When Senate Democrats rolled out their signature bill addressing Connecticut’s energy affordability crisis more than four months ago, the text intentionally left a lot to be desired. The legislation, Senate Bill 4, began as just a single sentence promising to “provide for improved service and reduced costs for electricity ratepayers in the state.”

Since then, proponents have been working — mostly behind the scenes — with Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration on a broader package to provide immediate relief to utility customers as well as longer-term reforms to lower Connecticut’s nagging electric costs.

With just over two weeks to go before lawmakers must wrap their work June 4, the details of that plan are coming into focus.

The latest draft of the bill, topping 150 pages and 45 sections, is expected to be released as soon as Tuesday evening, according to state Sen. Norm Needleman, D- Essex, who has been heavily involved in the negotiations as co-chair of the legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee.

“Not close in certain buckets, but close in some other buckets,” was how Needleman described the draft, which is expected to be revised further in the coming days and weeks. “I mean, it’s comprehensive.”

According to Needleman, the new bill includes a plan for the state borrow up to $260 million a year in order pay for bill arrearages, EV charging infrastructure and energy efficiency programs that are currently covered by utility customers through what’s known as the public benefits charge. As a result, the cost of those programs would be removed from customers’ bills and paid back using taxpayer dollars.

In addition, he said, the legislation would allow utilities to securitize their expenses from storm damage and switch to smart meter systems — essentially spreading those costs out over time and at lower, state-backed interest rates.

Needleman said his “very rough estimate” is that the bill could save a typical utility customer around 5% off their current monthly bill. That would come on top of recent reductions in the public benefits charge and anticipated lower supply costs starting this summer.

While that amount is well below the demands of Republicans who sought to shift most or all of the $1-billion-a-year cost of the public benefits charge off of customers’ bills, Democrats argue it is a more realistic approach given the state’s fiscal constraints.

“I think we have pretty good agreement on the energy bill,” Gov. Ned Lamont said this week when asked about negotiations with lawmakers. “I think we’re going to be shifting some of the costs from ratepayers over to bondholders. You know, they’re all pretty much the same people. So that’ll reduce the public benefits a little bit.”

On Monday, the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee voted along party lines to advance a slimmer version of S.B. 4, even as lawmakers on both sides conceded that the measure remained a work in progress.

The co-chair of that committee, state Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, has been another leading voice among Democrats on energy policy, with many members pointing to his years of experience gained as Needleman’s predecessor on the Energy Committee. (The senator has also attracted scrutiny over his ownership of several energy-related companies, conflicts with regulators and efforts to secure his own appointment to a seat on the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority.)

Earlier this year, Fonfara released his own proposal promising to immediately lower electricity bills by up to 20% through state borrowing that would cover nearly all of the public benefits charge. In addition, he proposed the creation of a new quasi-public authority tasked with directing energy procurement, in hopes of saving customers more over the long term.

That effort caused tensions between Democrats to spill briefly into the open.

During one particularly contentious hearing last month, Needleman insinuated that portions of Fonfara’s bill had been drafted by the utilities, and he accused the senator of trying make an end run around the Energy and Technology Committee. Eventually, the two chairmen agreed to sit down and begin crafting a compromise that incorporated aspects of both their bills, as well as some Republican proposals.

“There is a good faith effort to meld those concepts as best we can,” Fonfara said Monday, before adding “there is a lot of work yet to be done.”

As a practical matter, S.B. 4 will become the vehicle for whatever plan the lawmakers come up with to move through both the Senate and House.

Republicans who voted against the bill in committee on Monday said they did so because they felt the existing, incomplete proposal didn’t go far enough to address voters’ dissatisfaction with electricity prices. The ranking Republican on the committee, state Rep. Joe Polletta, R-Watertown, acknowledged the ongoing negotiations at the time and said he was “cautiously optimistic” those conversations would bear fruit.

“We are butting up against the end of session, so everyone is kind of at the edge of their seat hoping and praying for a bill, a comprehensive bill, that will ultimately lower bills here in the state of Connecticut,” Polletta said, adding that it would be a “shame and massive failure,” for the legislature to take no significant action on the issue.

Even before drafters revealed a more complete version of the bill Tuesday, some of their ideas had come under scrutiny from people keeping track of the bill’s progress.

For example, a proposal endorsed by Fonfara and other legislative leaders to adopt mandatory time-of-use electric rates that charge customers more for power during hours of peak demand was opposed by the American Association of Retired Persons, whose leadership encouraged members to write legislators in opposition to the concept.

“The problem we have is that the poor, the elderly, the disabled, disproportionately need to use electricity at peak times,” said John Erlingheuser, a lobbyist for the group. “You’re an elderly person who’s disabled or uses oxygen or medical devices — those don’t make a difference between day and night, right?”

Needleman said that he was sympathetic to the group’s concerns, and that the final version of the bill would include an opt-out mechanism allowing customers to revert to single, constant rate. Erlingheuser said he was still concerned that solution could prove confusing to some customers.

Lori Brown, the executive director of the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters, said she feared the latest version of the bill would include language paring back Connecticut’s incentives for rooftop solar panels, causing significant disruption for the industry and the state’s clean energy goals. Needleman responded that those aspects of the bill were still being worked on as of Tuesday afternoon.

Environmental advocates have also raised concerns that borrowing the money necessary to pay for recurring programs like energy efficiency could doom their existence once the money runs out.

“I’ve not heard of anything positive in the bill yet,” said Charles Rothenberger, a climate and energy attorney with Save the Sound.

In addition to Fonfara and Needleman, those involved in the negotiations around S.B. 4 have included the House chair of Energy and Technology, state Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, Lamont’s energy advisor Jonathan Dach, as well as representatives of PURA, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the Office of Consumer Counsel.

The state’s two investor-owned electric utilities, Eversource and United Illuminating, were not directly included the discussions, though lawmakers said they would solicit feedback from the companies after releasing the latest draft of their bill.

“We had a lot of bright people in the room” Steinberg said adding “there were also disagreements, not all of us were on the same page.”

One of those disagreements had to do with the procurement process for power supply, which is currently handled by utilities. In his earlier bill, Fonfara proposed creating an entirely new government entity, the Connecticut Energy Procurement Authority, to take over that process, similar to a system currently used in Illinois.

While that idea drew initial support from utilities like Eversource — who earn no profits off the sale of power under Connecticut’s deregulated energy market — Lamont and other Democrats have been more skeptical about the costs and bureaucratic challenges associated with the proposal. Both Needleman and Steinberg said this week that while the bill will include some language offering the utilities additional flexibility in how they purchase power, it will not put the state in charge of that process.

The ranking Republican on the Energy and Technology Committee, state Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich, said he expected that some portions of S.B. 4 will come from ideas originally raised by his GOP colleagues, though he declined to share more details until a draft of the bill is released publicly.

“I feel that there’s a good opportunity to come up with something that we can all get on board with,” Fazio said. “But there’s still issues that need to be bridged where there’s not agreement.”

Democrats also hope to gather at least some bipartisan support for the measure in order to avoid a lengthy filibuster that could derail their agenda in the final days of the session.

When asked Monday whether rank-and-file lawmakers would have enough time to digest the final draft of the bill before voting on it, Fonfara noted that work on the state’s massive, $26 billion annual budget routinely lasts until the final days of the session.

“I think there’s plenty of time,” he said.

CT Mirror reporter Mark Pazniokas contributed to this story.