By Keith M. Phaneuf

State officials today sparred for the second day in a row over whether to give communities more time to adopt their local budgets — a fight that left the extension issue in limbo following a 90-minute Senate debate.

Democratic leaders announced early in the afternoon they expected to adopt a bill in the Senate that would suspend municipal budget adoption deadlines set in local charter or ordinance until June 30.

The 36-member Senate is divided between Democrats and Republicans, but Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, a Democrat, can cast a 37th and tie breaking vote. In addition, Republican Sen. Tony Guglielmo of Stafford was absent from today’s Senate session.

But after a 90-minute debate, Democrats tabled their bill and accused Republican senators of waging a filibuster.

By Tom Condon

In one of his recent meetings with residents of Hartford’s suburbs, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin observed, as many have before, that if Connecticut were created today, it almost assuredly would not be with 169 cities and towns.

His point was that the state’s ancient and fractionalized political organization, combined with its heavy reliance on property taxes, stacks the deck against hard-pressed Hartford, which has high needs and less taxable property than some of its suburbs.

He asserted that the region’s fate is tied to the health of the core city, and asked for support at the Capitol and for more cooperative sharing of services or resources among towns, sometimes known as “regionalism.”

This notion has never been terribly popular in a state where a tradition of local authority can be traced back to its Puritan settlers. But while autonomous municipal government — home rule — is the norm and likely to remain so, regional cooperation has been inching ahead, especially in the past decade. Towns are sharing such services as building inspection, permitting, property revaluation, solid waste management and others.