ROAD PLAN IS LITTLE MORE THAN A SCAM

It has been a long time since Missouri voters have had foisted upon them a scam anything like the work of the so-called Total Transportation Commission. This 35-member group was appointed last year by Gov. Mel Carnahan -- by executive order and without any warrant in the Constitution -- supposedly to address, in comprehensive fashion, all the transportation needs of the state.

Our Constitution has long vested exclusive power over transportation issues in the independent body known as the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission. Its members are appointed by the governor to six-year terms subject to Senate confirmation, giving the highway commission at least some measure of accountability and independence crucial to judgment free of undue political influence. This balance has led to the happy situation in which, by and large, we haven't had Republican or Democratic roads in Missouri, but rather a comprehensive roads-and-bridges policy that takes into account the needs of the entire state.

Enter Carnahan's new Total Transportation Commission. Although its members included some of the state's leading citizens, the commission has flubbed badly. It held a series of hearings across the state last year and this week finally delivered a report some six months late. The members voted 27-3 to recommend that the General Assembly send to the voters a one-cent general sales tax to be dedicated to transportation. A majority of the commission is apparently convinced that there is a shortfall of $14 billion in transportation funding in the state's 15-year plan for construction.

Adopted in 1992 as part of a package to convince the General Assembly to approve a phased-in, 6-cent fuel tax increase, this plan is full of specific promises. If the work of the TTC is to be taken seriously, one would have thought the 15-year plan is a dead letter.

Or is it? At bill signings last week, out of the blue Gov. Carnahan responded to a reporter's question by reaffirming his support for completing the 15-year plan. This was rather bizarre and must have come as news to most TTC members. The entire drift of the Carnahan-appointed TTC, to that point, as well as of the governor's own public statements had been to try to move us away from this very commitment as an unrealistic and hopelessly underfunded plan.

But is it? Commission member Estil Fretwell of the Missouri Farm Bureau is a former Democratic state representative and one of the three to vote against the TTC report. Fretwell has courageously worked to research and question many of the TTC's operating assumptions, foremost among them the alleged $14 billion shortfall. Fretwell, from Jefferson City, and former Missouri highway commissioner John Oliver of Cape Girardeau are emphatic that there is no such shortfall. Oliver goes further, saying there is "nothing wrong" with the 15-year plan, there is "nothing new" that the state got for the $600,000 the TTC spent on consultants and the TTC is part of an effort to politicize Missouri's transportation policy beyond anything we have known before and to divert fuel tax money for urban mass transit.

For his part, Republican Sen. Sam Graves, a Tarkio farmer and another TTC dissenter, told the Associated Press the TTC report is "a joke."

Fretwell, Oliver, Graves and others are leveling tough charges against the work of Carnahan's TTC. Somehow, between a sleepy statewide news media and responsible state officials, we have to start asking tough questions by the boatload, and getting some straight answers.

The credibility of all state government, never at stratospheric heights to begin with, is very much on the line. Carnahan, who has been testing the water on calling a special session of the Legislature to send the TTC's one-cent sales tax proposal to voters this November, might want to think long and hard before he does so.