The massive proposals to settle Minnesota’s big issues that have consumed lawmakers at the Capitol the past few months? Those were just the starting positions.

When the Legislature returns from a 10-day break on Tuesday, the real work will begin.

“You are going to put out your offers and they are going to put out their offers and you’re going to go from there,” said Republican Rep. Nick Zerwas, a two-term member from Elk River. “It’s a negotiation, right?”

In two dozen Pioneer Press interviews with Capitol decision-makers and members, the fault lines for the last six weeks of this year’s legislative session were consistent: How to raise billions for transportation and how to spend more than $40 billion in taxpayer cash.

Few believed the solutions Republican and Democratic-Farmer-Labor lawmakers or Gov. Mark Dayton have proposed so far will be exactly what passes by the session’s May 18 end.

“They just started to put some cards on the table and some of them are still face down,” the DFL governor said of legislators. “These first three months are basically treading water and waiting until we get down to the real numbers and the real issues that divide us.”

Meanwhile, they are ramping up to a route many voters say has been lacking under the dome — compromise.

“I think we would be foolish to think that everything we want, we will get,” said Rep. Dave Baker, R-Willmar.

Baker is a freshman who unseated a DFL incumbent with only 214 votes to spare last year. Outside groups dumped more than $500,000 on his race, making it a $678,144 fight and one of the most expensive House battles in the state.

With that bruising campaign only five months in the rearview mirror and the next legislative election coming up in just a year and a half, lawmakers are ready to deliver cooperation.

“Let’s be reasonable, let’s compromise, let’s show that shared government does work,” an optimistic Baker said.

RELATIONSHIPS

In what may be good news for Minnesotans sick of seeing Capitol bickering, Dayton and leaders of the Republican House and the DFL Senate promise they are getting along just fine.

“What’s important, has been important all session, and continues to be very important going into the final stretch, is that the leaders not make anything personal,” said Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook. “I think all the relationships of the key players are in as good of a condition as I’ve ever seen them.”

From Bakk, that is saying something.

In February, Dayton and Bakk, who generally share common policy goals, created a bitter uproar, upending the early-session peace.

Freshly into his new term, Dayton enacted massive pay raises for his commissioners. Bakk led the Senate in moving to delay those raises. Dayton called Bakk a back-stabber.

With Republican House Speaker Kurt Daudt acting as emissary, the two agreed with the House an appropriate salary punishment would be to slash raises and strip future governors of the power to set pay.

“The governor and I? We’re doing great,” Bakk said. “We have moved to a point where the dust-up that happened at the start of the session didn’t happen.”

Ramping up to his first major negotiating session, Daudt, R-Crown, said that he is pleased with the level of trust he has built up with his DFL partners and his sometimes raucous Republican caucus. And he is ready to work toward a tidy conclusion.

“Am I going to make some position adjustments? I’m certainly open to that,” Daudt said. “I’m trying to look at this from as reasonable perspective at I can.”

Bakk concurred.

“I don’t anticipate an outcome where I get everything I want. I don’t anticipate an outcome where (Daudt) goes away mad,” said Bakk, who is many years the speaker’s senior in both age and legislative experience. “Anybody that thinks I’m going to roll over him is mistaken. That’s not going to happen.”

Dayton, who will end up locked in a room with Bakk and Daudt to negotiate the final deal, voiced similar assurances.

He said both his detente partners are savvy negotiators and smart politicians.

Still, he predicted the end-of-session bargaining to come will be messy.

“The last weeks of the session are always contentious and always challenging,” Dayton said. “We all ultimately need to resolve our differences in a timely manner.”

TRANSPORTATION

The leaders, and their legislative followers, agree coming to a deal on transportation will be the biggest challenge.

DFLers and Republicans at the Capitol have heard Minnesotans’ desperate cry for more transportation funding. Each has proposed spending billions over the next decade to improve the ways people get to and fro.

That accord shows how far the Capitol powers already have come.

“One of the things we were very far apart on right at the beginning is where is the actual need and how far are we going to go,” said Rep. Tim Kelly, R-Red Wing. The chairman of the House transportation committee said, “That’s come around to a pretty close agreement.”

