OLYMPIA – It is a rare day when an irate news consumer doesn’t write, call, text, e-mail or otherwise communicate displeasure with the Legislature’s inability to finish its work and get the heck out of Dodge.

Many offer suggestions on how to keep future Legislatures from going into multiple special sessions to do the work that they are tasked with doing in the 105 days of a regular session.

The most common is “don’t pay them”, but that shows a general misunderstanding of how legislators collect their salaries. They get paychecks year-round, in session and out, so they don’t get extra pay for a special session any more than Mariners’ paychecks get a boost when a game goes into extra innings.

They do get an extension of their daily expense allowance, known as a per diem. Legislators often make a show of refusing their per diems, but in fact they aren’t required to file, so it’s a passive, not an active refusal.

To hit them in the pocket book, it would be necessary to deduct a day’s pay for each day spent in special session. This could have some impact, particularly for the majority of legislators who do not spend most of a special session in Olympia. They’re back at home with family, working at whatever other job they have, waiting for a summons from their leadership to return for votes on deals that have been struck. A relative handful have been in Olympia for much of the first and second special sessions; if the remainder back home were getting their paychecks docked, they might pressure their leaders to reach a deal.

But that assumes legislators are motivated chiefly by money, and the majority are not. Those who want to make more money usually find more lucrative employment as lobbyists or consultants. Money alone won’t get them to finish on time.

The real solution must be structural for this part-time Legislature. (Some suggested this year that Washington needs is a full-time Legislature; yeah, like it needs a year-round sinus infection.)

An odd-year session like this one, in which the state’s two-year budget is written, by law is set at 105 days. But those days run consecutively from the time the first gavel bangs in January until late April. Legislators almost never do official work like committee hearings or floor debate on Saturday or Sunday. Yet those days count against the total, so those 105 days, practically speaking, automatically are reduced by 28 percent.

Rather than extend the number of days in a session, it might make more sense to cut them to 90, but only count weekdays, and build in a two-week break after day 45. Most legislators could go home, hold town hall meetings, talk to constituents, reconnect with families while budget leaders and their staffs draft budgets that would be available to the public by the time the full Legislature returns. Make each chamber vote its budget out of committee by the end of the second week, off the floor by the end of the third, then begin negotiations to resolve the differences while the rest of the Legislature tries to pass non-budget items.

That would lead up to a session ending in late May. But we did not have a budget by late May this year, you might argue. And there’s no guarantee a schedule change would fix that. So to avoid the specter a government shutdown at that point, the state would need another provision that says if there’s no budget by May 31, all current programs continue into the next year, but no new programs, policies or pet projects get a dime. Legislators could then go back and explain that to their constituents and see how fast they settle on a budget in January of the following year, which for all of the House and half the Senate would be an election year.

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