Gov. John Hoeven should call a special session of the Legislature to allow lawmakers to challenge the recent formation of a committee to monitor North Dakota's budget, a legislator says.

The panel is "a small clique of legislators" that is attempting "to take control of North Dakota's traditional budgeting process," Rep. Eliot Glassheim, D-Grand Forks, said in a letter to the governor this week.

The panel, called the Budget and Finance Committee, represents "a power play which does not represent the wishes of a majority of elected legislators," Glassheim's letter said.

If the committee is to exist, it should be authorized by the Legislature itself, and lawmakers have previously rejected similar budget-monitoring proposals, Glassheim said.

Lt. Gov. Jack Dalrymple said Wednesday the governor will not grant Glassheim's request. Hoeven himself could not be reached immediately for comment.

During the Legislature, lawmakers usually work from a set of budget recommendations presented to them by the governor. Dalrymple, who is a former chairman of the budget-writing North Dakota House Appropriations Committee, said he was not worried that the newly formed panel would try to draft a spending plan to rival Hoeven's.

"They have assured us that they're not going to attempt to actually put together a budget," Dalrymple said Wednesday. "Basically, what they're going to do is their favorite thing, which is look at revenues and expenditures, compare trend lines, and sort out ongoing expenditures versus one-time expenditures."

Rep. Al Carlson, R-Fargo, the chairman of the Legislative Council, formed the committee two weeks ago. It has not had a meeting. Carlson himself is chairman of the panel, which has nine Republican members and four Democrats.

Its objective is to keep track of state tax collection trends and develop possible spending benchmarks for the 2009 Legislature when it writes the state's next two-year budget, Carlson said in a letter to Legislative Council members.

The Legislative Council supervises the Legislature's business between sessions. It has 10 Republican and seven Democratic members. The council's chairman has broad power to form interim study committees and pick who is on them.

Carlson could not be reached immediately for comment Wednesday. In an interview about the committee last week, he said it is meant to give lawmakers more influence over the governor's budget recommendations.

"For many, many years … it's bothered me that we haven't had some legislative input into the budget process," he said then. "We're not rewriting the governor's budget, but we are going to have some input as to where we think … what the spending for the future should be."

Glassheim, in an interview, said the budget committee was formed largely in secret.

"Most of the people who were appointed to it didn't know about it," he said. "Hardly anybody was consulted about forming it in the first place … The way it was done does not bode well for the openness of the process."

Glassheim's letter says a special session should consider whether the budget committee should be authorized by the full Legislature, and whether lawmakers should approve a trigger mechanism to distribute surplus state revenues to pay a share of North Dakota's school property tax bills.

North Dakota's budget surpluses are "projected to be somewhere between $700 million and $900 million for all reserve funds by 2009," Glassheim's letter said.

Dalrymple said the surplus number was wildly inflated, and said it apparently included reserve funds that are not intended to be spent unless there is a budget crisis.

"I have no idea how he can possibly get up to numbers like that. I really don't see where there is all of this cash laying around that, for some reason, the legislators in a special session would suddenly want to (spend)," Dalrymple said. "If I flip through the (budget) book and add up every number I can find, I can't get to $900 million."