It's budget time in the Capitol, and even as a deal begins to come together, the insults are still flying. Republican staffers capture Democrats plotting secret strategies over a microphone they thought was dead. Democrats accuse Republicans of lacking compassion for the poor and infirm. The governor's finance director confronts a legislator in a hallway, gets in his face and implores him to "give us a budget!"

These are the stories that make the evening news and the next day's papers. Conflict sells. Confrontation is the coin of the political realm and the engine that drives the news coverage. It has always been so.

But the clashes have become so common that I wonder if now the paradigm has shifted. Maybe two legislators shouting inanities at each other is dog-bites-man stuff. Here's the rarity: legislators from different parties, with different agendas, sitting down in civil discourse about the state's massive fiscal problems.

I found such an event last week, in a small hearing room on the first floor of the Capitol. Little advertised, little known, and lightly attended by the press corps, a special Senate committee is plowing through the budget program by program, calmly exchanging ideas on how the state got where it is today -- and how it might prevent the same thing from happening again.

These are not the heavy fiscal hitters, the men and women who will cut the deal when the time comes. Some insiders think they are wasting their time. But it can't be completely futile when people of opposing points of view sit down in honest pursuit of a deeper understanding of the problems they face.

The committee is headed by Sen. Gil Cedillo, a Los Angeles Democrat and one of the Senate's most passionate partisans. Here is a man for whom the spending spree in which the state engaged during the recent boom was not enough. The past two governors, Cedillo said, "did not spend as much as I would have liked to have spent." The state, he says, has many needs still going unmet.

But gavel in hand, the chairman doesn't lecture. He listens and leads. This group, he says, came together because many members of the Senate saw early on that the budget likely to emerge this summer would be a one-year patch job designed mainly to push the state's problems into the future. They wanted to explore at least the outlines of a long-term solution.

"It's like trying to fix the plane while it's sputtering along," Cedillo says. "It's challenging."

Republican Sen. Charles Poochigian of Fresno says he's impressed with Cedillo's demeanor and the committee's earnest approach. "He's been eager to receive input from a wide range of sources in the hope of reaching some consensus on reform," Poochigian said.

Trying not to reinvent the wheel, the committee has searched for ideas in plans and reports gathering dust on Capitol shelves. The members have also heard from experts at the legislative analyst's office whose job it is to comb line-by-line through the budget and to study the state's long-term fiscal trends.

Cedillo seems intrigued by one statistic he hears: 11 percent of the cases in the state's Medi-Cal health program for the poor account for 44 percent of the costs. Those are the cases of the elderly. "People are getting older," he says. "It's hard to do anything about that." On the other hand, he notes that the state's programs for children with disabilities are also growing very quickly, and many of those services are delivered without regard to the ability of families to pay. "We might have to start looking at doing some means testing," he says.

Last week the conversation turned to the state's volatile revenue stream, and how to prevent the radical swings that lead to rapid expansion of programs followed by deficits that can only be cured by deep spending cuts or big tax increases. This is a topic on which Democrats and Republicans seem to agree, at least on the diagnosis of the problem, if not its solution.

Bill Hauck, president of the California Business Roundtable and a veteran of the state's fiscal wars, shared the findings of a mid-1990s constitutional revision commission that recommended creation of a mandatory reserve and a mandate that the budget be balanced at the beginning and the end of every fiscal year. If things got off track in the months in between, the governor would be required to submit a plan for bringing spending and taxes back into line, and that plan would become law if the Legislature failed to act within 45 days.

Cedillo listens to Hauck explain the virtues of his plan, smiles and tells the business lobbyist: "I'm amazed at how much I agree with you."

Now that's news.