OOPS! CHANGE THAT TO A $2.25 MILLION BLUNDER

Last Tuesday, in this very space, we suggested the Missouri Legislature was headed for a $2 billion blunder. At stake is a plan to authorize bonds for transportation needs that would quickly inject new dollars into the Missouri Department of Transportation's spending plans. Sadly, legislators don't know what projects the funds would build, nor do they have a clue as to how the bonds -- and hefty interest -- would be repaid.

Meanwhile, as noted in a letter to the editor on Friday's Opinion page from state Rep. Cindy Ostmann of St. Peters, a move is afoot to impose a cap on how much of the highway department's money is spent on other state agencies. Incredibly, the cap would be equal to the amount siphoned off in the fiscal 2001 budget -- a figure estimated to be nearing $200 million a year.

On Wednesday, legislators started pushing the bond plan in earnest. The legislative session ends Friday, so this week's deliberations will be the customary frenzy of last-minute negotiating and ramming bills through without much regard for the fine print.

Unbelievably, the ante has been raised to $2.25 billion in bond authorization for MoDOT. How did the figure jump another quarter of a billion dollars?

As it turns out, some legislative leaders say they want to give the MoDOT bosses a boost in morale. After all, the highway department has certainly taken its lumps over the financial disarray that led to scrapping the road-and-bridge construction plan approved by the Legislature in 1992. That was the plan that included a six-cent increase in the state fuel tax. The plan was abandoned a couple of years ago because MoDOT said there wouldn't be enough money to pay for it. But we're still paying the extra six cents a gallon every time we fill up the gas tank at a Missouri pump.

"We are giving them a $250 million blank check and saying we trust them," said state Rep. Don Koller or Summersville after the bill authorizing the highway bonds was changed to add more money. "If the department doesn't come through, they are in deep trouble."

Wait a minute. We thought the department was already in deep trouble. It said it was going to complete an ambitious 15-year program of highway construction -- a plan that has been dumped while MoDOT continues to fumble for facts and figures to justify that decision.

The department Representative Koller would like for us to trust is the same department whose head came to Cape Girardeau last year and told us the failure of the 1992 highway plan was the fault of greedy voters who demanded more than highway officials could deliver. This was at the annual dinner of the chamber of commerce's transportation committee. The highway chief, Henry Hungerbeeler, received polite applause when he was finished with his tongue-lashing.

It is gyrations like this that leave Missourians baffled: Legislation suddenly changes so millions of dollars are added to a highway bond plan. The head of the highway department blames voters for a failed highway plan on which they never got to vote.

And now, to top it off, Representative Ostmann wants to place a cap on money that rightly should be spent on highways but goes to other state agencies a cap that is sufficiently high so the affected departments won't even blink an eye. Why should those agencies get a dime of fuel-tax revenue?

It's beginning to look like legislators in Jefferson City won't be satisfied to make just one gigantic -- $2.25 billion surely falls under this heading -- blunder. On top of that, they are willing to go through the motions of setting a cap on using highway dollars for other purposes that still gives all the hogs at the trough plenty of slop and a few bushels of corn to boot.

But no one -- no one we've asked, and we've asked plenty -- can tell us what projects $2.25 billion of bond money will buy. They can't tell us what happens to road funding when all the state's highway revenue has to be used to pay off these bonds.

Now it looks like a $2.25 billion blunder. With a week left in the session, could it go even higher?