MISSOURI WATCH: ON INTEREST IN GOVERNMENT, SEN. JONES HAD A POINT

"I've been talking to people, and I want you to know nobody really cares what you do." -- Former Missouri Sen. Clifford Jones

After he had been out of office several years, the former state senator from Ladue returned to the chambers of the Legislature and was asked to speak to his former colleagues. As the diminutive man from St. Louis County reached the podium, he delivered the short address printed above and promptly sat down. The chamber was quiet for several minutes following Cliffie's brief observation that citizens weren't really interested in what the senators were doing, despite the seriousness attached to the affairs of state in Jefferson City.

As usual, the St. Louis Republican's words were laced with truth, although, as was his wont, Cliffie sometimes reached for the absurd to prove his point. I can recall a legislative hearing when he was giving a psychiatrist from the Department of Mental Health a hard time over some method of treatment. During the questioning, the senator told the physician he didn't know what he was talking about since the senator had majored in psychology in college. He did it with a straight face, but he made his point: it didn't require much knowledge to recognize that the psychiatrist was advocating something beyond the pale of reason.

Every session of the Missouri General Assembly is fortunate enough to have a few Cliffie Joneses in its midst, although some latter-day versions might not be as colorful or as skilled in the art of verbal warfare. But whatever form they take, Missourians should be eternally grateful that there are a few elected officials who recognize that some solutions are better than others and that, despite the best of intentions, government does not always supply the correct answer.

There have been times since the voluntary retirement of Cliffie that I wish he were back in Jefferson City, deflating pompous public servants who pursue their own agenda as if it had been brought down by Moses and who presume that anyone who doesn't agree with them is guilty of heresy, if not sedition.

There are times today when Jefferson City needs to put the affairs of state in neutral and pause long enough to survey what has been wrought in the name of good government. We are living, as America has lived since 1776, in an era of change, some of it revolutionary and some evolutionary. A great many self-appointed public servants have difficulty differentiating between the two, a fault that leads to needless expenditure of taxpayer dollars and needless suffering for innocent individuals and families.

In at least three areas of state government, there are pejorative solutions being undertaken that simply will not resolve problems that admittedly good people are trying to solve. In virtually every case, those who succeed in furthering their solutions are people motivated by the best of intentions. Seldom are solutions prompted by evil intent. Those who believe they have the key to knotty problems are sincere, even if they are wrong. That doesn't make them evil, but, unfortunately, it doesn't serve the public's interest either.

Many among us argue that the biggest problem facing Missouri is crime. They have a point, since crime makes a major impact not only on daily lives but on lives 5, 20, 50 years from now. Crime impacts the family, public education, vocations, virtually every act of everyday citizens. The answer in Jefferson City has been to build new prisons, extend sentences and avoid prisoner pampering. The solution is perfect except for one important fact: While we are dealing with today's need to get criminals behind bars, we are ignoring programs designed to prevent crime tomorrow. There is a greater supply of criminals than prison cells, a fact of life that has produced the current expenditure of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in new prisons, with promises of more spending to come.

Believe me when I say Missouri will never be able to keep up with the supply of new criminals if all we are doing is laying down more bricks and mortar. We must do more to prevent crime where it occurs if the state hopes to resolve the awful fact that its two largest cities are among the 10 most dangerous communities in America. I don't see anyone proposing anything to resolve this dilemma. Rather, officials seem to be sitting around watching the contractors erect new buildings with barred windows. That won't catch it.

For several years now the state has followed a program of downsizing its mental facilities, offering as a solution the creation of new privately operated services by psychiatrists who refused to work for state salaries that were "only" above the $80,000 a year range. Despite the expenditure of millions of dollars for new clinics, new hospitals and numerous other facilities, the state thought it could get by on the cheap by privatizing its constitutional responsibility to nearly 100,000 mentally ill and mentally retarded citizens.

The effort to balance the federal budget has thrown a monkey wrench into the plan, however, and now the state must consider how it will balance a smaller input from Washington with an ever expanding caseload. Believe me, if Missourians think the present system is expensive, they have no concept of how costly the process will become when state hospitals and drug and alcohol clinics are shuttered and patients are sent to profit-making facilities. The wrecking ball on perfectly good buildings built by the public is at work all over the state, even as you read these words. No one seems empowered to stop it; no one seems interested enough to halt this officially sanctioned insanity.

A third area in which political expediency will no longer suffice is campaign reform. Instead of lacking any remedies, Missouri has too many, thanks to legislation and a poorly written initiative referendum. The solution can only be found in placing campaigns under public financing, an idea the public simply won't countenance at this moment. Eventually, we must finance the process with public money or we will continue to suffer from out-of-control campaigns that do more to harm electoral reform than advance it.

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