Although many North Dakota lawmakers grouse about the governor's outsized role in developing the state's budget, they have never decided to write a competing blueprint of their own before the Legislature begins. It would be expensive, and it would take a lot of extra work.

Almost a decade ago, a study indicated it would cost almost $1 million every two years for the Legislature to write its own detailed set of spending recommendations to rival the governor's budget plan, which is delivered a month before lawmakers start their regular session.

The expense included extra meetings of legislative interim committees and the money needed to hire four new budget analysts at the Legislative Council, which is the research arm of the North Dakota Legislature.

In 1999, the North Dakota Senate approved a less ambitious proposal for the Legislature to draft its own pre-session budget recommendations. The measure was defeated in the House, 89-7.

"I think the Legislature would get a lot more involved and have a lot more debate about areas of the budget, if they were developing it themselves," said Gary Nelson, a former North Dakota Senate Republican majority leader.

Nelson supported the concept of a legislative budget. "The Legislature would start the discussion how much spending there should be," he said. "They would not just be reacting to what the governor has done."

The debate about the Legislature's role in the state budget process flared anew recently with the formation of a legislative committee to monitor state tax collections and set growth targets for the next two-year spending plan for North Dakota's government.

Rep. Eliot Glassheim, D-Grand Forks, called the panel a stealth attempt to upstage Gov. John Hoeven's own budget work and appealed to Hoeven to call a special session to "rein in a power play (and) avert a constitutional confrontation."

Hoeven declined. Rep. Al Carlson, R-Fargo, who formed the committee and chose its 13 members in his role as chairman of the Legislative Council, said Glassheim had an exaggerated view of what the committee will be doing.

"We are not going to try to duplicate what the governor does," Carlson said.

Talk of a "legislative budget" can be puzzling because the Legislature already has the last word about what each spending plan contains. But most of the governor's budget recommendations end up in the Legislature's own final product, with some tweaking around the edges.

The governor's plan includes detailed spending suggestions for each North Dakota government agency. To finance their own initiatives or reduce spending growth, legislators often must hunt for ways to trim those recommendations, which can provoke opposition from interest groups and the governor himself.

Rep. Ken Svedjan, R-Grand Forks, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said legislative budget guidelines are useful in developing the final money allocations.

Svedjan, however, said he doubted the Legislature could develop a set of recommendations as detailed as the governor's, which is written with help from state agencies and analysts in the state Office of Management and Budget.

"As far as sitting down and drafting a budget, with all of the nuances that exist … I'm not sure a handful of legislators, or a committee of the Legislature, could effectively do that," Svedjan said. "Maybe we could, but I'm not sure we could."

Rep. Rick Berg, R-Fargo, the House majority leader, said writing a detailed legislative budget would require more Legislative Council staffers and demand more work from part-time lawmakers.

"I believe in the citizens' Legislature, and if the legislative assembly is going to take a larger role in writing the budget, it's going to require a full-time Legislature," Berg said. "I don't think that is the route we want to go."