State lawmakers are celebrating more birthdays, gaining more victories at the ballot box and writing fewer drafts of bills, a report to be released today by a conservative think tank has found.

The report by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute finds that the average age of Wisconsin's lawmakers has increased by more than 12 years since 1977 - more than state citizens as a whole have aged. The report also found that lawmakers are writing fewer bills now than they were 30 years ago.

"They're getting older, they're staying in office a lot longer, they hardly ever lose (an election), and they're spending less time on the floor," the report's author Christian Schneider said. "It seems like a pretty sweet deal to me."

Schneider said the report shows the need for a constitutional amendment to limit lawmakers' time in office to 12 years.

"That's truly the wrong solution to the right problem," said Mordecai Lee, a former Democratic state senator who chose to leave after losing his enthusiasm for his job after 13 years in office.

Now a governmental affairs professor at UW-Milwaukee, Lee said many longtime lawmakers who have chosen to stay continue to be productive. A better solution would be to redraw legislative districts and rewrite laws on legislative fundraising to make elections that are now tilted toward incumbents more competitive, he said.

The report found that after a lawmaker spends more than 12 years in the Legislature, the number of bills he or she writes tends to drop. Schneider acknowledged that writing no bills at all can be better than writing bad ones and that senior lawmakers may serve in leadership positions or take on more difficult and controversial bills, lowering their output.

Sen. Bob Jauch, D-Poplar, a 26-year veteran of the Legislature, said experience mattered. He noted that most lawmakers who had to deal with the state's budget crisis this year hadn't served during the state's last major crisis in 1983. Jauch, whose more than 20 pieces of legislation this session include bills dealing with fraud in the state's child-care subsidy program, said the report was intended to lower the public's respect for the Legislature as an institution.

"It's going to outlast all of us," he said of the Legislature. "And we all need to believe in it."

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