HARRISBURG -- It's not easy for a state legislator to ask his colleagues to cut the size of the General Assembly in half.

But that's what Rep. Tom Caltagirone has been doing for more than 10 years.

"It scared the devil out of some members," said the Berks County Democrat, because a lot of legislators would be out of a job.

In previous assembly sessions, his bill to cut the 50-member Senate to 26 and the 203-member House to 103 never even got a hearing.

So it was progress of a sort yesterday, when the House State Government Committee held the first hearing on the Caltagirone bill and a similar but more modest measure proposed by Rep. Jess Stairs, R-Westmoreland. He proposed having 40 senators and 151 House members.

Mr. Stairs told the panel he'd also introduced the measure about 20 years ago "but it wasn't very popular [with the General Assembly] and didn't go too far."

But things have changed in recent months, in light of voters' uproar over July's legislative pay raises and then the scramble to repeal them in November. Even some lawmakers are getting the message.

"After going around to many people in my district over the summer, I found that people liked the idea" of reducing the Legislature's size. Mr. Stairs said.

But the measure still faces considerable opposition from many incumbents, and it isn't known if the committee or the full House or Senate will vote on it.

Rep. John Maher, R-Upper St. Clair, a co-sponsor of the Caltagirone bill, said he's hopeful.

"I've been encouraging a reduction in the size of the Legislature since [I took office in] 1997, and this may be the year when the job can be accomplished," he said.

Several recent polls have shown that the public supports a downsized Legislature, and "good government" groups like the League of Women Voters have pushed for it for more than a decade.

"Action on this issue is long overdue," league official Bonita Hoke told the committee yesterday. "The present size is too large for individual [legislators'] opinions to be considered and too large for meaningful floor debate."

She argued that cutting the size would make it easier for the remaining rank-and-file lawmakers to influence state policy and would reduce the "concentration of power" that has built up in the hands of a few House and Senate leaders.

Now that the pay raises have been rescinded, the league and other citizen groups are pushing for two more legislative reforms. Besides cutting the size of the Legislature, they want lawmakers to approve a bill to force lobbyists to say who they work for and to list their quarterly spending aimed at influencing bills.

Mr. Caltagirone denied that he came up with the smaller-assembly bill to placate voters who were angry over the pay raises. He said that he and former state Sen. Allen Kukovich, D-Manor, who was defeated in 2004, had pushed for years to trim the Legislature.

One reason is to reduce the cost of government, he said. For the 2005-06 fiscal year, which ends June 30, the House plans to spend $204 million on its staff, offices and operations, while the Senate will spend $106 million, with another $30 million going for bill research and other legislative agencies.

Mr. Caltagirone said he thinks $100 million could be saved by slicing the Legislature in half. A lot of the savings would come from trimming the 3,000 employees who serve the two chambers, he said.

It's not as if any incumbent lawmaker would immediately lose his or her job, he added.

Reducing the size of the Legislature would require a constitutional amendment. That would involve passage of a bill in two consecutive sessions and then approval by voters in a statewide November referendum.

If approved, legislative districts couldn't be revised until after the 2010 census, so the new 26-district Senate and 103-district House wouldn't take effect until the elections of 2012, Mr. Caltagirone said.

He is looking at California as an assembly that does more with fewer lawmakers. It has 80 House members and 40 senators, for a total of 120, compared with Pennsylvania's 253. Other large legislatures include New York, 211 members; Illinois, 177; Florida, 160; Michigan, 148; and Ohio, 132.

California has nearly 34 million people while Pennsylvania has only 12 million. That means each California senator represents 846,000 people and each House member represents 423,000; in Pennsylvania, it's 245,000 people per senator and 60,000 per House member.

Some critics of such reductions fear that having fewer lawmakers might make it more difficult for constituents to get their government-related problems resolved, but Mr. Caltagirone said each legislator still would have several district offices that could handle constituent services.