MISSOURI WATCH: NEW PROMISES AND OLD PROBLEMS

"We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called _ to perform what we cannot." -- Abraham Lincoln (1856)

Addressing the first Republican state convention at Bloomington, Ill., more than 141 years ago, Abraham Lincoln offered sound advice that has too often gone unheeded by both political parties and politicians ever since. The deceit of delivery is the property of both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and preservationists.

Indeed, this pejorative practice of over-promising may well stand as the principal cause for the disturbing degree of today's public distrust in representative government, a distrust so pervasive that it has caused a steady decline of Americans' once-strong faith and confidence in government at all levels.

Because state government casts the greatest influence over the daily lives of millions of citizens, let's examine some of the promises Jefferson City has made and when called upon to perform has fallen short. In some cases, the degree of failure has been slight, so minor that it has gone virtually unnoticed, while in other instances the performance has been so egregious that the results couldn't be hidden even by highly skilled political spin doctors.

Depending on your point of view, the worst case of political over-promising is the 1992 15-Year Road Plan, so filled with problems that several members of the General Assembly are demanding constitutional revision to gain fiscal oversight of the Department of Transportation. The snafus in this highly ambitious program that was to have been funded by a new revenue source are by now well known, as well as widely vilified. The truth is that the authors of the plan simply goofed, miscalculating the obstacles and exaggerating the promised results. The denouement is not simple, as witness the failure to achieve consensus on how to repair the plan and restore public confidence in a vital agency of state government. It is fair to say that confidence will not be restored until the promises have been fulfilled with verifiable assurances additional taxation will not be required for completion.

When crime began escalating to such a point that public concern was bordering on hysteria, public officials in the state offered a seemingly reasonable solution: get tougher on criminals, sentence them to longer prison terms and throw away the key. Hey, we can support that solution, most citizens answered, and so our elected officials "solved" the crime problem by making prison sentences longer and requiring judges to send more lawbreakers to correctional facilities. The problem with this answer is that it immediately impacted on the state treasury, requiring more and more revenue to construct more and more facilities, which in turn required more and more personnel, who in turn increased state spending. The result is that the taxpayers of Missouri are supporting a corrections population that is the fourth largest "city" in Missouri and spending five times more on convicted felons than college students. Trying to resolve problems after they occur is like locking the cell after the convict escapes.

Missouri, like its sister states, has fought the war on drugs for at least three decades. In addition to going after dealers, and then their customers, we have persuaded ourselves that until we "get tough" on the drug culture, hiring more police and waiting for demographic shifts that give us smaller numbers of crime-prone 18 to 24-year-olds, we cannot solve this dilemma short of legalizing drugs. This would be nothing short of disaster. Few remedial plans have noted the state's glaring lack of treatment and prevention programs, other than pathetic slogans that convince no one. We witness widespread drug use and demand prison time without noticing that the latter serves to reinforce the former, and worse yet, without demanding that we establish neighborhood drug treatment and rehabilitation clinics where the problem is epidemic. There are few brownie points for officials who push for more effective substance abuse programs even though this is the most effective approach.

Because some favor short-changing mental health systems to fund expansions of other programs, Missouri's politicians began cutting expenditures for another growing population segment in the state, the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled. The statistics on this are truly frightening but this single fact will help Missourians understand the crisis: budget allocations for all state mental health services have declined from 9.8 percent of total appropriations in FY 1986 to 7.7 percent in FY 1997. This means that under-funding during the last 12 years amounted to $125,635,000. The state can't expect to wage a war against drugs when its most effective weapons are inadequately funded even below previous levels.

State programs to improve education have compiled a mixed record. Some provisions of the Outstanding Schools Act, designed to give struggling school districts more financial support, have served to increase local tax burdens, while some promised revenue, such as the state lottery, have proved to be minimal. The lottery, sold as a better education program, is now only providing 3 percent of its profit to local schools. State handling of the casino industry is turning into a fiasco as rules are changed and previous decisions are rescinded.

The list goes on and on, with inadequate space to discuss other bureaucratic bungling that erodes public trust and corrodes the public's perception of effective governance. Each new program becomes a candidate for future disaster.

Isn't it time we took stock of what has been promised in the past and concentrate on better management before going to the next level which offers political but not public rewards?

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