On the same day it voted for a new state budget that freezes education aid statewide, knocks 2,400 children off subsidized childcare and imposes new prescription drug co-pays on people with disabilities and the very poor elderly, the Senate voted to raise the pay for members of the state Board of Elections.

Their pay would rise from $7,000 to $10,000 a year initially. Then, they would get guaranteed “cost of living” increases every year after that under the bill introduced by Sen. Leo Blais, R-Coventry, that was approved 20 to 13 on one of the most divisive votes of the day.

Salaries for the part-time job have stood at $7,000 a year since they were slashed to that level — from $30,000-plus — in 1992 during a paroxysm of reform.

Yesterday, Sen. Paul Fogarty, D-Glocester, said he couldn’t vote for a pay raise and then go home to his district and explain why, on the same day, he voted for the first time for a budget with less money in it for things like education aid than the governor recommended. “I have to go back and explain that, which is very tough and bite the bullet on that one, but I can’t justify this.”

But Blais, acknowledging that his father was once a member of the board, told colleagues he has proposed the pay hike annually — though it has rarely gone this far — “to correct a wrong that I think was made during the passion of the banking crisis.”

As for the timing, he said: “Quite frankly, the size of the problems we have are not going to be solved by not paying people a fair compensation for what they really do.” The potential beneficiaries of the bill now headed to the House are Thomas V. Iannitti, the acting chairman, John A. Daluz, Frank J. Rego, Florence G. Gormley and Raymond Xavier.

Senate President Joseph Montalbano was on one side, voting yes; Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed was on the other, voting no during a session that also saw Senate passage, for the first time, of a high-profile bill banning mandatory overtime for nurses and another banning a form of forced prostitution.

But what didn’t happen yesterday was as noteworthy as what did. Governor Carcieri’s director of administration, Beverly Najarian, was spared, for now, a grueling reconfirmation hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee. At midday, the hearing was postponed to a date uncertain.

As director of the Department of Administration, Najarian has become the lightning rod for the governor’s threat to lay off 1,000 state workers and her own department’s handling of the no-bid staffing contract — worth upward of $11 million annually — given to Smart Staffing Service last fall.

Her department — and a consultant-selection committee attached to it — has also had a hand in some, if not all, of the controversial contracts bubbling up at the state Department of Transportation. With state and federal authorities, and a task force appointed by Carcieri, now investigating contracting practices at the DOT, Senate Judiciary Chairman Michael McCaffrey, D-Warwick, said his committee wants to see what plays out. “The director of administration is the chief purchasing agent,” he said, “and we want to see what they turn up over there, what her involvement was in that, what she should have done or didn’t do, what she knew and when she knew it.”

In response to questions, Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal said the governor “stands behind Beverly Najarian’s nomination. She has done a tremendous job as DOA director, saving taxpayers millions of dollars. It is up to the Senate to determine when they will hold a hearing and a vote.”

The Senate also handed organized labor a long-sought victory when it approved a bill banning overtime for nurses and certified nursing assistants, except in unforeseeable emergencies, such as a power outage, a spike in the patient population or when an unusual number of employees call in sick.

For more than a decade, the issue of nurses and nurse aides being forced to work overtime has been a perennial complaint at the General Assembly. Nurses asserted that patient safety was compromised when caregivers were forced to work exhausted. Hospital lobbyists countered that they rarely used mandatory overtime, and only as a last resort.

The issue had faded into the background at the State House for years, as legislators waited for hospitals and health-care unions to work the issues out. Some did, some didn’t. Last year, the House approved the bill in the session’s home stretch, but it died when the Senate ran out of time to consider it.

Yesterday’s Senate vote for a compromise version of the bill introduced by Sen. John Tassoni Jr., D-Smithfield, drew a thunderclap of applause. The compromise was limited to nurses and certified aides, and it no longer contained a requirement that would have called for payments of twice their hourly wage if an employer violated the law.

But, in an unexpected reversal, a bill to ban human trafficking sailed through the Senate and got snagged in the House. (In the past, the bill has passed the House and gotten held up in the Senate.)

The House Judiciary Committee put off a planned vote over concerns that the bill, as written, punishes sex workers, rather than people who force them into involuntary servitude.

Several committee members said the bill is so vaguely worded that it could be interpreted to make all “commercial sexual activity,” including a striptease or a lap dance, illegal.

“There are some licensed venues that would be subject to 20 years in prison under this,” said Rep. Nicholas A. Mattiello, D-Cranston. “I think it goes beyond what it’s intended to do.”

The committee members sent the bill to House lawyers for amendments last night, and will consider the amended version when they meet again today.

Meanwhile yesterday, the House passed and sent to the Senate a bill sponsored by Rep. Raymond E. Gallison Jr., D-Bristol, intended to make it more difficult to build a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal in Fall River. The bill would require that any emergency management plan for the transportation of LNG through Narragansett Bay and Mount Hope Bay be approved by the General Assembly and the eight coastal communities that tankers would pass near.

Also passed was a bill, sponsored by Rep. Peter L. Lewiss, D-Westerly, to let judges include pets in custody orders that drew both ridicule and passionate support before it cleared the House 52 to 16.

Rep. David A. Caprio, D-Narragansett, said the bill would give animals the same consideration given to children in Family Court, and lawyers a means to cause major delays in cases.

How, Caprio wondered, would the judge figure out who the dog, or whatever, really wanted to be with?

But Rep. Gordon Fox, D-Providence, accused Caprio and some other critics of “having fun” at the expense of children whose homes are breaking up. The point of the bill, he said, is to keep pets with the children who are emotionally attached to them when families separate.

“Some judges say, ‘I don’t do animals,’ ” Fox said, when pets can help maintain “some semblance of normality.”

egudrais@projo.com