Blame game - Highways need real solutions

The Missouri Department of Transportation's director, Henry Hungerbeeler, picking and choosing his words with great care, called it "unusual."

The Republican chairman of the Senate transportation committee, Sen. Morris Westfall of Halfway, Mo., says it was questionable.

Privately, MoDOT commissioners, half of whom were appointed by this governor, are said to be either dumbfounded or outraged -- or both.

What they're all reacting to was the extraordinary appearance recently before a regular Highways and Transportation Commission meeting by Gov. Bob Holden.

Hungerbeeler says he learned of the governor's plan to speak only the night before. The Missouri Capitol was buzzing with reports that at least two commission members spoke with the governor prior to the meeting, urging him not to make this an occasion to dump on the commission and the beleaguered department it oversees.

With all this as prologue, the governor made his extraordinary appearance before the commission, which is constitutionally independent, and basically barked at them.

Avoiding specifics, the governor urged commissioners to take immediate action to restore credibility, improve accountability and complete scheduled projects.

He said last month's resounding defeat of Proposition B, the statewide funding plan for transportation that was on the August primary ballot, was a vote of no confidence in the department.

Well, yes, perhaps.

But isn't it just as possible that that vote was a vote of no confidence in a whole decade of Carnahan-Holden budgeting?

If the governor thinks last month's vote was limited to telling us the public's opinion of MoDOT to the exclusion of all the rest of state government, he is mistaken.

Proposition B's fate at the polls had at least as much to do with a declining level of confidence in all state government as it did in MoDOT itself.

For most of the 1990s, state revenue was rolling in at record levels, but it was more important to a majority of legislators and those occupying the governor's office to grow government three times the rate of inflation than it was to use some of that revenue growth to build roads and bridges.

We lost the last decade on transportation. And that is a record for which this governor, as well as defenders of his predecessor, must answer.

In the meantime, blaming others won't help at all.