"There will be a special session," Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. told lawmakers. "We have a little bit that's left undone."

The thin veneer of fiscal restraint sloughed off at 11 p.m. Wednesday when House members started amending tax breaks back into a flat tax proposal. Senators tried to retaliate by recalling legislation to cut the sales tax on food, but it was too late. The bill had already gone through.

"I don't know if I was the only one in this body that didn't think we were going to get it quite done," said House Speaker Greg Curtis. "There are some things that we're not happy about. Life goes on."

For weeks, lawmakers have been playing nice in public while privately sniping about their differing philosophies about tax reform.

But after being at odds for much of the last two months, representatives and senators came together in the final hours of the 2006 Legislature to adopt a $9.9 billion budget. But they still couldn't agree about lowering the state income tax rate to a flat 4.95 percent.

In between the budget debates, Lawmakers also adopted legislation to require parental consent before a girl's abortion, allow private-public partnerships to build toll roads, raise per-pupil spending a significant amount, ban smoking in private clubs and taverns and limit access to Utahns' addresses and phone numbers on government records.

Besides cutting taxes, lawmakers also dedicated $1.1 billion in cash and bonding for roads, carved out a $2 million infusion for This Is the Place Heritage Park and set aside $2.6 million to cover just 200 of 1,900 low-income Utahns waiting for taxpayer-funded medical treatment.

While lawmakers eventually agreed on how to carve up the money, other issues got lost in the shuffle.

Senate President John Valentine said lawmakers did their jobs: planning for Utahns' future. "We have had major policy decisions and those are hard to pass," said Senate President John Valentine. "In the short term, those are easy to make. But we had to make decisions for the long term."

But lawmakers also acknowledge the wrangling over the budget and tax cuts left them scrambling to push through mundane and hot-button legislation alike.

House Majority Leader Jeff Alexander said the fact that lawmakers couldn't agree to tax reform within the six-week session is not a crisis.

"It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if [the tax reform bills] didn't get passed and we have to come back in a special session," Alexander said. "We come back for special sessions every year."

Some of the big bills never were debated. Legislation meant to outlaw gay-straight student clubs appeared as though it was never going to receive debate in the House. Also bottled up and seeming unlikely to receive a final vote were bills proposing to increase the penalty for animal torture, allowing lawmakers to bypass the governor in budget battles, requiring more disclosure of lobbyist gifts, informing women seeking abortions that their fetuses feel pain and repealing resident college tuition offered to the children of illegal immigrants.

And legislators remained intractably split on other issues. Senators voted to override Huntsman's veto of legislation that would take away his final say over new and expanding waste sites in the state. But House members turned their backs on the override attempt.

A lingering tension simmered beneath the delayed flurry of bills in the final hours. In the end, lawmakers adopted nearly 400 bills this year - more than last year.

"We made a concerted effort and sent a lot of bills out at the beginning so House members could have their bills heard," said House Rules Committee Chairwoman Becky Lockhart. "That's part of the relationship with the Senate. The tension that exists is very normal."

The power struggle between the two houses switched lawmakers' alliances with Huntsman this year. A year ago, the Senate acted as mediator between the House and Huntsman. In 2006, the roles were reversed. The governor and House members ended up prodding senators to remove the sales tax on food. Huntsman even offered to abandon the flat tax for another year. "In some cases, you have to take things off the table to ensure that they're on," Huntsman said. "Our system worked the way it's supposed to."

His partnership with the House raised ire in the Senate. It didn't help when the governor spoke confidently of the "tools" he used this session to assert his authority and joked about term limits for senators. In response, senators retracted $7 million in funding for all-day kindergarten - one of Huntsman's pet projects.

Despite the loss of one of four threshold issues Huntsman said he would use to judge the 2006 session, the governor put a good game face on late Wednesday. He used a lyric from the Grateful Dead rock band to summarize the session: "What a long, strange trip it's been."

Lawmakers fully funded the USTAR high-tech economic development initiative with $65 million.