferson City but on the political consequences of campaign excess. With great difficulty that extends to this moment, the state has attempted to correct the excesses that Bill Webster refined to such a high degree of creativity, but which was---and remains so today---the preferred tactics of some political campaigns.

Even if Missouri succeeds in altering the present electoral system, and even if such populist notions as term limits and public referenda on tax increases ultimately succeed in achieving their sponsors' fondest dreams, the 5.1 million residents of this state will still be governed by a public structure that was last overhauled a half century ago, before the end of World War II. The geriatric deficiencies of the 1945 Constitution, whose delegates were anything but representative of the state as a whole, were obvious almost at the outset, containing several soon-to-be unconstitutional provisions, among them being codified public school segregation and disproportionate population representation.

Although voters have made various changes in this 50-year-old document, many of them at the behest of special interest groups, the basic structure and functions of government remain in place, some of them deserving of this permanence and others desperately in need of change. Again, examples abound. A good place to start is in the field of local and county governments, where restrictions have existed for more than a century and a half.

The 1945 Constitution, adopting almost word for word the philosophy as well as some language of the 1875 Constitution, severely restricts the right of counties and municipalities to make both systemic and creative changes in their basic structures. The philosophy of the 1875 document was one of severe limitations on local governmental creativity, since most such units were still greatly influenced by the Civil War and its awful consequences in our state. The restrictions which the 1875 charter placed on both cities and counties were primarily designed to correct abuses during the nation's long, devastating period of civil unrest and revolution.

Today, many of the state's 114 counties are mere shadows of their former selves, some expanding beyond mere fiscal caretakers and providers and others shrinking to the size of small towns providing minimal services at maximum expense. Conversely, the ability of cities to create new and needed services is severely restricted, with the right granted grudgingly only to larger cities and counties. Although the privilege of creating charter cities is granted to Missouri's largest communities, that right is denied to the small, perhaps more needful, towns and cities.

The question this raises is: why deny charter or home-rule rights to any corporate entity, be it municipal or county, if change is the will of local residents? Putting lids on governmental creativity is an ancient precaution that has long outgrown its need. But this restriction is countenanced, even codified, by every constitution ever written in Missouri.

Furthermore, constitutional restrictions that were once designed to protect residents of St. Louis and Kansas City from the abuses of political machines are about as relevant to today's Missouri as the horse and buggy. The legislative right to approve the budget of the St. Louis Police Department is sheer idiocy today, depriving locally elected officials of an important right of decision. The power of a governor to select police commissions in the state's largest cities is only a throwback to an earlier reform attempt that failed to correct local abuses of power. Police commissions are local units of government and the right to appoint and confirm them should rest at the local level, not in Jefferson City.

Anyone reading the Missouri Constitution is struck with several impressions that are not incorrect: the document is overly detailed and overtly structures the functions of every level of government, from the state down to the corporate village. It is limiting in the right to create changes dictated by modern needs, and it is extremely inconsistent in its treatment of governmental structure. For example, why does the Constitution provide for a mental health commission but not a social services commission? Why is there is a citizen oversight panel for the highway department but none for economic development? And why in each of these instances are the powers of the various commissions so different?

The answer to these questions is that much of state government was organized at different times, and the creation of each reflects the mood of the moment, without regard to consistency or efficiency.

The truth is today's Missourians are being governed at the municipal, county and state levels by outdated concepts, some of them first adopted in 1821 and later continued by constitutional revisions. Citizens are being denied the right to create better governments by a document that is now more than 50 years old and which resembles in several ways the one written 174 years ago. Saints preserve us, that even predates the horse and buggy!

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