RIVER CAMPUS FACES UNCERTAIN FUTURE

A lawsuit filed by a leading Cape Girardeau businessman has delayed plans to move ahead with the River Campus for Southeast Missouri State University. Last year, businessman Jim Drury filed suit against the city, alleging that irregularities in the city's 1998 election on the city's participation in the River Campus violated state law.

Drury filed the suit on behalf of his MidAmerica Hotels Corp. He argued that the city misled voters when officials said that both a tax measure and a bond issue had to pass for the River Campus project to proceed. Voters approved the tax measure, which continued a 3 percent tax on gross motel and hotel receipts and a 1 percent tax on restaurant receipts, but rejected a measure that would allow the city to issue bonds. The money was to be used for the city's $8.9 million of the $36 million project. When voters rejected the bond issue, the university found a state agency to issue the bonds. As a result, the city won't be obligated on the bonds.

Circuit Judge Robert Stilwell of Fredericktown, Mo., issued his decision week before last, ruling for the city on six arguments Drury made and for Drury on the seventh. As to the one point decided in Drury's favor, the judge based his decision on the "honest title" clause in the city's charter and the state Constitution. This is a legal requirement that the title of city ordinances clearly expresses the subject matter of those ordinances.

Drury has consistently argued that a new election must be held to place the issue before the people. He repeats this claim now.

The ruling voids the collection of the expanded motel-restaurant tax and puts nearly $1 million in annual city tax revenues in limbo. City officials are planning an appeal and say they are hopeful the ruling will be overturned on the one issue found in Drury's favor.

The question remains as to where things proceed, pending the appeal, from here. The state's half of the funding came in two budget years and is contingent on full approval of the city's share of the funding. It is therefore clear that any success by Drury on appeal could greatly jeopardize the entire project. To state the matter slightly differently, if the judge's ruling isn't overturned on appeal, two results are virtually certain. First, there will have to be another vote to conform with the "honest title" clause the judge found the city to have contravened. Second, costs will rise to complete this project or any modified version of it. Delay costs money, and the future course of interest rates the price of money is anything but certain. It may be that city and university officials will have to look at scaling back the plans if funding is threatened, or at least if its receipt in timely fashion is.

Finally, as noted in this editorial space before, still another cloud looms on the horizon before planning on the River Campus can proceed. Two lawsuits on the Hancock Amendment are in the Missouri Supreme Court awaiting ruling. Either or both could torpedo several hundreds of millions of funding for this and other capital-improvement projects around the state. Together, they involve more than $500 million in potential refunds to taxpayers. Should they succeed, the state's capacity to fund any capital-improvement projects may be stymied for at least one year, perhaps longer.

The upshot is that the River Campus project, like others among the state's planned capital improvements, faces an uncertain and cloudy future. It'll be most of a year before that picture becomes clearer.