Changed your mind on yearly sessions?

How about it voters: Have you changed your minds since 1998?

That was the year that more than 280,000 of you -- 71 percent, in fact -- declared you wanted to limit the Legislature to meeting for no more than 120 days every other year.

Since then, we've had 10 special sessions, five of which were called to deal with pressing issues and five of which were necessary because lawmakers didn't meet your 120-day deadline. (And that's even adding back the extra hour they lost for daylight savings time!)

But now Assemblyman Tick Segerblom has floated an idea to have the Legislature meet every year.

"It's [biennial sessions] not working any longer," Segerblom told the Review-Journal's Ed Vogel. "The reality is, we are meeting every year anyway."

Pretty much: The Legislature has met in either regular or special session in 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. There have been no meetings this year, but heck, it's only March.

Those special sessions are costly, too: About $100,000 for the first day, and $50,000 per day thereafter, assuming a stripped-down agenda and staffing.

Nobody has taken a poll to find out about how the current Nevada electorate feels about annual sessions, but it's a good bet their view isn't far off from the opinion attributed to Mark Twain: It would be better for the Legislature to meet for two days every 60 years, rather than 60 days every two.

As someone who's covered a session or two, I can tell you firsthand that even the modern 120-day session makes it difficult to give issues a full hearing. I can also tell you that there's more than a little time wasted during those sessions, especially at the beginning. Lawmakers, like journalists, are notorious procrastinators who don't do anything until deadline.

But the recent history of special sessions shows why they're needed: Gov. Jim Gibbons had to call three -- two in 2008 and one in 2010 -- to deal with economic problems caused by the recession. Annual sessions would help fix that. They could also resolve the long-ignored legal issue of whether the Interim Finance Committee, a group of lawmakers that meets between sessions, is constitutional. The budget-shifting that's often necessary in the interim, which the committee votes upon, could be handed by an annual session.

In fact, you may not even have to violate the will of the voters. Former state Sen. Bob Beers, who was recently elected to the Las Vegas City Council, had a proposal to split the difference: Hold a 90-day regular legislative session every other year, and a 30-day budget-only session during even-numbered years. You'd have the flexibility to deal with budget problems, but still obey the intent of the 1998 constitutional amendment that established the 120-day session.

Some will react badly to the idea, on the theory that government is bad, so more government meetings can only lead to mischief. Trust me when I say the duration of a session is not the cause of bad ideas; they can (and do) happen just as easily every other year.

There's no question the national trend is toward annual sessions -- only three other states besides Nevada meet biennially. But it's also incumbent upon lawmakers to wisely use the time to focus on real problems. New license plates, state insects, impossibly unconstitutional bills and resolutions recognizing this or that should not be on that list.

Will Segerblom's idea go anywhere? Probably not, and even if it did, it would require another constitutional amendment, a five-year process.

So how about it, voters? Have you changed your minds?

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist and author of the blog SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at 387-5276 or SSebelius@reviewjournal.com.