State Reps. Jim Shon and Nathan Suzuki questioned the plans to continue using an inflexible, expensive mainframe-based computer system when many new legislative management systems are available.

The worry is that if the Legislature is forced to use an expensive, difficult system, the people the legislators are elected to serve will ultimately suffer.

"If I can't get information, I am at a terrible disadvantage and so are my constituents," Shon said. He wanted a system that would allow legislators, and ultimately the public, to easily review actions by the state.

"We can't even get (budget) worksheets. We should be able to track the money day by day.

"You would be surprised how many high elected officials don't have e-mail or know how to tap into the Internet."

Only about 20 percent of the state's 76 legislators have e-mail addresses and even fewer have sites on the Internet.

Because the system is a proprietary one - that is, the company owns all the code needed to run it - no else can bid on the job.

"The current word-processing system . . . is considered by many of our staff, and not just in my office, to be a joke, and continued reliance on the current proprietary service in effect locks us out of whatever changes occur," Shon complained. After the state House leadership decided not to change the contract last week, Shon gave up the fight, saying the Legislature was "stuck with a clunker contract."

Meanwhile, House and Senate members are working on ways to increase the public's electronic access to the workings of state government.

A new law allows the Legislature to set up Internet access to the Legislature's system dubbed ACCESS, now generally only available by dialing into a state computer system. But House Speaker Joe Souki yesterday said he didn't know when such a system could be running.