Progress seems to be emerging on budget negotiations after weeks of uncertainty , though lawmakers won’t convene for budget conferences until at least next week.

A deal on tax relief, while getting closer, also still remains unfinished.

Republican Sen. Ed Hooper , the upper chamber’s budget chief, told Florida Politics Monday morning that the Senate had received an offer from the House on Friday, and that he expected to send another back to them sometime Monday.

The House offer, Hooper said, notably did not include a recurring sales tax reduction, as has been a sticking point in the House. The House budget originally contemplated cutting the sales tax by three-quarters of a percentage point, a number later revised down to a quarter of a percentage point.

Hooper didn’t elaborate on tax relief in the House offer, but said “business rent was a big part.” Reducing or eliminating the business rent tax has been a priority of House Speaker Daniel Perez , and Hooper had previously hinted that negotiations were beginning to move in that direction.

Asked to confirm the information Hooper provided, Republican Rep. Lawrence McClure , who is leading budget negotiations in the House, said his chamber remained focused on reducing recurring spending. He did not specifically confirm the omission of a sales tax reduction, or the inclusion of a business rent tax reduction, but hinted that the House is willing to meet the Senate on the issue while still sticking to its goal of reducing recurring spending.

“We think the cleanest way to do it is via a sales tax cut, but what we’re after is reducing the recurring spending. It’s out of control. If the Senate is uncomfortable with the sales tax, no problem,” he said.

The House is concerned that spending in Florida has ballooned as a result of higher-than-expected budgets in the pandemic and post-pandemic years.

“If we continued spending as normal, the three-year out-year is upside down billions of dollars, and that is unacceptable,” McClure said, referring to a three-year fiscal outlook that considers continued growth in the state, but at a slower rate than in recent years. “That means you can’t spend as much as you have historically spent.”

Hooper, in his text to Florida Politics Monday morning, lamented that the House “keeps moving the goalpost.” To that claim, McClure had strong words.

“With all due respect, we haven’t moved one ounce off of our sincerity to reduce recurring spending,” he said. “Additionally, we have not gone back on our word one time to the Florida Senate.”

“We haven’t said we’re against nonrecurring spending,” McClure added. “We’re not big on the Legislature adding recurring dollars when it puts the future of the Legislature in a bind.”

McClure also addressed the elephant in the room. “I never predicted that it would be so tough (to pass a budget) with a Republican supermajority,” he said.

Yet the process has been rife with challenges between the House and Senate. Earlier this week, the House accused the Senate of going back on its word .

Hooper told Florida Politics that the budget breakdown was “a big kerfuffle” that will get worked out. McClure fired back that “it’s not a kerfuffle, it’s a re-trade,” accusing the Senate of backtracking on Senate President Ben Albritton’s promise to bring a sales tax cut proposal to the Senate floor, which they did not do .

Hooper at that time had told Florida Politics that the Senate was working on an offer that could include a business rent tax cut. The Senate President’s Office at the time confirmed that “reduction or elimination of the business rent tax has been a component” of some of its offers.

If the latest House offer did include business rent as a key tax relief component, and if the Senate has indeed used that in some of its offers, it appears as though a deal may be on the horizon.

But as has become the case over the past several weeks of back-and-forth with little movement, it’s best no one holds their breath while waiting.