Senators may have tightened up the title of a gas tax bill to curtail monkey business in the House, but that hasn't smoothed the bill's progress before representatives.

Now an afternoon hearing is delayed until the full House Resources committee can meet with Attorney General Dan Sullivan, who has briefed two members already with information panel chair Rep. Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage, thinks will smooth out disagreements.

That's important. The bill is key for the Senate, one of those major pieces that's part of the end-of-session game plan. Johnson said his committee could meet well into the night, if that's what it takes, as the Senate grows "frustrated" with lack of progress.

The bill to separate the tax relationship between oil and gas met with widespread approval in the Senate, where sponsor Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, labeled it a risk management bill that would protect billions destined for state coffers once gas flows from the North Slope through a big pipeline.

The plan landed in the House Resources Committee with a three-three party split and three more members voting less predictably.

The panel heard the bill for hours over the weekend, running until 9 p.m. Saturday.

Johnson has pushed back a scheduled 1 p.m. hearing on the bill until the whole panel can meet with Sullivan in executive session. He and others expected that the meeting would pull the Resources Committee onto common ground, and that the bill could move out his evening.

But the public may never get a real handle on the reasoning behind that, as the AG's input is expected to come within an executive session and could involve confidentiality agreements.

That's expected at around 4 p.m. today. The private talks could run to the House floor session start at 5 p.m., Johnson warned.

So far, the committee is pretty divided about the need to break apart -- decouple, in legislative lingo -- oil and gas taxes. They are also divided in just about all the details of how decoupling would work. On one point, Johnson brought forward an amendment totaling 23 pages -- nearly as long as the 33-page bill itself.

Next up for SB 305 would be House Finance. Johnson said the policy call -- should the commodities be taxed separately -- is a policy call that should be made not in his committee, but on the House floor.