AUGUSTA — After more than five months of negotiations, wrangling and fiery political rhetoric, state lawmakers worked well into the evening Thursday to pass a $6.3 billion, two-year spending package that raises sales taxes and cuts spending.

Facing a more than $800 million revenue shortfall, lawmakers rejected a plan by Republican Gov. Paul LePage that relied heavily on suspending state revenue-sharing with local municipalities and scaled back popular property-tax relief programs.

The budget, which passed 102-43 in the House of Representatives and 25-10 in the state Senate will head next to LePage’s desk.

The bill raises the state’s general sales tax from 5 percent to 5.5 percent and the tax on restaurant meals and hotel lodging from 7 percent to 8 percent. Both hikes will end after 2015.

The tax increases will allow the state to restore about $200 million of the revenue-sharing cut in the LePage proposal.

LePage has said he would veto the bill if it raises taxes. Both bodies passed the measure with just over the two-thirds majority needed for emergency enactment, which will allow it to go into effect before the state’s current budget ends on June 30.

The more than two-thirds margin also means if lawmakers stick to their votes, the new budget would withstand a LePage veto.

Lawmakers who supported the measure hailed it as a difficult compromise but a true effort at bipartisan teamwork.

“This is not a Democratic budget or Republican budget,” Rep. Peggy Rotundo, D-Lewiston. said prior to the measure’s passage in the House. 

Rotundo is House chairwoman of the Legislature’s budget-writing Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee. She has said since January that her intent was to pass a bipartisan plan.” Rotundo, who has served four terms in the state Senate and is on her fourth in the House, said it was the most difficult budget she’s worked on.

During her floor speech Thursday, she said the pressure from both sides was intense. But lawmakers stuck to it.

“In a divided government, you must stay at the table even when you feel most strongly that you want to walk away,” she said. “These were no easy choices in the face of extreme pressure from both the left and the right. We were not sent here to represent our political parties. We represent the people back home, who are tired of partisanship. They just want the government to work when they need it.”

Republicans who voted against the bill said the better plan, because the state is still recovering from a difficult recession, would have been to reduce spending without tax increases. 

Rep. Jeff Timberlake, R-Turner, complimented his colleagues on the committee for their work but said people had no understanding of how much money $6.3 billion was. He urged his colleagues to reject the measure in favor of more cuts.

Timberlake, an apple grower and hardware store owner, compared dollars to the apples his family grows and said growing that many apples in his family orchards would take 210 years, and only if the weather cooperated. 

He suggested lawmakers instead eliminate the sales tax increase and ask all state departments to cut their budgets by 1.5 percent. He suggested the change could be accomplished in an hour.

“My father told me that if you can’t be part of the solution, then don’t be part of the problem,” Timberlake said. “This is a simple fix from a simple man.”

Lawmakers rejected the idea and tabled it indefinitely before sending the bill to the Senate where it passed on its initial vote with only limited debate.

On the Senate side, Sen. Doug Thomas, R-Ripley, said he couldn’t vote for tax increases. 

“The people in my district can’t afford to pay any more taxes. It’s as simple as that,” Thomas said. “They are struggling to keep their house warm and food on the table. They are getting by with less; there’s no reason state government can’t.”

Thomas said Republicans against the budget also feel the tax increases would come at the same time the state’s economy was showing some signs of recovery. 

“It’s going to mean fewer jobs and less money for people to provide for their families,” Thomas said. 

Democrats supporting the budget said there was much in the budget they did not like also, but efforts to suspend previously enacted income tax cuts were largely rejected by Republicans.

“There are things I don’t like in the budget, but it is better than the governor’s proposed budget,” said Sen. John Cleveland, D-Auburn. “It does provide about 64 percent funding for communities’ revenue-sharing and makes the impact much less than it would have been.”

House Minority Leader Ken Fredette, R-Newport, said his job was to lead and that meant supporting the budget with his vote.

He also said he did that only after he knew the Legislature was going to act on three other bills that were important to Republicans, including paying off the state’s debt to its hospitals, voting on a Medicaid expansion bill and finalizing the merger between the state’s departments of Agriculture and Conservation.

“We are thankful to the speaker that we were able to achieve those three priorities and we are finally able to put the budget in a position to fund state government for the next two years,” Fredette said. 

He said whether the votes in favor of the budget would hold through a veto was still a question mark. “It’s a very tough budget for Republicans,” he said.

He said LePage has said he would take the full 10 days the governor is allowed to decide whether to sign the measure or veto it, and that’s the governor’s prerogative.

“That’s a long time — in politics, particularly,” Fredette said. “So we will have to wait and see what develops in the next 10 days.”  

He said that if they couldn’t hold the votes to override a veto after 10 days, the state would be facing a government shutdown. The state’s constitution requires a balanced budget by June 30 every two years.

“Obviously, the consequences at that time get to be very dire,” Fredette said.

[email protected]

Bangor Daily News Staff Writer Christopher Cousins contributed to this report.