PROVIDENCE — Lawmakers want to explore expanding the State House.

Saying the seat of state government needs more, and larger, hearing rooms to increase public access to government, they voted to create a commission to study the issue. The brand-new idea was introduced as a resolution yesterday and voted the same day.

In a marathon session that went well into the night, the lawmakers voted to repeal mandatory minimum sentences for drug charges, override the governor’s vetoes on the budget and the medical use of marijuana, and increase the powers of the quasi-public board that operates a federal detention center in Central Falls.

Some are now headed to the governor’s desk, including the mandatory minimum sentence repeal. Others await final votes.

Bills flew, deals were cut, confirmation hearings were posted for eleventh-hour nominees to coveted state positions — and municipal lobbyists pitched $100-million bond refinancing plans to weary-eyed lawmakers — as the legislators raced toward possible adjournment tonight — or, more realistically, early tomorrowmorning.

Out of the behind-the-scenes negotiations came Republican Governor Carcieri’s nomination yesterday of a former Democratic senator, David P. Kerins, for one of the three full-time hearing-officer positions at the Department of Environmental Management that pays approximately $110,000 per year.

The nomination arrived in the Senate less than 24 hours after Senate leadership posted a confirmation hearing today for Carcieri’s latest nominee for the Board of Regents, former Supreme Court Justice Robert G. Flanders Jr.

When asked, Carcieri’s deputy chief of staff John R. Pagliarini said there was no linkage between the two events, but the Kerins nomination “was something we discussed for a long time,” and “something Sen. [Joseph] Montalbano clearly made a priority of his.”

Kerins, 58, is a former assistant city solicitor in Newport, a onetime lobbyist for the Narragansett Indian casino-drive who this year lobbies for the Rhode Island Fraternal Order of Police and the Waste Management Association and a former state senator, a distinction he shares with current DEM director, Michael Sullivan.

As for the timing of his nomination, Kerins yesterday said he was “not really privy to what it was all about,” but he surmised that “as we got to the end of the session that there was nothing left on the table for anybody really to worry about.”

Meanwhile yesterday, the House broke long enough for dinner and a House Finance Committee hearing on a late-filed bill to keep Newport from barring video-slot machines.

The bill, filed earlier this week by Rep. Steven M. Costantino, D-Providence, chairman of the House Finance Committee, reflected the importance of gambling revenue to state government: an anticipated $322 million this year alone, including a projected $256 million from the video slots.

In 2005, lawmakers approved the expansion of video-gambling at Newport Grand and the former Lincoln Park. But Newport Grand’s plans to build an addition to accommodate the additional 800 machines have been tangled up in a legal fight with the city ever since.

Newport Grand lawyer Christoper Boyle said he believed the legislation would render moot the city’s appeal to the Supreme Court of a lower court ruling that effectively said the state, not the city, has exclusive power over Lottery-run games.

The proposal to expand the State House also came in at the last minute, but the sponsor, House Majority Leader Gordon D. Fox, said the idea had been on his mind since he visited Tennessee during a National Conference of State Legislatures meeting, and was impressed by how that state had built modern office space around the edges of its State House without compromising the historic integrity of the building.

During hearings on bills, committee rooms often get so crowded that the Capitol Police must monitor the number of occupants and set up television monitors in hallways so the overflow crowd can watch.

Fox’s resolution creates a 12-member commission, composed entirely of lawmakers, to study expansion options and cost and report back to the General Assembly by May 15, 2008.

Senate Finance Chairman Stephen Alves, D-West Warwick, unveiled another last-minute arrival: a proposal for a new hospital bed tax that would raise about $15 million per year. He said the money would be used to “help get more people insured.”

The tax would be 3 percent of the charges for many hospital services.

The proposal was contained within a compromise bill that has emerged from the struggle between hospitals and insurers over millions of dollars a year in unpaid health insurance copayments and deductibles. That bill is scheduled for a vote today.

Now, the hospitals try to collect the fees from patients. When they can’t, they’re stuck with the bad debt.

The rewritten bill the committee produced yesterday evening would let the hospitals pass along to the insurers responsibility for a portion of uncollected debts.

The controversy over separation of powers and the Coastal Resources Management Council continued yesterday, with a House committee voting to ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether the coastal permitting board is subject to the constitutional amendment voters approved in 2004.

The House asked the state’s highest court the exact same question last year. The watchdog group Common Cause of Rhode Island claimed the question was worded so broadly that the opinion, depending on what it said, might have the effect of undoing separation of powers completely.

The Supreme Court declined to opine on the issue last year, on the grounds that the legislature returning this year would have several new members and therefore they would be giving an answer to a different legislature than the one that asked the question.

In other actions, the House approved a bill to let the Central Falls Detention Facility Corporation run the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility.

The corporation — run by a board of five Central Falls residents appointed by the mayor — has had a contract with Cornell Corrections, a Texas-based private prison operator, since the facility opened in 1993. But the corporation gave Cornell a notice of non-renewal in September, and Cornell has been continuing operations under the terms of the contract that expired in January. The corporation hopes to save money by running the prison directly starting Aug. 1, said Anthony Ventetuolo Jr., who provides administrative oversight to the facility through his company, Avcorr Consulting.

The Senate approved a bill mandating long-term air monitoring to detect pollutants around T.F. Green Airport. Sen. William A. Walaska, D-Warwick, said the legislation would require the Rhode Island Airport Corporation, which runs the airport, to install monitoring equipment by the end of the year and keep sampling the air until at least 2015. Walaska said the monitoring would look for particulate pollution and for volatile organic compounds including benzene and formaldehyde.

A 15-month state study found elevated levels of several cancer-causing substances in the air near the airport but didn’t say whether the airport was the source or what the public health significance of the findings was.

The House and Senate both voted to override Governor Carcieri’s veto of a House bill, sponsored by Rep. Thomas C. Slater, D-Providence, continuing the state’s medical marijuana program.

The Assembly legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes last year, notably to help patients suffering from cancer or other diseases causing extreme pain, but set it to expire in one year.

Slater, who has cancer, got a loud round of applause when he entered the Senate, carrying the bill, for the last step in its trip through the legislature.

The Senate Finance Committee approved a $243,999 sales-tax exemption for the $100-million indoor water park and hotel complex proposed for the West Warwick Business Park.

Senate fiscal adviser Russell C. Dannecker said the legislation is written so that the exemption will be covered by the additional income taxes the water park’s estimated 132 employees will pay. He said the sales-tax exemption will last five years, after which the state will collect sales tax.

blandis@projo.com