MISSOURI WATCH: MISSOURI'S TRANSPORTATION MESS

It required little foresight or prescience to predict, as many did just a few years ago, that federal grants for a new rapid transit system in Missouri's largest urban region would ultimately trigger a desperate need for yet another state-funded bailout. At the time of the prediction, Jefferson City had just finished approving a 30-year funding program to build an athletic stadium in St. Louis that will eventually cost taxpayers from all over the state more than a half-billion dollars.

Repressing for the moment the growing municipal debt attached to a far-from-fully-utilized convention center-athletic complex in St. Louis, Missourians need to concentrate for the moment on the report of a transportation study group that has just recommended higher taxes in order to operate a fiscally unsound transit system in the same city. The 35-member committee, fed by a consulting report that cost several miles of new highways, has called for more revenue in the form of a 1-cent increase in the statewide sales tax. This comes just after Jefferson City has been forced to end sales tax collections on food purchases and provide other equitable tax adjustments in order to meet the constraints of the Hancock Amendment.

The study panel recommendation comes amid a plethora of contradictions, half-truths and outright lies concerning both the efficacy of the 1992-enacted 15-road plan and the hidden agenda of urban interests to provide funds for a rapid transit system that, regardless of its momentary popularity, will soon become as financially pressed as its counterparts throughout metropolitan regions that are far more heavily populated than the one in eastern Missouri. The consulting group's call for an unprecedented use of sales tax revenue to fund urban transportation needs was the result of a constitutional restriction against gasoline tax proceeds being spent for anything but roads and highways. The logic of all but three persons on the 35-member panel is that if you can't divert funds for ill-advised projects from one source, find another source.

At this point it seems wise to urge extreme caution by Missouri's elected officials against immediately following the recent call for a transportation sales-tax increase, particularly in light of some very questionable facts presented by expensive consultants and representatives of urban areas, where state money is viewed as the only alternative to bankrupt municipal projects and where even basic health care is now being reduced to conform to suddenly discovered budgetary shortfalls.

The 15-year road plan enjoyed such widespread public support that then-Gov. John Ashcroft and the Democratic-controlled General Assembly did not even hesitate to increase the gasoline tax by 6 cents a gallon without first submitting it to a voter referendum. The 1992 15-year plan was a reasonable solution for resolving some of the more pressing highway and bridge construction needs in a state that has the nation's sixth largest road network. The motoring public wasn't crazy about the higher tax levies they would be forced to pay at the pump, but they recognized both the need for additional revenue and the inherent fairness of requiring those who use the highways to pay for their improvement and maintenance.

In contrast, the report issued the other day by the Total Transportation Commission skirts the issue of need by exaggerating the funding requirements of the 15-year plan, claiming that higher-than-projected revenue totals are actually deficits. That fallacy was effectively rebutted by one member of the study panel, Estil Fretwell, who had the initiative to check into the consulting recommendation fallacies. It's too bad it required one individual among hundreds to determine the facts of a study that cost all taxpayers in the state more than a half-million dollars to make.

When Fretwell tried to discuss the errors of the consulting report with other members of the study panel, his efforts were ended by the group's chairman, an urban wheeler-and-dealer who seems to have little or no empathy for the needs or problems of any area west of Interstate 270.

Gov. Mel Carnahan has thus far greeted the commission report with the puzzling observation that his study panel's recommendations would both fund the 15-year plan and provide money for urban transportation plans -- with an increase in the state sales tax. We presume the governor also knows that taxes to fund the 15-year plan were approved back in 1992 and any financial emergencies are the result of additions, diversions or expansions of that program.

These emergencies, for the most part, are in St. Louis, and, by the way, Mel, they result from projects undertaken in that area without prior approval of elected state officials, including the General Assembly. Like the football stadium plan before it, the state is seen as the cash cow which St. Louis, and to a lesser degree Kansas City, can milk whenever the cash drawer is empty. The St. Louis MetroLink, as envisioned by its original promoters, must expand into far more areas than it presently serves if it hopes to recoup even the operating costs of the system. As for capital expansion costs to make up for operating costs, the investment would need to reach billions and billions of dollars, with no source in sight. That sets the stage for the desperation that now grips the myopic founding fathers of MetroLink and the political hacks who seek to escape the fiscal quicksand they have created on their own.

The other compelling argument against the study committee's recent report is that it breaks the equity long recognized by thoughtful Missourians as essential for funding any state program or project: those who use the services should pay for them. That is the voter-confirmed policy of gas taxes for highway construction and remains an essential component of the contract between all Missourians and their governments. No servant of the people should now try to break that contract.

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