AUGUSTA (AP) – Late-session snags over bills dealing with overhauls of the state tax code and the Dirigo health program persisted Wednesday night as House and Senate leaders weighed how to conclude this year’s legislative session.

Both chambers summoned members back from a dinner break for more work.

“Tonight we will be in a series of stops and starts,” Speaker Glenn Cummings told the House after it reconvened.

The tax reform debate was proceeding off stage and along two tracks.

One option actively under discussion was for lawmakers to be offered a new package building off one unveiled just a day earlier by Sen. John Martin and other Democrats.

The original so-called Martin amendment would lessen a sales tax broadening recommended by the Taxation Committee and include a not-quite-so-deep drop in income tax rates that the Taxation Committee had also proposed.

A new version still under development Wednesday would retain those basic elements, including the elimination of personal services and real property services from the list of new subjects of the 5 percent sales tax, and restore some version of a property tax break for homeowners.

At the same time, there were discussions involving Gov. John Baldacci’s office of simply putting off tax action for now and setting up another forum for review some time in the future.

“That would be one desired route,” said Democratic Sen. Joseph Perry of Bangor, a Taxation Committee co-chairman. “And the other desired route would be to enact something now.”

Perry credited another Taxation panelist, Democratic Sen. Ethan Strimling of Portland, with leading the drive to find a new formula to action right away.

Others such as Republican Sen. Jonathan Courtney of Sanford suggested the tax overhaul attempt had run aground.

Meanwhile, discussions on Dirigo extended to ways that immediate action would be put off to allow a new round of talks in a different venue, Baldacci administration officials said.

On Tuesday, facing three conflicting committee recommendations, various stakeholder representatives met twice to discuss redirecting and refinancing the Dirigo effort to move Maine toward universal health insurance coverage.

As part of that effort, Dirigo subsidies have been supported by assessments on insurers meant to be offset in part by cost savings.

That controversial financing system has come under steady attack but negotiations to replace it have not produced a broadly accepted alternative.

The three-way committee split continued through the day Wednesday and was not immediately put before rank-and-file lawmakers.

The unresolved Dirigo issue threatened to dovetail with the complicated dispute over tax reform, because the Insurance and Financial Services Committee option that had drawn the most support within that panel included a proposal to raise the cigarette tax by 75 cents to buoy program funding.

Wednesday had been scheduled to be this year’s adjournment day.

AP-ES-06-20-07 2012EDT