TALENT'S HIGHWAY PLAN HOLDS ONLY HOPE FOR RURAL AREAS

Watching as Al Gore fights against becoming the first presidential nominee since George McGovern to lose his home state while trying to prevent defections of his base voters to Ralph Nader, a most interesting thing has occurred in the Missouri governor's race. A real, bona fide issue has emerged. It's about highways.

You can't say there's no difference between Republican Jim Talent and Democrat Bob Holden. Their respective approaches to what to do on transportation set them apart.

Some 18 months ago, Jim Talent boldly announced his intention to complete Missouri's 15-year highway plan. This is the plan announced in 1992, on the basis of which state lawmakers made solemn commitments to all Missourians and passed a phased-in six-cent fuel-tax increase to fund road and bridge improvements. Part two of Talent's plan is to issue up to $10 billion in highway bonds to fund this program.

Missouri is one of only a few states that hasn't been issuing bonds for this purpose for years. We're one of the few that has instead long been a pay-as-you-go state on roadbuilding. You can debate the wisdom of pay-as-you-go versus issuing bonds. In a sense, however, the debate is over: Last year the General Assembly passed legislation authorizing the issuance of $2.25 billion in bonds for roads. Bob Holden supported this measure. So the question isn't whether Missouri is going to issue bonds, but rather how much.

Holden claims the Talent proposal is fiscally irresponsible and will imperil our state's triple-A bond rating. But recently, Holden went even further.

Holden put out a press release a few weeks back, a real humdinger. Too bad it didn't get more notice, because it's remarkable. In his campaign release to the news media, Holden reveals his utter contempt for the 15-year plan. This is a dismissal of the 15-year plan so complete, so contemptuous, that he might as well have written that infamous editorial, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a couple of years back. I'm referring to the one that referred to all the outstate highways linking rural Missouri towns as "highways to nowhere."

Here's what Holden campaign manager Richard Martin said on Oct. 10:

"The 15-year plan was political pork in 1992, and now Congressman Talent is resurrecting the plan in an attempt to deflect attention from his consistent record of voting against the interests of rural communities. ... He has seized on the failed and pork-filled 15-year plan ... ."

Now, if you didn't get the point from this statement, there's Holden's own quote from a lengthy Post-Dispatch article this past week on the candidates' differences on transportation issues. Finding still more fault with Talent's position on transportation, Holden criticized his opponent on grounds that he didn't have any plan to do anything with fuel taxes except use it for roads. This is code for the Holden agenda: He wants to take your fuel-tax money and use it on mass transit in the cities.

Of course, all this attention serves mostly to remind us of another Holden position on transportation. Three years ago, he was a member of the Total Transportation Commission. He voted for a new, one-cent general sales tax for transportation. This isn't a fuel tax, understand. It's a new general sales tax on everything you buy.

You can't say you weren't warned: A vote for Holden is a vote for sharply higher taxes AND abandonment of the 15-year plan that is outstate Missouri's only real hope.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.