MISSOURI WATCH: MISSOURI HARMED BY DORMANT DILEMMAS

If major crises, like deaths, travel in threes as many people believe then Missouri already has its quota. Our state government has three major problems of varying duration, but all bearing the same characteristics of being fiscally threatening, difficult to remedy and, to date, unresolved.

Public officials like to adopt a public persona that projects the image of ease and efficiency in dealing with pressing public policy dilemmas. Listen to a public figure, especially at election time, and he or she will promise 24-hour service in resolving sticky problems, while assuring us that the impossible may take a while longer. The promises are not always kept and the assurances have a way of extending through the politician's current term in office. The public is seldom fooled by such optimism and with good reason.

Unfortunately, Missouri now faces some very difficult, disturbing and threatening problems which are made all the more sensitive by the failure of our elected officials to find easy answers. If they could be resolved quickly and easily, officials would have moved much faster and with great publicity.

Not in order of importance, these three problems are:

1. How to proceed with the 15-Year Road Plan, now missing some $14 billion in funding for completion.

2. How to resolve a crime problem that has expanded to such an intensity that taxpayers are having to build or expand at least four new prisons every two years.

3. How to reallocate funds that for a decade and a half have been diverted to St. Louis and Kansas City school districts to comply with federal court orders.

As the reader goes down the list of nagging neglect, he is struck with the thought that none of these problems is exactly page one news. In fact, the reader may even have grown so weary of reading about them that his initial response is one of irritation rather than concern. Citizens grow tired of reading about the same problems and more often than not they grow resentful not only of the lack of resolve displayed by officials elected to office but indifferent to their resolution.

But resolution must come, in one form of another, or the state faces the danger of increasing the consequences to the fiscal well-being of its citizens. We cannot immediately fund the deficit of the highway improvement plan unless we plan on spending every penny collected in the state treasury for one year on concrete. We cannot continue to build or expand two prisons every year or soon we will be make the size and payroll of the Department of Corrections the largest among the state's 16 major agencies. As for appropriations that for more than a decade have varied from between one-fourth and-one-third billion dollars in extra spending for federal desegregation plans, such practices have deprived a majority of Missouri's children of the advantages of improved classroom instruction and better equipped schools. To continue such an inequity for another decade would be unconscionable, not to mention unconstitutional.

I have enough faith in the democratic process that I believe these three major problems can be solved and without endangering the fiscal stability of either the individual taxpayer or the state's collective treasury. I also happen to believe that resolution can almost entirely be made from savings in current spending for emergency measures in the three agencies affected: Departments of Transportation, Corrections and Elementary and Secondary Education.

Indeed, this should be the caveat attached to each of the three solutions: allocate no more to problem resolution than is now being spent to meet emergency band-aids. The average Missourian should not have to dig deeper to remedy past errors of judgment or inadequate planning by state officials.

No average Missourian believes he should have to pay more than he was initially asked to fund an ambitious highway improvement program throughout the state. Missourians were told that if they increased the price they paid for gasoline by a few pennies, the state would receive a much better road system. When citizens responded with support for the plan,the state immediately began funding new activities other than new road construction from the increased revenue. This funding should be halted and the increase applied to carrying out the earlier construction promises.

No average Missourian believes that the high cost of housing a wide variety of criminals, exceeding that allocated for college students, should be the price society must pay for safe neighborhoods and communities. Since not all criminals are the same, why does the state insist on treating a felon who has committed first or second degree murder in the same way it treats a felon who suffers from drug addiction and commits a non-threatening crime in pursuit of funds to assuage his physical habit? Common sense dictates that we incarcerate the first criminal and rehabilitate the second, making him a useful citizen rather than a ward of the state.

As for nearly $3 billion the state has spent on following court orders to atone for a horrible injustice against children of color, the wasting of tax dollars on bloated bureaucracy, needless busing and fuzzy minded curricula have only expanded rather than mitigated earlier damage. Solutions must not continue or expand the spending for a minority of students while ignoring the majority ever since 1981.

Missouri has other problems which our leaders must address, but unless the prolonged ones addressed above are resolved with existing funds, the ability of the state to meet other challenges will be severely limited, perhaps made impossible. Resolution is needed for these dormant dilemmas, and citizens should made their wishes known in voices loud enough to be heard even by the hearing-impaired in Jefferson City.

Jack Stapleton of Kennett is editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.