Pressure was mounting as 24,000 state workers had been furloughed, forcing a partial government shutdown.
To Republicans, the tax break was an exasperating example of what they call "issue creep" - Rendell's constantly changing priorities and growing list of items he had to have in order to agree to the $27.4 billion budget.
"We tried to negotiate in good conscience, and then another thing would pop up as a deal-breaker," Armstrong said, discussing the nine-day impasse in an interview yesterday. "The film tax credit was the straw that broke the camel's back."
In the end, the sides agreed to limit the tax break to $75 million a year; Republicans wanted a third as much, while Rendell sought no limit at all.
Yesterday, as state government reopened, politicos tried to figure out who won the budget standoff, who lost, and who blinked first.
"We all blinked a little bit," Rendell said. "Unless there is mutual blinking, there is no budget and no legislation that comes out of here."
Rendell's priorities, as set out in his spending plan unveiled in February, were long and broad. Many were tossed off the negotiating table. He dropped his push for a sales-tax hike as a way to provide property-tax relief. Gone, too, were his ideas to tax oil-company profits and to lease the Pennsylvania Turnpike to private investors.
Still, he was able to claim victory on many fronts. He got more than $900 million annually in new highway and mass-transit funding, several health-care-related initiatives, increased education funding, and a deal to consider energy policies in a special session.
Republicans say they held down the rate at which spending is growing and killed seven new taxes the governor wanted when he unveiled his budget in February.
