After weeks of crunching numbers and weighing priorities, almost no one in the New Hampshire Senate was 100% happy with the state budget.

Despite several of the state’s 24 senators — Democrats and Republicans alike — expressing disappointment over tough cuts, the spending plan that allocates nearly $16 billion to run the state over the next two years passed in a 14-10 vote on Thursday. Two Republicans — Manchester senators Victoria Sullivan and Keith Murphy — voted against it.

Sen. Daniel Innis, a Bradford Republican and University of New Hampshire faculty member, wanted more funding for the state’s university system than the $85 million per year that the Senate landed on. Sen. Cindy Rosenwald, a Nashua Democrat, said she’s disappointed at the lack of new funding for affordable housing, and Hampstead Republican Sen. Regina Birdsell disagreed with the group’s decision to briefly delay changes to retirement pensions for state employees.

“It was painful,” Senate President Sharon Carson, a Londonderry Republican, said of the long, arduous budget process at Tuesday’s final Finance Committee meeting. Now that federal subsidies from the pandemic have dried up, she said, legislators were forced to take a hard look at what they could actually afford.

“Now we have to go back to the New Hampshire way of living within our means,” Carson added.

Sen. Rebecca Perkins-Kwoka of Portsmouth, the Democratic minority leader, argued before Thursday’s vote that as lawmakers stressed the need to “tighten our belts,” they should have looked to reverse some of the Republican-passed tax breaks instead of approving cuts that will impact working families.

“This is not the New Hampshire way. We can do better,” she said. “This is about choices, so let’s choose hard-working Granite Staters. Let’s choose to invest in housing. Let’s choose to invest in our workforce and small businesses.”

Democrats also proposed a dozen amendments to the budget, most of which aimed to reverse the universal expansion of Education Freedom Accounts, the state-funded school voucher program, and reallocate that money toward areas including housing, childcare and healthcare. None of these amendments passed.

The Senate budget:

■Reinstates Medicaid rates, $38 million in community mental health funding and $31 million for developmental disability services that had been cut by the House.

■Restores the Office of the Child Advocate, but eliminates half its staff.

■Brings back 75 of the 100 filled positions in the Department of Corrections that the House had proposed eliminating.

■Allocates $85 million annually for the University System of New Hampshire — lower than the governor’s proposal of $91.2 million, but up from the House’s $66.2 million.

■Funds expansion to make Education Freedom Accounts universal by removing the income cap.

■Reinstates small agencies that had been cut by the House, such as the Human Rights Commission, the Housing Appeals Board and the Commission on Aging.

■Keeps the Council on the Arts but shifts toward donation funding.

Next comes the Committee of Conference, where House and Senate budget writers will get together to hash out the differences between their two proposals. Once they pass that final version, Gov. Kelly Ayotte can either sign or veto it.

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.