Everything's on the table: selling buildings, turning to private business, cutting the size of the legislature and even taking away cellphones are all ideas for states desperate to cut costs.

• Author: Boulard, Garry
• Position: BUDGET CUTS

The ideas are sometimes quirky, sometimes innovative, and they're coming from every direction.

Confronting the most stubbornly enduring national economic downturn since the Great Depression, state legislators have cutting on their minds.

"They're doing budget cutting by bits and pieces," says Alan Rosenthal, a professor of public policy and political science at Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics.

Asked if the many varied budget-reducing and efficiency-promoting ideas signal either legislative innovation or desperation, Rosenthal is quick to reply: "Desperation."

"But it's a desperation formed by two perfect storms," he says. "One is the recession, which has had enormous consequences for the federal government and most of the states. The other is the instant gratification binge we've been on of spending money and cutting taxes."

Symbolic of the new way of thinking, lawmakers in Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Vermont and Virginia have revisited their states' long-standing and cherished alcohol control policies. While they haven't changed anything yet, they have at least raised the question of whether their states can afford to be in the beer, wine and distilled spirits business, while at the same time shrugging off increased state revenue through privatization in the process.

"The demand for cost-savings and budget-balancing measures, for new and effective ways of delivering state services, tends to peak, grow and mushroom during times of fiscal stress on the state budgets," says Arturo Perez, fiscal affairs director at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

"It comes down to the basic element of trying to do the same or even more with less," Perez says. "And more means trying to deliver services to more Medicaid recipients as a result of high unemployment."

Legislators also have been wondering about decades-old expensive programs that were not questioned in the past, such as maintaining highway rest stops. In at least one state, Georgia, where the annual bill for such responsibilities has come to more than $4 million, the legislature approved a measure calling for the privatization--or retail development--of those same spaces.

Lawmakers in Arizona even wondered about the expense of operating their big, marble state office buildings, signing off on selling two legislative structures, a slender tower and even the state Supreme Court building last year in two separate sales that netted the state more than $1 billion.

"In the kind of economy we've been dealing with for the last three years," says Rosenthal, "everything, every program, every way of doing business, is being rethought."

And then there are the ideas to save money by altering the actual structure of the legislatures themselves.

In Connecticut, Representative Linda Schofield has noted her state currently has more legislators than California, even though the Golden State has eight times more people. She proposed cutting the size of the state General Assembly in half, saying a smaller membership could save the state upward of $28 million.

Maine Representative Linda Valentino took it a step further. She'd like to do away with the Maine House altogether, contending such a move would mean up to $11 million less in costs for her state every two years.

Welcome to the era of attacking budget deficits and making government more efficient through creative thinking.

"Crisis brings reform," says Bob Stern, the president of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles. "When times are good there is no incentive to reform things because reform also means pain, reform imposes on people's turf and reform changes things. People down deep don't really...