Lawmaker: Missouri yet to step up to plate
BY MIKE FITZGERALD
News-Democrat
Missouri Department of Transportation director Pete Rahn has played his cards close to the vest throughout his dealings with Illinois leaders over how to pay for a new Mississippi River bridge.
In an increasingly rancorous tug-of-war between the two states, Rahn has insisted the nearly $1 billion bridge-and-highway project should pay for itself as a tollway, and be built through a "public-private partnership" -- an idea Illinois leaders have rejected as unfair to their state's commuters.
Meanwhile, Rahn's oversight of a previous public-private partnership when he served as New Mexico highway chief in the late 1990s is a concern for at least one regional leader.
The dispute over a new Mississippi bridge has dragged on for nearly a year, but recently it has started to cool off, thanks to a closed-door meeting Friday in St. Louis between Rahn and Tim Martin, the Illinois Department of Transportation director.
The meeting took place three days after state Rep. Frank Watson, R-Greenville -- the Senate minority leader -- announced he had enlisted the help of Missouri state Sen. Mike Gibbons, the Missouri Senate president, to bring both sides together.
Watson is rankled by the idea that so much money and time has been spent preparing for the new bridge -- $80 million on Illinois' end, and $25 million on Missouri's, and yet its future is in doubt.
"Why in the heck didn't somebody have an idea as to what Missouri was going to do?" Watson said. "That's totally irresponsible. It just boggles my mind that there wouldn't have been more of an understanding of what everybody's responsibility was in the whole picture."
To a small number of Missouri leaders, Rahn has been forthcoming about his plans for the eight-lane span, which would funnel Interstate 70 traffic north, away from the crowded Poplar Street Bridge.
Les Sterman, executive director of the East-West Gateway Council of Governments in St. Louis, said Rahn has disclosed to him an unusual piece of news.
"He has announced that within 30 days of having approval to go in this direction, we will have an unsolicited proposal" from a contractor to build the bridge, Sterman said. "How can you know that without having some relationship with the proposer?"
Rahn did not return calls seeking comment since last week.
What concerns Sterman is how Rahn's disclosure is reminiscent of a New Mexico highway project.
"It's deja vu all over again," Sterman said.
Rahn, a native of New Mexico, is a former insurance salesman and construction industry lobbyist who enjoyed close ties to Republican leaders. In 1995, New Mexico's then-Republican governor appointed Rahn chief of the state's highway department, despite his lack of an engineering background.
In 1997, Rahn oversaw the widening of 118 miles of a highway known as N.M. 44. With a price tag of $420 million, the highway project ranked as the most expensive in state history. It also would be remembered as one of the most notorious, souring many in that state on future public-private partnerships.
The Albuquerque Journal later reported that Koch Industries, the highway's builder, had been allowed to bid on the project even though Koch's unsolicited proposal formed the basis for the project design.
Koch was the only bidder, even though the company had never built a major highway in the United States and the design it proposed was untried.
"At the time, they were selling it as a new, novel approach that couldn't be afforded any other way, that we were making some kind of history," said Colleen Heild, a Journal reporter who followed the project.
Despite Koch's claims of a superior design, portions of the highway today are buckling and falling apart, Heild said.
"They're really re-evaluating it now because of the problems," she said.
Rahn defended the project in a story published in the Illinois Business Journal earlier this year, saying it exemplified a successful public-private partnership because it was completed under budget and on time.
Former State. Sen. Billy McKibben, one of Rahn's toughest critics in the New Mexico statehouse, viewed the project in a different light.
"This was a monumental mistake," he told the Albuquerque Journal.
Here in the new Mississippi River bridge tollway dispute, both sides -- for now -- are refusing to budge from their positions.
To state Sen. Bill Haine, D-Alton, Missouri's insistence on a toll is consistent with its behavior on past bistate bridge projects.
While Illinois has pledged $210 million for the bridge, in addition to the $239 million the federal government has earmarked for it, Missouri has promised nothing, Haine said.
"Missouri has yet to step up to the plate," Haine said. "I think they're trying to get a free ride."
Haine scoffed at Missouri's claim it doesn't have any money to invest owing to commitments to improve roads within Show Me State boundaries.
Noting Missouri will receive $75 million in federal funding for the bridge, Haine said: "They were little help on the McKinley Bridge" between St. Louis and Venice. "And they were little help 20 years ago on the (Martin Luther) King Bridge."
Missouri is using the new river bridge as a "test case" by insisting it be a tollway, Haine said.
"We are the guinea pig in a certain sense," he said. "They want this to be the test case, which is fancy language for not putting any money in."
Sterman defended Missouri's assertion it lacks the money for a bridge. He noted the state's history of relatively low gasoline taxes, coupled with the big-ticket loan it recently took out to repair its much-maligned roads.
"Over the next few years, Missouri will be reduced to repaying debt and filling potholes," Sterman said. "They won't be able to build anything."
The idea of making the new Mississippi River bridge a tollway always hovered in the background, according to Sterman and Henry Hungerbeeler, who served as MoDOT director from 1999 to 2000.
"It was clear from the first that if we did not get more than a normal allocation of federal funding, then Missouri could not build a bridge unless we came up with some alternative financial plan like a toll bridge," Hungerbeeler said.
Hungerbeeler said both states hoped to receive an especially big earmark for the project owing to the influence of a pair of important Congressional Republicans: Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, and House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois.
"We had high hopes that we'd be able to bring a lot of money home," he said.
The $239 million earmarked for the bridge turned out to be the largest single line item contained in the transportation bill signed by President Bush last year. But it wasn't enough to close the funding gap, Sterman said.
As a result, Rahn has to come up with another financing idea, Sterman said. "And that's part of why he's so committed to experimenting on the Mississippi River bridge," Sterman said. "It's a great experiment for Missouri because you do it with somebody else's money."
Contact reporter Mike Fitzgerald at
mfitzgerald@bnd.com or 239-2533.
