Rewrite the state constitution

by Jack Stapleton, Jr.

One can accurately say that when it comes to the announcement of yet another funding crisis in Missouri’s state government, there is no shortage. Jefferson City unquestionably lacks money. But there’s no poverty of plans to curtail funding some of the most fundamental portions of Missouri’s agenda: full support of all levels of public education, assistance for the poor and disadvantaged, improvement of public health, both urban and rural economic development and critically needed rejuvenation of the state’s infrastructure particularly in the field of transportation.

Indeed, it would be virtually impossible to name a single state agency that since last fall has not cited the “critical need” for additional funding for an agency’s favored projects. The rare exception might be the Department of Conservation which enjoys the special status of an earmarked-funds budget and which from year to year seems able to buy more and more state landscape for the pleasure of the state’s fishers and hunters.

The latest state program to fall victim to the fiscal drought is the National Guard’s excellent juvenile boot camp in the Nevada area. This project is so successful that local residents sought to make up the shortage with private contributions. Local donors provided more than $200,000, which is $130,000 shy of the operating budget, but the state couldn’t come up with the remainder. So, another successful and needy state activity will die on the vine, barring some unforeseen source of needed revenue. This is the latest of halting, canceled or severely curtailed state programs, but it certainly neither the first nor the last. And so we 5.6 million citizens wait on the future, speculating whether even the most essential of services can survive the current crunch.

State officials during halcyon moments of revenue surplus couldn’t foresee September 11, the unbelievable greed of dishonest corporate criminals and the possibility that we might resume federal defense spending at the levels of the Cold War. Everybody ran out of money at about the same time. Unfortunately, one of the first in line was the State Treasury where revenue searchers have worn a smooth track in their search for extra money that hasn’t appeared and isn’t likely to do so in the immediate future, if then.

Missourians held the key to their dollar dilemma last fall when they had a chance to rewrite their 57-year-old state Constitution. But since it was impossible to demonstrate clearly to show-me Missourians that fundamental changes were needed (required is a more apt term), the rewrite issue went down in dazzling defeat. Voters effectively got across their basic beliefs: we’re satisfied at this moment and we don’t expect to resolve problems that, while obvious, are not immediate, so please just leave us alone and everything will be fine. Without the rewrite, the state retained its obvious revenue inequities, its unfair tax write-offs for a favored few and its guaranteed tax loopholes for those who secured their gains through favoritism and cronyism.

The result has been nothing less than substantive: inadequate funding for local schools and the creation of job-endangered career teachers, lowered college curricula that will find it impossible to address current, much less future, employment demands, closed mental hospital wards and facilities for the mentally ill and retarded, a stagnant drug-treatment program, shuttered youth facilities such as the one at Nevada, greatly reduced general relief programs for the very poorest segment of Missouri’s population, a limping welfare-to-work project that was succeeding far above expectations, a crumbling transportation system that cannot meet its decade-old goals, a Texas-style lockup corrections system that ignores rehabilitation even for those returning to civilian life this week.

This is Missouri’s tomorrow. When one adds a county government system that is far greater than taxpayers’ ability to fund, a pejorative tax system that places far too much emphasis on land ownership regardless of its value, and then throw in innumerable constitutional requirements that were written more than a century ago and provide for such antiquities as 114 county governments, each with its own bureaucracy, and pretty soon it’s possible to visualize the real state of Missouri: Misery, Incorporated.

Missourians voted last November that they were satisfied with the form and structure of their government. But in the meantime, times have conspired to provide them with a radically altered system that is far from perfect and seems obviously imperfect during these difficult times.

We won’t get change until the average Missourian decides that there are far too many resolvable problems that could be ended without a crisis if we simply tired. This, of course, relies on strong leadership and an enlightened public that has the capacity to understand both the problem and to approve the solution. It’s a tall order for a state that’s knee-deep in angst and frustration. Welcome to Missouri.

[Missouri News & Editorial Services, Inc. Copyright (C) 2003 MNES Corp.]