A package of DUI reforms is still on track to be passed by the end of the fall legislative session despite the bill being pulled from the Joint Finance Committee, Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker's spokeswoman says.

The Senate is on the floor Thursday and will take up the bill then. It will then have to move through the Assembly, which is also on the floor Thursday, before it can go to the governor.

Carrie Lynch, spokeswoman for Decker, D-Weston, said the changes the Senate is making shouldn't stall the bill.

"I don't know why there wouldn't be an agreement," Lynch said. "We're essentially passing their bill with very minor modifications, but the difference is we're paying for it.

"We're passing their bill with a funding source. If they can find a major policy difference, I'd like to hear what it is."

The Assembly passed a bill last month that enhanced drunken driving penalties and funded the new standards by transferring money from existing funds. When the proposal left the Assembly, it was expected to cost about $20 million per year.

After a new fiscal estimate was released that showed the cost of the bill to be about $70 million per year, a Senate committee passed a proposal that funded the reforms in part with a 50-cent per liter increase in the liquor tax. A compromise was expected to be hashed out in the JFC.

Rep. Mark Pocan, the co-chair of the JFC, reacted with surprise today that the bill was removed from the budgeting committee and pulled back to the Senate Committee on Organization.

"There's no reason why working together we couldn't have this on the governor's desk by the end of the week," Pocan said. "By circumventing the process by which we were going to reconcile the bills, it tells me there's going to be two different bills without reconciliation.”

Lynch said if Pocan was concerned about the bill not going through the JFC process, he should have directed it there before it was passed in the Assembly.

"His new found interest in the Joint Finance Committe is great. We have never wanted to circumvent the Joint Finance process," Lynch said.

Lynch said the Assembly put the Senate in a bind by not first taking the bill through the JFC, leaving questions about the fiscal viability of the measure as the end of the session drew near.

"(Pocan) had an opportunity to send it to Joint Finance. He chose to completely abdicate their responsibility and pass a bill with a structural deficit problem," Lynch said.

Statutes require a spending bill go through the JFC before passage in both houses, a rule Pocan said the Assembly honored more closely than the Senate, which will "dip" the bill in the committee without a vote.

But he said the important thing is the bill gets passed by the end of the floor session.

"Instead of trying to fight about this, let's find a way to get it to the governor by Thursday," Pocan said. "The Assembly is committed to finding a way to do that and we hope the Senate will join us."

Assembly Democrats have said the tax increase would have been a non-starter in that house, while Senate Dems countered it would be fiscally irresponsible to pass a bill without fully funding it and chided the Assembly for not putting the bill through the JFC, where most spending bills are sent.

But yesterday Wauwatosa Dem Sen. Jim Sullivan, the Senate author of the bill, said Senate Dems were moving off their insistence on a liquor tax hike in favor of an increase in criminal assessments as well as the fees paid by those whose licenses are revoked or suspended. The fiscal estimate for the bill is said to have been reduced with new data showing that the enforcement and treatment measures could decrease recidivism sharply.

-- By Greg Bump