The state's new biennial budget is now over 100 days late. The conference committee that is supposed to have remedied that problem has not met in public for weeks, even though it continues to do so behind closed doors. Even Gov. Jim Doyle's involvement in the process has had little to no effect.

The obvious question then becomes: Can anything get the Assembly and the Senate to pass a budget?

It looks like the answer is no. Not even State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster's threat that taxpayers across the state will face a $600 million property tax increase without new K-12 spending figures produced a reaction or a result.

Legislators at the state Capitol — along with a large number of citizens in the state — are becoming understandably frustrated, and with little other business going on, some Democrats and Republicans have decided to take matters into their own hands.

Two state lawmakers — one Democrat and one Republican — have introduced separate pieces of legislation that would cut legislators' pay for every day that a state budget is late. This seems fair. After all, if the most important job that state representatives and senators have is to pass a budget, it only makes sense to hold them accountable.

Another proposal would require the budget conferees to meet for eight hours a day, five days a week at the start of budget negotiations. As time goes by, the requirement would increase to 10 hours a day, six days a week and so on until a budget is passed. The kicker in this proposal is that any member of the Conference Committee who fails to show up for the meetings could be arrested by state police.

While it may seem a little overboard, the fact that any member of the Legislature would propose cutting his or her own pay or risk arrests in future negotiations shows that patience is beginning to wear thin in the Capitol.

Unfortunately, I have not heard anyone suggest the one solution that may actually help bring the budget stalemate to an end: Let the Legislature pass the budget agency by agency.

A few short weeks ago, the Assembly did just that when it passed a separate K-12 education bill to avoid the massive property tax increases that I mentioned earlier. The bill funded K-12 schools in the state at the exact same levels that the governor and the Senate had asked for earlier, but amazingly the Democrat-led Senate refused to pass the bill. Why? Because Democrats in the Senate believed that it was irresponsible to pass only parts of the budget and not the entire thing.

To remove the accusation of irresponsibility, the solution is to pass a statute that would allow future state legislatures to pass parts of the budget that are already agreed upon. It seems to me that this would be a simple and straightforward way to handle future "budget crises."

If it were the case that the state's budget did not continue from last year without a new budget passed, then passing a budget piece by piece may not be such a good idea. Fortunately, the state's budget does continue at last year's levels even if the Legislature fails to pass a new budget.

Because the state does not shut down without a new budget, the Legislature has the ability to pass one agency's budget at a time. Going back to the K-12 education funding as an example, if the Senate had acted and passed the separate budget, no other state agency or department would have been affected, and the potential $600 million property tax increase would have been avoided.

It is not only education funding that would be effected by this type of budgeting either. There are most likely several state agency budgets that could be passed separately if the Legislature were allowed to do so by state statutes. Not every agency is as hotly contested as Healthy Wisconsin or the UW System, so why should we hold other departments hostage because of disagreements on only a few agencies?

Maybe, before we start throwing legislators in jail for not passing a budget on time, we should step back, take a breath and do the simple things first.

Mike Hahn ([email protected]) .is a senior majoring in history and political science