AUGUSTA – Late-session snags over bills dealing with overhauls of the state tax code and the Dirigo health program persisted as House and Senate leaders laid plans to work through the night and conclude this year’s regular legislative session on Thursday.

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

The tax reform debate was proceeding offstage 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 Martin amendment would lessen a broadening of the sales tax recommended by the Taxation Committee and include a not-quite-so-deep drop in income tax rates that the Taxation Committee also had proposed.

A new version developed Wednesday would retain those basic elements, including the elimination of personal care services and real property services from the list of new subjects of the 5 percent sales tax.

As outlined by Democratic Rep. John Piotti of Unity, a Taxation Committee co-chairman, the new package would establish a flat 6.5 percent income tax rate. Scrapped from proposed sales tax expansions would be various items and services such as hair care and health clubs, snowplowing and lawn care, caskets and urns, newspapers and ski tickets.

Revised changes in the real estate transfer tax would retain a 1.5 percent rate on homes worth more than $1 million and a flat 1 percent for other property with home-buyers exempt from paying the first $1,000 of tax.

The package also would authorize local option sales taxes of up to 1 percent with a portion of revenue set aside in a rural area relief fund.

“It’s not what we designed, but it’s pretty good,” Piotti told his Democratic House colleagues.

At the same time, discussions involving Gov. John Baldacci’s office considered putting off tax action for now and setting up another forum for review sometime 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 for 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.

House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, D-North Haven, said plans called for the creation of a special committee to meet through the summer and prepare a new proposal for lawmakers to consider at a special session “probably sometime in the fall.”

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.