WITH FOUR WEEKS LEFT, LEGISLATORS HAVE MUCH LEFT TO DO

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- There are four weeks remaining in the 2001 session of the Missouri General Assembly before adjournment on May 18.

This past week we in the Senate completed earlier-than-usual first-round action on the 12 House bills that make up the $18.8 billion state budget.

With a deadline to pass the budget by May 11, we are about a week ahead of the usual schedule for dealing with this enormous task. The bills are now headed to a House-Senate conference committee (five members from each chamber) that will undertake the difficult task of ironing out differences between the two versions.

It may interest readers to know that Senate budgeteers wrote a plan that contains some $73 million less in spending than the House version.

On Thursday, Gov. Bob Holden stood up at a press conference and announced the need for further budgetary restraint. Specifically, Holden announced that receipts from both sales and corporate income taxes are coming in significantly below expectations, to the tune of $50 to $100 million lower.

Accordingly, the governor said, further savings on this order of magnitude will have to be found in the fiscal year 2002 budget year that begins July 1. Thus it would seem that once again, we in the Republican Senate are closer to the budgetary position of Gov. Bob Holden than is the House, still under Democratic control, as it has been since 1954.

A further concern is that the governor also said he felt constrained to put on hold the $154 million in capital improvements approved last year, at least until June 30, the end of the current fiscal year.

Among many other projects, this will include the $12 million in funding for Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus and the $1 million for the Cape Girardeau Career and Technology Center, as well as another $1 million for the Southeast Missouri Regional Port Authority. It is to be hoped that by then the situation will have eased sufficiently to allow release of these funds.

In the remaining four weeks, we have an amazingly number of large and tough issues with which we must deal.

This is the once-in-a-decade year for redistricting of our state's nine congressional districts. This matter alone could easily consume a week.

There is still further action on the budget to be dealt with after the conference committee reports. There is action to be dealt with on the issue of tobacco funds, including this writer's attempt to stop the unjust enrichment of four-dozen politically connected trial lawyers to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. We in the Senate must deal with Holden's plan to ram through a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar package of tax increases for transportation, the largest tax increase in state history. Any such plan would have to be approved by voters. There aren't many in the Senate who believe that voters would approve such a gigantic package of tax increases, at a time of rising gas prices and credibility problems in our state's transportation agency.

Action on scores of other issues also hangs in the balance as we head into the final four weeks for the first Republican-majority Missouri Senate since the period 1946-48. We'll try to keep you posted.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.