PORTLAND – Navy shipbuilder Bath Iron Works is getting mixed signals from Congress, where one committee wants to include it in a contract for a new generation destroyer and the other wants to cut the Maine company out of the action.

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee endorsed President Bush’s $3.4 billion request to develop and build the first two DD(X) ships. In that scenario, BIW would build one, and Northrop Grumman’s Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi would build the other.

But the House Armed Services Committee voted a day earlier to build only one ship, and to let Ingalls do the work. Now, a compromise must be worked out, and the process could take months.

BIW focused on the Senate committee vote, calling it good news and thanking Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the Armed Services Committee, for helping to persuade the committee to approve full funding.

BIW President Dugan Shipway called the Senate committee vote “the strongest signal so far this year from the Hill that support for the DD(X) program is solid.”

U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, played down the House committee’s vote, emphasizing that it endorsed designing the new ship and the Navy hadn’t expected to start construction on the second ship until 2008.

“It’s really not a concern,” Allen said. “It keeps the BIW designers at work. It should have no practical effect on the workload or employment.”

Collins said the House vote was potentially “devastating to the skilled work force at BIW.”

House members have long argued that the new destroyer is too expensive and too few are planned to be useful. The House panel authorized the Navy to enter design contracts with two shipyards to keep that process moving forward.

The dispute is over the cost of high-tech equipment making the ship much more expensive than initial estimates.