LANSING The 109 members of the House had to be locked into the House chamber for almost 10 hours to make it happen, but the Legislature finally ended a weeks-long impasse on the budget by passing a 33 percent increase in the tax paid by Detroit’s three casinos.

An aggressive arm-twisting effort by the Granholm administration on Democrats and by House Speaker Rick Johnson (R-LeRoy) on Republicans produced a 93-15 victory on the bill, which would raise the Detroit casino tax to 24 percent. It came only after the first Call of the House in 12 years (during which time lawmakers cannot leave the House chamber and the State Police are dispatched to find missing ones) and a roll call vote that lasted 1 hour and 39 minutes.

The casino tax vote was the highlight of an extraordinary legislative session on the day after the statewide primary elections. A legislative session that concluded at 11:50 p.m. was not the first choice of bleary-eyed legislators, many of whom had just concluded exhausting campaigns and gotten few hours sleep after monitoring vote totals Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning.

Opposition among lawmakers who had been reluctant to support the casino tax increase because they saw it as dooming a the so-called racino bill that would authorize slot machines at the state’s horse racetracks eventually melted away after they received a commitment from the Senate for a September vote on the legislation.

The House rejected the casino tax compromise forged Tuesday and House-Senate negotiators reconvened and came up with a new version that included $6 million per year for agriculture interests, which would stand to benefit from the racino bill.

Overall, the bill would raise $50 million in additional revenue per year for the state and $25 million annually for the city of Detroit. Supporters have called the bill critical to keeping the state’s budget balanced, but opponents – principally the casinos themselves, affected unions and the business community – have called the bill a job-killer that would put off the building of the permanent casinos.

Officials said high-level talks on the budgets themselves would resume Thursday. They said about $65 million in cuts would be needed to complete action on the budgets.

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