Hello, Mr. Hungerbeeler

Off the Editor’s Spike by Darryl Wilkinson

Last Friday, newspaper publishers from across Northwest Missouri converged for an annual “conflab” at St. Joseph. These usually are a mixture of social and cerebral affairs of which I’m never quite sure: it’s either workaholics meeting a need to be social or wordsmiths meeting a need to glean someone else’s thoughts. The effort, however, is not confined to those with ink on their hands.

Henry Hungerbeeler was there.

The afternoon session was slated for politicians. This is, after all, an election year, and tradition says politicians are supposed to be chummy with newspaper publishers. Pat Danner, however, was the only one who showed up. And for an hour or more she visited more like a friend among family than a politician stumping before a captured audience in the Downtown Holiday Inn’s theater. Pat’s just naturally like that.

Both the Missouri Transportation Commission and Highway Department have been criticized since agency officials announced in 1998 that they had to scrap the state’s $12 billion road- building plan. The project was supposed to have been financed by a 6-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax increase lawmakers approved.

That, if I recall, was a politically explosive legislative decision debated in the Missouri House even as Northwest editors and publishers met in St. Joseph for the 1992 version of their annual “conflab.” Legislators bypassed the option for a public vote to assure a healthy take of federal highway tax dollars. Everyone thought things would be great by now, confident because of the Highway Department’s past record.

Henry Hungerbeeler says: “But that was then; this is now.”

The department’s failure to include inflation in the original cost estimates played a major role in the plan’s demise. Joe Public no longer trusts the highway boys; the only certainty is that our roads, in many key places, are getting worse. Eight of 10 highway regions in the state are considered rural, and taxpayers in every rural district think they’re getting cheated in terms of highway dollars being spent.

Henry Hungerbeeler says: “Missouri’s highway department does a fine job.”

Promises of new construction ballyhooed in the now discarded plan seem vulgar since Missouri never seems to have the revenue, and some argue the expertise, to maintain the roadways we now have. One gubernatorial candidate (Jim Talent) has staked his political future on fulfilling Highway Department promises, although he has based his revisions and management ideas on the same cost estimates used in the 1992 plan.

Henry Hungerbeeler says: “That’s no good.”

Fluff balls for conversation were tossed about during the session’s question-answer portion — the billboard petition, comment on a specific bridge problem or a particular maintenance barn situation, snow removal. Inevitably, the discussion focused on I-70, the state’s main artery between its two largest cities which was built in 1956 with a 20-year life expectancy.

Henry Hungerbeeler says: “Something’s got to be done.” We all nodded.

Yesterday some Republicans in the Missouri House proposed that the state’s transportation commission be abolished and replaced with a cabinet-level secretary of transportation. The idea is to have voters approve the change, hopefully to make the agency more accountable and less vulnerable to political pressure. A ringleader, Delbert Scott of Lowry City, is quoted in the Kansas City Star as saying, “We can no longer stand by and wring our hands while a completely unaccountable commission mismanages the highway and transportation needs of Missouri.”

Ahhh. So, that’s why Henry Hungerbeeler was in St. Joseph last Friday. He seemed eager to compare Missouri to other states. He emphasized how Missouri’s department, as organized by our constitution, is an independent agency that is better at using limited resources than most. He points to Illinois, a state with three times the median family income and higher taxes, more people and a smaller highway system. He said Missouri does better with its highway dollars than Illinois. He said that seven of the eight states neighboring Missouri have better median household income but spend more proportionally than Missouri on their highways.

May I paraphrase Henry Hungerbeeler: “Send us more money.”

Then he left. Well, not exactly. Henry Hungerbeeler was lauded for being the first Director of the Missouri Department of Transportation to personally attend a Northwest Press meeting in many years. But it wasn’t until he left with his entourage of assistants and department personnel — and this morning’s headlines about abolishing the commission — that this editor, at least, understood that Friday’s session was intended to be something important.

Henry Hungerbeeler attended Northwest Press as an unannounced program speaker, loaded for bear and expecting us news types to do all the shooting. He seems to be a nice man who’s only recently inherited a decade’s worth of problems and hostility from an impatient public. But the newspaper publishers were anticipating a political round table, or some Internet prattle, and were largely unprepared to do anything more than a pop-gun battle. Nobody breathed a word about changes sought in the roads bureau. Not one minute was spent on how the commission might be abolished or meaningful details on how the department might be improved.

And after the annual newspaper “conflab,” dumb me, I found myself having to research the name of the most important man in the Missouri Department of Transportation because I had forgotten it. Henry Hungerbeeler, Henry Hungerbeeler, Henry Hungerbeeler…