MISSOURI WATCH: LET PUBLIC DECIDED PUBLIC POLICY

When thousands of lawmakers gathered the other day in St. Louis for the annual convocation of the National Conference of State Legislatures, one of the more pressing problems discussed was how best to involve John Q. Citizen in formulating public policy. It was a timely question, made all the more so by a number of recent events that have highlighted the absence of the public's input into the public policy decision-making process.

In recent years, the absence of public voice in changes inaugurated in public policy has been evident. A prime example is a change inaugurated during the Ashcroft administration in how Missouri cares for more than 100,000 of its developmentally disabled and mentally ill patients. Indeed, this decision-making process was so exclusive that even as they were casting votes that inaugurated a revolutionary change in the care of the mentally ill, most members of the General Assembly were unaware of the programs they were approving. Even after these changes were made, legislators remained in the dark about the transition they had so blithely approved.

Still another dramatic policy change came in 1992 when lawmakers were asked to approve state funding of a large municipal project being planned in the City of St. Louis. Although this is now known as the St. Louis stadium project, the proposal first bore the title of an economic development plan to assist in the rebuilding of a dilapidated urban municipality. Legislators who were unaware of a move to secure 50 percent state financing of a huge indoor stadium had to read the bill's fine print to detect any mention of state participation in a purely local and totally parochial project.

Public policy was used and then abused as sponsors of the St. Louis stadium proposal, in order to gain support from other urban areas, included these cities in the benefit plan that was actually tailored to St. Louis. Not surprisingly, most legislators from Kansas City, Springfield and fringe areas around St. Louis joined in this overturning of not only public policy but both the letter and spirit of the state Constitution.

Still another example of these consistent alterations in public policy without the public's consent---and sometimes even without its knowledge---has been the repeated addition of new institutions for taxpayers to support. In recent years the state has assumed supervision and obligation of two small colleges, primarily because these institutions were no longer economically viable and had lost students to other colleges that better met their needs. One of these was the Harris-Stowe College in St. Louis, which had been organized to train black students as teachers during the long era in which their access to state universities was denied. When integration came, the role of Harris-Stowe was met, yet it continued to function until the state was persuaded to assume its vast liabilities and pour public money into what had become an outmoded educational enterprise. Just this past year, the state has assumed greater financial responsibility for a community college that specializes in technical courses. Missouri assumed this obligation when its policy toward such funding was reversed, but the decision was made not by those who had to assume the additional cost but by officials elected for finite terms. This is not to suggest that the absorption of Linn Technical College should have been put to a statewide vote, nor does it suggest that future additions to the state's higher education system be approved each and every time it occurs.

What should be decided by the public, however, is whether Missouri should continue to assume responsibility for other community and four-year colleges that might have fallen on hard times. Indeed, when Missouri, back in the mid-1960s, assumed responsibility for certain funding of community colleges at St. Joseph and Joplin, this break with policy should have first been approved by citizens voting in a statewide referendum. The question that should have been asked was not whether financially pressed colleges at St. Joseph and Joplin should become eligible for money collected from taxpayers all over the state, but whether Missourians wanted to assume added financial obligations of schools that sought state funding.

One of the reasons the recent- aborted attempt to issue one-half billion dollars in state bonds to accelerate highway construction was eventually tabled was that the public learned about this proposed venture before it could take place. When lawmakers began hearing from constituents back home, they discovered that this was not the plan favored by a vast majority of citizens. The project was ended. Had it succeeded, public policy would have been revised by a six-member commission whose tenure was, at best, temporary.

It was another commission that revised public policy toward meeting the needs of the mentally ill and developmentally disabled. Indeed, many policy changes are hatched within meetings of commissions, then sometimes run past the executive office and then introduced as legislation that never mentions the changes that would occur with the bill's passage. Some legislation is so subtle that only an experienced legislator can recognize the changes being outlined in an innocuous sounding bill. The pejorative effects of term limits will only increase and enhance that subtlety.

At the recent legislative conference in St. Louis, a few speakers noted the absence of grassroots support for new and innovative programs, and at least a few implied the best tactic was subterfuge. That's the worst tactic imaginable since its use further erodes the public's confidence in the democratic system of self-government. That confidence has been shattered enough, with Washington and Jefferson City doing their share.

Missouri has no policy concerning policy changes. It even has no policy about identifying them when they occur. Indeed, public awareness sometimes does not surface until tax season rolls around. And then it's too late.

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