In reality TV, you make decisions and redecorate houses, win prizes and become semi-famous. In reality Legislature, you make decisions, maybe get rearranged by the House and could become semi-infamous.

The state House last week did its most important job of the session, passing its own version of the state’s $6.5 billion operating budget.

Two leaders stood out in the debate: Rep. Sylvia Luke, finance committee chairwoman, and Rep. Isaac Choy, higher education committee chairman.

If the pair’s ideas are endorsed by the Senate, the state could be moving toward a new financial reality.

First, Luke steered the budget away from almost all increased spending schemes.

Insisting that the state is still in an unsustainable mode of spending more than it takes in, Luke said the only increases were because of increased fixed costs.

That means the public worker costs went up because public workers got pay raises last year.

Pay raises, paying the interest on money borrowed and health insurance costs came to $320 million more in FY 2016, Luke said. In the next fiscal year, those costs go up $585 million.

"We are continuously spending more than the revenues the state generates," Luke said in her House floor speech last week.

"The Finance Committee is hoping to reverse this trend in the next few years."

The University of Hawaii is always a big part of the state budget. This year, UH gets $369 million in operating funds from Luke’s committee.

The wrinkle is Choy designed a budget that essentially is a lump sum. Basically, the House is telling UH, "Here is $369 million; you figure what you want and how you will pay for it."

In other budgets, Choy said, "It was every campus for itself."

The UH chief financial officer, who is the state’s former budget director, Kalbert Young, will run the numbers and decide on budget requests from each department and restrict or manage funds.

"No more coming to the Legislature with fake budget requests for electricity, no more hiding money in their slush funds," Choy said in his floor speech last week.

If the university top brass wants to pay down the athletics deficit, it takes the money out of the $368 million it was given, not by asking the Legislature for a little something special.

Lawmakers have heard the annual cries of poverty from the university, but have never been able to verify the truth.

"Now the university will have full control to fund its programs, manage its repairs and fund its operating costs," said Choy, warning that no longer would UH be able to say, "The Legislature didn’t give us the money to fix our toilets."

With the lump-sum approach, Choy reasons that if UH is awash in broken plumbing, it is because UH decided to spend the money on something else.

Today each campus has a direct line to the Legislature, and each chancellor and program learned how to curry favor with a special legislative sugar daddy.

That stops, if the budget plan holds.

"We erased all the lines from the Legislature to the individual campuses," Choy explained in an interview.

"The UH president and the board of regents will have to look at each campus and each program and ask, ‘Is this sustainable?’" Choy said.

If, as Choy puts it, "UH doesn’t have the stones to manage and make the allotments," the new budget has a fail-safe provision and everybody gets what they got last year.

Responsibility can be taking care of a new puppy or growing a campus out of abandoned sugar fields, but if UH buys into the new budget responsibility, it means a new reality for the entire institution.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.