STATE'S BUDGET WOES AFFECT BIG PRISON PLANS

Residents of the small town of Bonne Terre, Mo., located just north of here in St. Francois County, have been looking to the opening of a new state prison as an economic boost for their community. Now it's clear that they will have to wait a good deal longer.

Six years after the grand announcement that the prison would be constructed, the new $168 million facility still has no inmates and no scheduled opening date. Lawsuits and construction delays combined to push back the completion date from the end of 1998 to this August. Even then, though, the prison will remain closed because the cash-strapped state can't afford the $12 million needed to equip it or the nearly $45 million required annually to run it.

(The smaller Charleston, Mo., prison, with a $20 million operating cost, is scheduled to open by next spring.)

Competing with several cities in the mid-1990s, Bonne Terre agreed to purchase the land for a state prison and issue bonds to help pay for $14 million in improvements -- a project nearly 10 times the size of the town's annual budget. An estimated 819 guards, medical professionals, maintenance workers and administrators would be hired at the prison. The prison's 2,684 inmates would boost Bonne Terre's population by two-thirds, even if none of the new workers lived in the city.

We're clear on this much: A state government that has gotten itself into this kind of budgetary fix isn't an especially well-managed one. Taxpayers might look to the spending explosion of the last eight or nine years and wonder who was managing the store.

Here's hoping that a return to prudent budgetary policies can get this situation back under control.