Excuse me for interrupting this moment, when you're probably discussing the serious issues of Campaign '96 with your neighborhood focus group.

I promise what I have to say won't take long. Cutting to the chase, I want to save a building. Now before you indignantly demand to know what is so important about saving a measly building when Clinton and Dole are taking such great pains to save America (from each other), let me explain this all has to do with more than saving a building.

As a matter of fact, it has to do with saving your share of $30,000,000.00. I thought you might not mind leaving your neighbors a couple of minutes for a possible tax saving of that size.

Now I don't exactly have the $30 million on me. The money is cash, in the form of taxes, which you helped raise several years ago--for a state-of-the-art building on the campus of a major state hospital. The structure had long been a dream of the director of the state Department of Mental Health, Dr. George Ulett, who used all of his skills of magic to find the funding from a variety of sources. But, essentially, the money came out of your pocket which paid the taxes which built the building that George built.

After passage of less than 30 years this important structure, used not only to cure the mentally ill but to research the diseases that constantly bedevil society, is still in tip-top A-1 condition. A few years ago the department decided that it no longer needed the building, and others like it in St. Louis and across the state, and got unwitting permission from a poorly informed General Assembly, to demolish numerous facilities.

Intervening budgets have provided funds to demolish the St. Louis hospital structure and several others. If you know anything about tearing down perfectly good, structurally strong and relatively new buildings, you realize that we're talking about the need for many more millions of tax dollars to get the job done. I don't mind telling you: the state intends to get that money from your checking account. Speaking of headache balls, how's your headache doing?

I know this sounds like a psychotic version of Alice in Wonderland, but while the state is demolishing a splendid multi-storied building at one location in St. Louis, it is spending millions more to build other structures to perform the same functions at another location in the area. Since civic leaders in St. Louis are simply nuts about big buildings, especially when they are financed by Missouri taxpayers, I guess we can't expect much emotional or political assistance from residents there.

But somebody, someplace, somehow needs to put a stop to this, if you will pardon the word, insanity.

Bluntly put, it is not good public policy to demolish highly expensive, structurally sound buildings and at the same time expend dollars gathered from the taxpayers of Missouri to build similar structures within a few miles of each other. I well remember the morning the General Assembly was scheduled to vote on this moronic monstrosity of state planning. A high ranking legislator got me out of bed to ask what I knew of the project, even though earlier he sat on a committee that heard testimony from state mental health officials about the project. He had even voted to approve the funds, even as he was unaware of the consequences. It was not exactly a great day for enlightened lawmaking in Jefferson City.

Since then I have asked someone, just anyone, to explain the logic of what the great State of Missouri is doing in this veritable wonderland of waste. No one can provide a satisfactory, even a halfway rational, decent explanation.

And so the wheels move slowly on their never-ending trip to nowhere. The demolition dollars are ready to be spent. The demolition equipment stands ready to do its damndest. And a $30 million building will soon feel the force of a great iron ball that will reduce it to rubble.

Unless...you write or call the governor, your senator, your representative, even your congressman, and ask them to stop and consider what they have already sanctioned. Unless they hear from you, they will spend the millions they have on hand to destroy the millions that have already been spent. That money, friend, is your money. Regards to your focus group.

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