HIGHWAY COMMISSION WARRANTS GOOD DEBATE

Last weekend, nearly 100 members of the Legislature gathered for a conference at the Lake of the Ozarks, sponsored by two Missouri foundations, to study our state's future transportation needs and how to meet them. According to an Associated Press story on the meeting -- confirmed by some attendees -- the overriding theme emerging from the session was an active questioning as to whether the Highways and Transportation Commission is "too powerful, autonomous and unresponsive to citizens."The concern crosses party lines and bridges regional differences statewide. The purpose of today' commentary, like that of the weekend session among lawmakers, isn't to bash the commission or its current members. The issues involved are much larger and more important than that. Mounting frustration with the commission and the current governance structure was inevitable once the commission announced that it was simply abandoning the 15-year highway plan the state committed to back in 1992. It is beyond contest that the commissioners believed they were doing the right thing. We don't question their motives. Still less do we see the need for a rehashing of the basis for that decision.

Still, the huge unanswered question, never effectively addressed by this commission, can be stated simply: If indeed there was a funding shortfall in completing the 15-year plan, discovered years after that plan took effect, why abandon it altogether in favor of a thinly disguised shift of funding to Missouri's urban areas? If it is true that you can't complete the plan in the prescribed 15 years, why is that an occasion for a completely new plan based on radically different assumptions.

Or to state it differently, Missourians would have been prepared to hear that the plan on the basis of which their elected representatives agreed to a six-cent fuel-tax increase needed to be stretched out to 19, 20, 23, 25 or 27 years. But why should it be scrapped in its entirety? Isn't a promise made a promise kept.

Apparently not with this commissions leaders and the governor who installed them. What rankles isnt just the decision, but the cavalier manner in which the commission, having made it, expected all Missourians meekly to fall in line and accept its insistence to just move on. And while we were at it, we're all supposed to sign onto the commissions demands for more funding, shoveling more money at the road contractors who have been donating disproportionately to Democratic campaigns this decade.

The time has come to say what many are whispering privately: Commission chairman Lee Kling, a personable and distinguished St. Louis banker with national fund-raising ties throughout the Democratic Party, is firmly in the driver's seat on the commission. Too many of its members are acceding, seemingly unquestioningly, to the Kling agenda. The entire department, vital to the transportation needs of more than 5 million Missourians, is now at risk.

Chairman Kling won't like this appraisal. But from our perspective, this is where his actions, and those of the commission that has followed him down this road, are leading us.

Again, the purpose here isn't bashing. But the Carnahan-Kling agenda has set the stage for these issues to be hashed out in election campaigns now unfolding for the U.S. Senate and for governor. This will no doubt be messy, and many times unclear as to who is right and who isn't. With all its imperfections, this kind of debate is how these things get decided in a democracy, if indeed they ever are. Defenders of the current commission will have to do better than they have to date if they are to carry the day.