Almost 200 Missourians got up Monday morning as free people for the first time since cold and dreary January.  They became free people at 6 p.m. last Friday.  They are the 34 members of the Missouri Senate and the 163 members of the Missouri House.  They didn’t have to get in their cars or board an AMTRAK train Monday morning and go to Jefferson City to spend four days under increasing pressure, living a life bizarrely different from their normal lives. 

That bizarre alternative life ends 6 p.m. on a May evening each year. Abruptly.  Done.  Suddenly, this consuming existence is finished..  

Legislators, legislative staff, lobbyists, reporters—all of us suddenly know that our world will be completely different on Monday.  Life might seem a little strange for the first few days when it is not scheduled according to committee meetings, caucuses, floor debate, compromise negotiations, maneuvering, strategizing, conniving—all the things that force a person to live by someone else’s clock and purposes. 

We suppose some of those folks have ways to transition back to civilian life, as it were. Some kind of healing ritual helps.

In our case we get in a car as soon as we can after adjournment and the post-session self-congratulatory news conferences by the Majority and the usual low ratings given out by the Minority and head east about 400 miles.  And the next morning, we park our car in the infield of The World’s Greatest Race Course.

 We are miles away from Jefferson City in distance and experience.  The first step onto the grass is the first step into spring after being cooped up in the Capitol through the early warm spells, the little cold jabs of dying winter, the arrival of daylight savings time (when the yearning for an end to the session increases markedly), and being drawn deeper into the legislative process as it enters its most critical days.  

In the background in the photograph is what they call the pagoda at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and to the left is the scoring tower that will tell main stretch fans what car is running in what position during the race a week away. The “pagoda” is the home of the timing and scoring operation, the place where race broadcasts originate, and other official functions go on. When the Speedway was new more than a century ago, the timing and scoring booth was in a wooden building that really looked like a pagoda.  A second, larger, structure replaced it and in 1957 a new, modern structure went up that had none of the charm or appearance of the pagoda.  The current modern pagoda-reminiscent building went up in the 1990s. 

If we’ve timed our arrival correctly we are greeted as we get out of the car by the whine of tightly-wound engines driving thigh-high cars around a 2.5 miles squared oval in about 38 seconds.   The sound alone is a cleansing experience. 

 Something about sitting along the main straightaway while someone flies by on  the ground at 240 or more miles an hour and turns left without touching a brake erases a lot of the late night voices  that have been our lives for months as they struggle to find some middle ground or fight to keep an ideology from over-reaching. Sunshine, the excitement of people competing on the edge for a chance at a phrase that will stay with them for the rest of their lives (“Indianapolis 500 winner….’), doing something that requires such extraordinary precision and ability, puts four and a half months in an incredibly different world far from the mind.   

And when the little guy beats all the big guys, that’s a great cap to the day.

 Saturday the little guy was Ed Carpenter, who owns his own team, who beat five drivers from one of the sport’s mega-teams and three drivers from one of the other mega-teams, and won $100,000 for having the fastest qualifying run that included the fastest official lap seen at the old racetrack in a decade.

After four months watching one party often portrayed as more likley to side with the big guys battle the other party that is often portrayed as the defender of the middle class, I watched the same drama played out in a much different way in a much different setting. 

On the long drive home Saturday night, the thoughts began to filter in that all I had done was change locations to watch the same kind of drama. Maybe that was true.  But the change in place and the way the drama was played out overcame the similarities—until the mind began to find ways to entertain itself as the tar lines on I-70 to Terre Haute thumped beneath the car.  

Both the race driver and the legislator must find ways to beat time whether it is being the fastest around a race track or finishing work before the adjournment deadline.  Each faces the challenge of precision whether it is making sure that a wheel is put eactly where it must be put to get through a corner in the fastest way possible or whether it is the precision of words that  clearly establish public policy.  Each faces increasing pressure to perform as the stages of the event unfold.  Each must risk something to achieve the highest result.  Each has obligations to others on their teams.  One must prove to others every two or four years that they deserve to continue. One must prove the same thing to others each week.

