There's another proposal in Harrisburg to reduce the size of America's Largest Full-Time State Legislature -- only this one would take 44 years.

The proposal came from Eastern Pennsylvania, where there has been little evident desire to downsize our 253-headed Legislature, so that's the good news.

Sen. David Argall of Schuylkill County is the architect of the plan. I took his home county as a good omen because "Schuykill" is most often pronounced "SKOO-kul," which means a good percentage of the letters are silent, irrelevant or just in the way.

Kind of like our General Assembly.

Mr. Argall, a state representative before becoming a senator, wants to get past one of the key barriers to reform here: "How do you get someone to cancel their own job?" So he proposes reducing the size of the 203-member House by 10 seats per decade, starting in 2013. By 2053, we'd be down to 153 members, and most of our current lawmakers will be dead.

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Brian O'Neill's book, "The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-first Century," is available in the PG store.

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I'll leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide which part of the preceding sentence is more comforting. (I, myself, wish Pennsylvania lawmakers long lives -- just in another line of work.) Meantime, you should also know that the state Senate would drop from 50 to 45 members by 2033.

Given the elaborate nature of this slow-mo downsizing, my immediate concern was that voters would doze off in the booths before they could read all the way through this proposed constitutional amendment. Mr. Argall assured me he could get a condensed version of the question on the ballot. If he's right, there seems little doubt it would be approved.

Getting to that step remains the difficulty. The way the Pennsylvania Constitution is written, all the power to initiate change is in lawmakers' hands. We haven't the right to citizen-initiated referenda that other states do. So two sessions of the Legislature -- interrupted by an election -- would have to approve the question before it ever gets to the voters.

Kim Ward, a first-term Republican senator from Westmoreland County, says the past 10 months in Harrisburg presented "the prime example" of why the current oversized model is counterproductive: a state budget approved more than three months late.

"How do you get 253 people to agree on anything?" she asked. "Apparently we don't need this many because we could screw it up with a lot less [people]."

Previous proposals to shrink the statehouse have gone nowhere. Sen. John Pippy, R-Moon, has pushed a downsizing bill for years. Sen. Elder Vogel Jr., a Republican dairy farmer from Beaver County, introduced his own legislation this year. And so on. Nothing ever gets out of committee.

The rest of the state isn't as fired up for reform as folks out this way. After he made his proposal Wednesday, Mr. Argall said, he heard from three newspapers and three radio stations -- all in the western part of the state, a good 200 miles from his home turf.

But he believes timing is everything in politics, and "if ever we're going to look for cuts in state agencies, this is the year. We have to look at ourselves and lead."

Dick Thornburgh, the Republican governor from 1979 to 1987, knows how tough it is to restructure Harrisburg. Mr. Thornburgh's first elected office was as a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention in 1967-68. He, future governor Bob Casey, and James Michener, the novelist from Bucks County, were among those attending as would-be reformers.

The "White Hats" were outfoxed by the 13 state lawmakers who were also delegates, Mr. Thornburgh recalled last week. The convention ended with the General Assembly "embalmed in its present size."

Maybe this incremental plan will prove the unlikely winner, for no other reason than Mr. Argall's reading of his peers: "No one plans to be there in 2043."