North Dakota's Senate has rejected a plan to study whether to build a new state prison, with critics saying the blueprint took important decision-making power out of the Legislature's hands.

The study outline was attached Monday to an unrelated measure that authorizes criminal background checks of hires for certain jobs despite objections from Sen. Tom Fiebiger, D-Fargo, and Rep. Joe Kroeber, D-Jamestown, who said legislative rules prohibited the move.

During Senate debate Monday night, senators deadlocked 23-23 on a vote to accept the study as part of other changes to the background-check bill.

Sen. Joel Heitkamp, D-Hankinson, said the proposal would leave the task of selecting the best prison construction plan to the Legislative Council, a 17-member panel of lawmakers that oversees the Legislature's business between sessions. That decision should be made by the entire Legislature, Heitkamp said.

"It's a dangerous road to go down," Heitkamp said. "What we're doing here is laying out options for policy and then leaving it to a much smaller body of all of us to make that decision, and I'm not sure that that's the way the Legislative Council is intended to work."

The proposal laid out guidelines for appointing an interim legislative committee to study whether to remodel the existing prison or build a new one. It ordered the panel to examine whether any new prison should be built near the existing penitentiary, or elsewhere.

It set a June 2008 deadline for the committee to pick its preferred option and forward it to the Legislative Council, which would then decide whether to reject it or forward it to Gov. John Hoeven.

Fiebiger said the legislation did not include any timeline for the Legislative Council or the governor to act. "I think that's problematic," he said.

In any case, the study committee provision belongs in the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's budget bill, not an unrelated proposal on criminal background checks, Fiebiger said.

Hoeven included $42 million in his budget recommendations to the Legislature to pay for new construction and remodeling at the existing prison site.

The Legislature has declined to endorse that option. Instead, $41 million has been put aside into a state prison fund within the budget bill for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. There are no instructions about how to use the money; the interim prison study was intended to provide that direction.

The North Dakota House voted 61-33 on Monday to endorse the prison's budget bill. The legislation now moves to the Senate for its review.

The bill that included the prison study plan is SB2260. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation budget bill is HB1015.