Journalists who cover politics or auto racing are faced with a complicated world populated by highly-competitive and complicated people.  And explaining the technical nature of today’s racing and the complicated nature of its participants is as much a challenge as explaining the nuances of writing and passing laws and the tendencies of those who create them. 

But let’s not dwell on groping for similarities because that’s not why the trip to Indianapolis is essential each year.  It’s essential because it’s ritual. It’s essential because it’s family tradition.  It’s essential because we can take racing at Indianapolis for the physical pleasure the participants provide. And after four and a half months inside, living in the dark walls of the Capitol, watching ideas clash, the opportunity to be in a much different place even for a few hours is a healing experience.  

Others no doubt have their ways, but it’s the Indianapolis 500 that tells me everything is okay again.

 ”This is a legislature that decided to add to its budget $38-milion to build a state office building for bureaucrats that I didn’t ask for.” 

     —–Governor Nixon  May, 2013

 We all know about bureaucrats, don’t we?  They’re those worthless loafers that feed at the public trough, take a lot of coffee breaks, stand outside the entrances to state buildings laying down a cloud of tobacco smoke that taxpayers have to walk through, and shuffle papers until 4:30 sharp when they walk away from whatever they’re doing until the next morning.  

 And now, to listen to Governor Nixon tell it, the legislature wants to spend $38 million dollars for ANOTHER office building where bureaucrats can disappear into their cubicle farms each morning.  And why do these legislators want to build another state office building?   Because THEY want more space.  These people who visit Jefferson City for three-and-a-half days a week four and-a-a-half months of the year want more room.

 They have coveted the Highway and Transportation Department building half a block from the Capitol for years. The new building would open MODOT’s current headquarters for uses the legislature would determine. Plus the are rooting for the state to lease the top two floors of the Federal Building (most of us know it as the post office building across the street from the Capitol) now that the federal government has erected a big new federal courts building next to the old, vacant state pen.  These lawmakers want to fill up those two floors too, renting space at a time when they propose building a big new building that will curtail rent payments to other landlords.     

 No, Governor Nixon didn’t ask for a new building to house bureaucrats. But the state has bureaucrats scattered all over the place in Jefferson City.  And those who dream of that new building that would house the main office of MODOT and maybe some other agencies say the state will save enough in rents to make the new building cost-neutral in seven to ten years while providing the legislature with more office space that will be needed when the double-decker offices for state representatives can be eliminated—and it’s well past time they were eliminated. They’re not accessible for disabled people. And they put a structural strain on the building. 

 Framed copies of the original blueprints of the Capitol are on walls in the building’s basement, nearing hearing rooms, offices, and the cafeteria.  A look at them tells us much about government before World War I and say something about the growth of Missouri government.

 The blueprints for the ground floor show a lot of unassigned office space buyt they also show space for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a dining room, the Insurance Department , the State Banking Department, The state mining office and the Fish and Game Department.  The Public Utilities Commission and the Library Commission also were on that floor.  The space where the Missourinet has its Capitol office and studio was designed as a storage room for the Department of Insurance.  The second floor was offices for state elected officials.  The third floor was for athe legislature.  The Adjutant General was on the fourth floor along with the Board of Health, the Board of Pharmacy, the Hotel Inspector, and the state Building and Loan regulators.  Office space was not really assigned, though, until the building could be occupied in 1917.  

 The same architect who designed the Capitol designed the Highway Department building in the 1920s—cars and highways had become such a big deal by then that the department needed more space.  Several years later an addition was put on the building.

 Other parts of  state government grew and in the 1930s, the Broadway Office Building was opened.  But government grew some more and in the 1950s, the Jefferson Office Building was constgructed.  But government grew and in the 1970s, the Truman Office Building went up.  

 But government grew and the number of state office buildings increased throughout Jefferson City. And the bureaucrats multiplied to fill the new spaces as they were created.  In the last few years of economic downturn, thousands cubicles have gone dark; bureaucrats have been fired or have retired before the axe could fall.   But despite all of that, the legislature wants to “build an office building for bureaucrats.”  And the legislature isn’t just messing with one building. It’s eyeing three.  

 Before we continue, however, let’s set the record a little straight about that faceless mass of people we disparagingly call “bureaucrats.”  Some truth in advertising first, though.  This reporter is married to a retired bureaucrat.  He lives in a neighborhood of retired, or still active, bureaucrats.  Cigarette smoking, coffee sucking, time-killing freeloaders?   Not on your life. 

