TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF HIGHWAY PLANS

What are Missourians to make of it all as we read continuing developments about the 15-year highway plan we embarked on in 1992? That plan was scrapped last month by the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission. Let us try to sort out what we now know of this amazing story:

* Original reporting by this newspaper's Mark Bliss this week showed a huge increase in fuel-tax revenue going to Missouri Department of Transportation since voters approved the first increase in that levy by passing Proposition A in 1987. In that year, the fuel tax -- then at 7 cents per gallon, the nation's lowest -- yielded $164 million for MoDOT operations. After the four-cent Prop A increase and the six-cent, phased-in increase for the 15-year plan adopted in 1992, this number has climbed steadily every year. This year the fuel tax is producing $464 million for MoDOT operations -- a $300 million increase in annual funding since 1987. (At 17 cents, Missouri's fuel tax is still below the 19-cent-a-gallon average of state fuel levies. Neighboring states' levies include Arkansas at 18.6, Illinois at 19, Iowa at 20 cents and Nebraska at 24.6 cents.)

* MoDOT gets 75 percent of this revenue, although all of the six-cent increase approved in 1992 was earmarked for construction projects. Missouri cities share 15 percent of the fuel-tax revenue, and counties split the remaining 10 percent. Overall revenue from this fuel tax to all levels of government totalled $672 million last year.

* Total revenue from the fuel tax has greatly exceeded projections made by the state budget office in March 1996. At that time, officials estimated the 17-cent-a-gallon tax would generate $544 million a year, or $32 million for each penny of tax. Just short of three years ago, officials of the current administration underestimated the annual take from fuel taxes by nearly $130 million.

* Former (1986-94) MoDOT chief engineer Wayne Muri now says that the 15-year plan was intentionally oversubscribed to the tune of 15 to 20 percent in planned projects. That is to say, the department included in the plan projects its top officials knew couldn't be finished in 15 years. Muri says this represents standard planning by that department, pointing to problems that arise over time such as environmental obstacles and changes in the priority and scope given to various projects. This has dismayed lawmakers of both parties who backed the plan six years ago and who say they wouldn't have done so had they known that projects were included that the department knew it couldn't finish in 15 years.

Missourians reeling from all this now confront a MoDOT that has adopted in place of the 15-year plan a five-year plan. Regardless of where blame is or isn't placed for the collapse of the 15-year plan, it is this new plan adopted by the current commission that is giving outstate Missourians plenty of heartburn. To start with, funding of urban projects increased from approximately 40 percent to 50 percent in the new plan the highway commission adopted last month. This funding shift was accomplished with remarkably little public comment and with no participation whatsoever by the people's elected representatives in the General Assembly.

Members of the General Assembly need to turn their attention to this immediately. We need to know how much of our fuel-tax money these folks intend to start shoveling at urban mass transit, for example. Early reports on the new five-year plan are that we will be lucky in Southeast Missouri if we end up with a bare-bones, maintenance-and-repair budget over the next five years. If this is what Gov. Mel Carnahan's administration has planned for outstate Missouri, let's see him stand up and say it.

Meanwhile, certain MoDOT officials continue to talk of the need for higher taxes for transportation. Anyone with any sense will understand the need to go slow on that one until state government digs itself out of this credibility hole.