OH, YOU WANT TRANSPORTATION SPECIFICS?

Having laid an egg with the July 2 release of the report of the Total Transportation Commission, high-ranking state transportation officials now say they will produce the specific road plans that are altogether lacking from that report. Recall that Gov. Mel Carnahan appointed this commission more than 18 months ago and charged it with surveying the transportation needs of the entire state. The commission's very existence has been suspect from the beginning, inasmuch as the Missouri Constitution vests exclusive control over these subjects in the independent Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission. One doesn't know quite whether to laugh or cry as the spectacle unfolds of the Department of Transportation's chief engineer, Joe Mickes, scurrying about trying to sweep up after the TTC, which badly flubbed its mission and issued a nonspecific report.

Mickes says he has directed his staff to get to work supplying specifics of the kind that were left out of the TTC report that cost Missouri taxpayers between $500,000 and $600,000. Quick: What did we get for all that money? The blunt answer of former highway commissioner John L. Oliver Jr.: Nothing. Nothing, that is, that the department didn't already have on file at the time of compiling the ill-fated 15-year plan in 1992.

"We're going to have to be a little more specific," Mickes told the commission at its July 11 meeting. "We're going to come up with a pretty good estimate of the projects." Added commissioner Mark Preyer of Kennett, "Let's be very conservative in our numbers. The legislators feel burned by what happened in 1992." If the new promises aren't kept, he added, the lawmakers are "going to have our heads on a platter -- and rightly so."

Preyer has probably noticed that the governor's notion of a special session to enact the TTC's recommended 1-cent general sales tax for transportation has attracted next to no support. Even the governor's own fellow Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are basically turning thumbs down on that one. Funny thing: Having just finished cutting taxes on Missourians by over $300 million, lawmakers sense no enthusiasm for asking voters to increase them by nearly $600 million this fall.

In sum, far from enhancing the credibility of state transportation leaders, all the scurrying about at this late hour in pledging specifics is further eroding that diminished credibility. No amount of whining by TTC leaders about allegedly excessive negative media coverage will change that fundamental fact.