But that does not guarantee lawmakers and the governor will deliver on that need.

Similar proposals from Dayton and the Senate DFL would raise about $600 million per year in new taxes on gasoline and motor vehicles to pay for roads and bridges, and pair it with a metro-area sales tax increase to raise hundreds of millions of dollars more for mass transit.

Republicans would dedicate about $300 million per year of existing tax revenue for transportation to pay for roads and bridges but are opposing any tax increases.

With that yawning gap, “I don’t think anything is definite,” said Edina Rep. Ron Erhardt, a former Republican turned DFLer and a veteran of legislative transportation funding battles. “All they’re doing is shouting at each other right now.”

Most House and Senate Republicans insist they will not support the gas tax increase DFLers want and most DFLers are saying they cannot allow the spending swaps Republicans want.

But there are some signs of deal-making.

A few Republicans suggested they could support some increased transportation revenue in exchange for cutting back transit spending, and a few DFLers have said the tax proposals from their leaders are too big of an ask.

But DFLers, despite Republican insistence and campaigns against the gas tax underway, say they are still fighting to raise the revenue.

Republicans are essentially “telling the Senate and the governor, if you want to do anything on transportation, you’re going to have to give us something big. What that is remains to be seen,” said Sen. Scott Dibble, a Minneapolis DFLer and Kelly’s counterpart in the Senate. He is convinced the Republicans’ first transportation proposal was “designed to leverage some other deal.”

Still, DFL lawmakers and the governor realize getting that deal will be tough.

“I think the hardest piece is going to be figuring out the path for transportation. I’ve got some thoughts about what that path might be, I’ve thought about it a great deal ’cause I concluded a long time ago it’s the hardest piece to figure out,” Bakk said.

Bakk, a 20-year-veteran of the Capitol and a former union negotiator, believes a gas tax agreement is still possible.

“It’s a real narrow road,” he said. “I’ve got to thread the needle to get there. But I think there is a path.”

BUDGET

The road is much wider on the budget, given that the state is expected to take in $1.9 billion more than it needs for current programs. Yes, Republicans and DFLers have different visions for how to spend the state’s expected $42 billion revenue over the next two years, but few think sorting that out will be all that hard.

Republicans have proposed $2 billion in tax cuts and $40 billion in spending, while Dayton and Senate DFLers have unveiled $43 billion in spending proposals, with some targeted tax cuts and savings plans.

The Republicans also include some cuts in Health and Human Services programs to offset some targeted spending increases. The Senate DFL, meanwhile, rolled out a budget similar to Dayton’s but with more money allocated for the state’s reserves. The governor also has pushed funding for universal preschool and tuition freezes, and the House Republicans have proposed $160 million more in spending for long-term care programs for the elderly and people with disabilities than Dayton has backed.

“Clearly, the major fault line” is over funding for health and human services programs, said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Richard Cohen, DFL-St. Paul. Senate DFLers have called for spending nearly $1.5 billion more in that area than House Republicans.

Further, Cohen said a House Republican proposal to eliminate the MinnesotaCare program that provides health insurance for the working poor is flatly out.

“We’re not going to do that,” Cohen said.

Cohen’s House counterpart, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jim Knoblach, R-St. Cloud, agreed the differences on health and human services spending will be thorny, but he thinks the two sides can negotiate a compromise solution.

“We’re not heading to a shutdown,” he said.

With a $2 billion surplus to spend, most Capitol powers say the final deal is within reach.

“I’m not seeing a ton of difficulties necessarily,” Daudt said. “I think as long as we commit to really focusing on what’s best for Minnesota, I can’t think why we can’t come to agreement at the end.”

But the end, Dayton reiterated, will be messy, as always.

“It will be intense, heated at times,” the governor said. “It will be a lively finale, but they usually are. … I don’t think it’s fun, necessarily, but it will be productive.”

David Montgomery, Bill Salisbury and Doug Belden contributed to this report.

Follow Rachel E. Stassen-Berger at twitter.com/rachelsb.