 The people who are disparagingly called “bureaucrats” work as hard as the people in the office of any profit-making company.  They share the same commitments to service–and, yes, some share the same lack of commitment for anything other than the next paycheck that workers in for-profit companies have.  The scorned bureaucrat is the person who answers the child hotline call, who tests the water in your city’s well to see if it’s full of contaminants, who designs the new bridge your school buses will cross, who chase down non-supportive spouses, who check on the conditions in dog kennels and nursing homes—all of the things we expect state government to do for us  or to keep from behing done to us. And they deserve working conditions as good as those us us in the private sector have.  Like it or not, we need them because they’re the real people who perform the duties of government that somebody wants government to do.   

 And most of them deserve to be thought of better than “bureaucrats” who will populate a building that Governor Nixon didn’t ask for.  

 All of this is a long way around to a couple of points—with a diversion to defend state employees (a more respectul description than “bureaucrat”–that this entry wants to make.

 1.  A Republican-dominated legislature that spends huge amounts of time and words bemoaning big government and proclaiming how it wants to shrink state government wants to expand government in Jefferson City by three buildings. The fact that it wants to do so–to a large degree–to improve its own working conditions is noted.

 2.    The first Governor this reporter interviewed was John Dalton  An Official State Manual shows Dalton had fifteen people on his staff.  The 2009-2010 state manual showed Governor Nixon with 34.  The most recent one showed 27.  The budget that Governor Nixon proposed in January listed 38.28 full-time equivalent employees in Fiscal Year 2012.  For this fiscal year, and for the one that starts July first, he asked for an even thirty, double the gubernatorial bureaucracy that John Dalton had. 

 The people in his office are staff.  The people who would work in the new state office building would be bureaucrats.    I’m sure I saw some of each uptown during a recent weekday noon hour stroll.  I tried to identify which was which.  I failed.  They all looked the same to me.  I was unable to determine which ones might move into a $38 million dollar new building and which ones might move into an 85-year old former (someday) highways building and which ones would stay right where they are in the governor’s office complex.  

 Bureaucrats is bureaucrats.  And all of us should respect the person in the cubicle deep in the heart of the Truman Building as much as we respect the sharply-dressed people who go in and out of the door marked “Governor.”  Come to think of it, he’s just a bureaucrat too, isn’t he?

 Pots and kettles are the same color at my house.

Every team needs a captain.  And as we know, no team is a real team these days without a mascot.  

Yesterday we talked about the team in the Senate that thinks wearing milk and sugar on Wednesdays is just the swellest thing.   The team needs a name.  Team Urdu (You have to read yesterday’s blog to understand)?  Team Seersucker?    Team Cool (as it, “aren’t we cool because we’re wearing seersucker suits?) or Team Cool (because seersucker suits are supposed to wick away heat)?  The ‘Suckers?

The team captain is Eric Schmitt.  He’s from Kirkwood.  He went to Truman State University, where he was a two-sport athlete—but not in basketball, which you might think the tallest senator in state history (or so he says) might have been.  No, he was a football and baseball player. 

We’ve been familiar with Truman University since it was Northeast Missouri State.  We have never seen the school’s spring sports teams in seersucker uniforms. 

The Cardinals have Fredbird.  The Phillies have the Phanatic. The whole thing started with the San Diego Chicken who is now just The Chicken. The senate has Kool Aid.

That’s Matt “The Explosion”  Michelson in full Dreamsicle mode.  Yesterday one senator interrupted debate to ask if it was proper to be wearing orange prison pants in the senate. We were shocked when that particular senator, who comes from a family catering service background, didn’t know the difference between prison orange pants and sherbet pants.

 We thank the Senate  photographer, Harrison Sweazea, who contributed some of the photographs in our Capitol Art book for the picture of the Captain and the Mascot of the Senate Seersucker Squad.  A group photograph was rumored to be in the works yesterday.   We’ll have to make an editorial decision about whether to post it.  Journalisms ethics hold that one should not gratuitously expose one’s audience to scenes of disaster.