LOOKING AHEAD: MISSOURI HIGHWAYS

The Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission received high marks when a committee of the Missouri House of Representatives met in Cape Girardeau last week to hear public comments on this vital function of state government. A House interim committee studying the MHTC and its mission held the hearing, one of five to be conducted statewide. The committee heard from a variety of witnesses, including area contractors and such officials as those representing Southeast Missouri's regional port authorities.

As always, funding is an issue of overriding importance. Missouri supports the nation's sixth largest state highway system, with 32,292 road miles, on the 45th-ranking fuel tax of the 50 states: 15 cents a gallon. Missouri's fuel tax is lower than any of the eight contiguous states and is 5 to 11 cents a gallon lower than three of them. Generally, it can be said that Missouri gets a significant bang from the bucks we have invested in highway construction and maintenance.

With facts such as these, it isn't hard to look down the road and foresee yet another MHTC attempt, sometime in the next two to five years, to ask voters to approve more funding in some form. It may well be that they will be able to demonstrate such needs convincingly. Before that happens, however, the department will have to continue its earnest attempts to climb out of the credibility problems into which it fell over the last two years with the frank admission of a badly mistaken forecast on the 15-year highway plan. Recall that voters were sold on the 15-year plan as the basis for fuel-tax increases back in 1987 (a voter-approved four cents) and in 1991 (the three-step, phased-in six-cent increase that will be fully in effect next year).

With candor rare in any government agency, MHTC officials owned up to their mistaken forecasts and leveled with a public, wary, as always, of those who spend their tax money. Sit down with MHTC Chief Engineer Joe Mickes today, and you will come away with an impression of a straight shooter trying his darndest to listen and to implement radical changes in the way the department does business. Foremost among these is the Mickes attempt to decentralize the department, pushing decision-making out of Jefferson City and closer to the district level. For anyone familiar with the benevolent dictatorship that was the old MHTC style, this is major improvement.

MHTC officials are forthright in their plans to ask the General Assembly next year for approval of up to $500 million in bonds to accelerate highway construction over the next decade. Whether they receive that approval will depend upon their continuing attempts to win back public confidence in the wake of their frank admissions of error.