ASHLAND — Democratic State Rep. Rick Nelson of Middlesboro has a radical idea: He thinks members of the Kentucky General Assembly should hold themselves to the same high standards of open government as members of the governing bodies of cities, counties and school districts are held by laws enacted by legislators.

Nelson  has promised to push a proposal in the 2011 General Assembly that would bar legislators from retreating into closed-door meetings to draft the state budget. But, despite the wisdom and fairness of his proposal, don’t expect Nelson’s fellow legislators to approve it.

There is a long history in Frankfort of meeting behind close doors to debate the budget and then waiting until the last possible minute to present the document to the entire General Assembly for a vote. Thus, most legislators are forced to vote on a budget they have not even had a chance to read.

Nelson’s proposal plus another one that would require a 48-hour posting of the two-year budget before lawmakers vote on it would go a long way to change a budget process that is so broken that legislators have four times been unable to adopt a budget before the end of the 60-day session.

The 30-day 2011 session is an ideal time to approve both budget proposals because legislators will not be debating the two-year budget. Adopting the changes in 2011 would enable legislators to enter the 60-day 2012 session knowing that they had to debate the budget in open meetings and give the public and legislators at least two days to read the final document before voting on it.

Kentucky has one of the nation’s strongest laws on open meetings, but the glaring weakness of the law is that it exempts the Kentucky House of Representatives and the Kentucky Senate from its provisions.

While it is against the law for members of county fiscal courts and city commissions and city councils to go behind closed doors to debate their budgets, most of the budget work in Frankfort is done in secret. Instead of debating budget items in the open, legislators prefer to do their wheeling and dealing out of the public’s eye. No doubt a lot of quid pro quo takes place in these secret meetings with Legislator A agreeing to support funding for Legislator B’s pet project as long as Legislator B supports funding for Legislator A’s favored project.

Legislative leaders insist that secret meetings are necessary for the budget process to work in Frankfort but, from our vantage point, the budget process is not working now. If it were, the General Assembly would get its most important work done on time and every legislator would have a chance to at least read the budget before voting on it. The status quo has eliminated  he vast majority of members of both the House and the Senate from ever having a meaningful role in the budget-making process.

Cities, counties and school districts somehow manage to approve their budget without meeting in secret. So can the General Assembly.

Nelson said his proposal would tweak the state’s open meetings law, adding one paragraph that requires budget negotiations to be held openly.

“I just think it would be better government,” Nelson said Wednesday. “We’d get more done, and we’d have a better resolution to the budget if it were open to the public.”

So why are legislators so reluctant to open the budget process to public scrutiny? We’re not sure, but here is what we suspect: Legislators are so embarrassed by some of the funding items in the budget that they don’t want to public to know about them until it is too late.

Meaningful debates on the state budget have been conducted in secret for far too long. It is past time to let the sun shine in.