At what point does a wish list have to end? That’s a question Louisiana lawmakers are asking this week as they wrestle with a $2.8 billion capital outlay bill.

The bill is a mammoth wish list of sorts — requests from all sorts of parishes, municipalities and agencies for state assistance in construction projects. Literally everything gets tossed into the mix.

With requests as varied as roads to courthouses to new museums, the requests can add up – and quickly.

But the problem for lawmakers — and more to the point, for Louisiana residents — is that the state does have limits on what it can spend. Only $200 million in bonds each year can be sold by the state; this bill includes $1.8 billion in projects over five years of funding — leaving some $800,000 that would remain unfunded, even if the state chose to spend its total annual bond allotment on the projects.

What’s worse, the law’s current structure includes no restrictions on lawmakers or local governments — no time limits, no guidelines, no built-in devices for weeding out the projects that remain unfunded year after year.

As the system stands, lawmakers must wade through the requests — year after year — in dealing with the bill. And many of the requests, particularly the smaller ones, get lost in the shuffle. The wish list becomes, for many, a nightmare of legislative proportions.

And, even if a project makes it through the legislature in the bill, there’s no real guarantee it will be funded – even if it doesn’t require bond money. Just ask Reggie Wycoff, Region 4 wildlife supervisor in Concordia Parish. He’s seeking $936,000 to fund a new office – a project which has been approved several times but, as he said, &uot;has been cut out … because the funds just aren’t there.&uot;

The Louisiana Legislature needs to create a reasonable system for handling funding requests — something that eliminates carryover requests and provides a manageable and reasonable number of requests for lawmakers to consider each year. It’s more than just a wish … it’s a necessity.