Tuesday, July 11, 2006

News Leader: Blunt should have met with representatives

A group of Republican representatives, including Ryan Silvey of Kansas City and Mark Wright of Springfield made several stops around Missouri Monday unveiling a proposal to reform the process used to award license fee offices.
The announcement, as you recall, was scheduled for a couple of weeks ago, but was delayed at the request of Governor Matt Blunt, purportedly so he could meet with the representatives and work out any differences that needed to be worked out before the plan was announced.
Now we discover that no meeting was ever held. A representative of the governor says the legislators canceled out. The representatives indicate they were never able to meet with him and would love to have done so.
Somehow, I find it hard to believe that these representatives, who are not among the party's leadership, would deliberately snub the governor. Judging from the tone of the editorial in today's Springfield News-Leader, that newspaper's editorial board feels the same way. The editorial outlined the importance of the reform proposals:

Fixing the fee offices should be important to all of our statewide leaders. Every day, we citizens walk into those offices all over the state and plunk down our cash for new driver's licenses or photo IDs. Those pieces of identification have become even more important to our democracy because of the passage of the Voter ID bill. When citizens pay for such important state documents, they should have confidence that their money is well spent and that there are no political shenanigans being played with the fees.

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