By unanimous vote, the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee early Tuesday morning supported the supplemental budget to the state’s overall budget for fiscal years 2006-07, addressing some important debts faced by the state and demonstrating that bipartisan cooperation is possible there and in Maine’s next challenges. With less than two weeks left, time is short for lawmakers to apply this lesson to conclude what has been a difficult, instructive session.

It has been difficult because Maine government will maintain a structural gap for the next budget even as it cuts programs broadly. Few legislators, Democrat or Republican, want to be forced into the position of saying no to constituents; this spring marks the third year running of doing so without relief in sight. And it was instructive because legislators have come to understand that these straitened times mean they have to think about budgeting differently than they did in the 1990s.

The legislative Part 2 budget restores much of the money Gov. Baldacci removed from hospital settlement funds. Maine’s hospitals have been waiting years to be paid properly for treating Medicaid patients and the settlement reached earlier this spring showed how seriously Maine was underpaying. The committee’s work in this area moved Maine in the right direction.

Medicaid was the primary reason lawmakers needed a supplemental budget – the projected loss of $73 million in federal matching money for the program was painful. Legislators propose getting around about $9 million of the problem by putting off a decision until next year. That may be unavoidable given another serious Medicaid shortfall: $24.4 million from the Maine Claims Management System.

Some of that money is the typical mis-anticipation of what Medicaid will require and some has been caused by the state’s meltdown with its new computerized payment system. Either way, it’s bad news for Maine.

Lawmakers voted to raise revenue for this problem and smaller programs by taking $11.5 million that would have gone to the state’s stabilization fund, $6 million in the Department of Edu-cation’s Efficiency Fund and cutting some new positions envisioned by the governor. There’s nothing pretty about any of this and it does little to put Maine in a better position for future budgets. But there’s also no provision for borrowing to pay ongoing expenses, as there is, for now, in Part 1.

Democratic Speaker John Richardson says he believes that $250 million problem can be solved and points to more than $125 million in possible savings with a 1 to 2 percent cut to all departments but education. Republicans, he says correctly, need to make public a formal plan of their own to see how much savings both sides can agree on. You’ll know how serious both take their charge by how far into the $250 million they get before proposing a tax increase.

The Part 2 budget may be helpful with this. The product of a state coming to terms with its limited resources, it is as much a model for future budgets as a warning of where Maine stands now.