Top Democrats in the Legislature quickly agreed Friday to the need to call their members back to Beacon Hill for a special formal session to pass an economic development bill that sat unfinished this week after a chaotic end to formal lawmaking for the year.

Less than two hours after Gov. Maura Healey put public pressure on House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka, the pair of lawmakers were on board with the idea of returning to work sometime during the five-month period of an election year in which the House and Senate customarily go on break from major legislative business.

Healey, who has largely held back over the past week from publicly putting her thumb on the legislative scales, said the multi-billion dollar economic development bill that includes hundreds of millions for life sciences and climate technology is “extremely important” to the state.

The governor has pitched the measure as a key way to address Massachusetts’ competitiveness with other states during a time when residents are flocking to cheaper areas of the United States.

“To that end, I am imploring the Senate and House to return as soon as possible and work together with me and my team to get this done. The people of Massachusetts deserve it and are counting on us,” she said in a statement.

Both legislative leaders soon found themselves amenable to the suggestion — but it remained unclear if the two branches would be able to bridge stark divides on legislation that they had already failed to cross during the normal course of their two-year session.

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“The Senate is ready to return to work and pass this critical economic development bond authorization — and we are prepared to call a special formal session to get it done,” Spilka said in a statement.

Mariano said he was committed to negotiating an economic development bill “that fully invests in the life sciences sector and that makes the additional, critical investments (that) we have consistently pursued.”

“We are prepared to return for a special session when such an agreement is reached,” he said.

The various versions of the economic development bill from the House and Senate differed on how much the state would be authorized to borrow to invest into the life sciences sector.

The House proposed $500 million over ten years for the industry, a move that brought them in line with Healey, while the Senate pitched $225 million over five years, which prompted concerns among companies and advocates.

It was a sticking point that Mariano pointed to during the end of formal lawmaking Thursday morning.

“Obviously, the bonding part of it is a problem. But we just couldn’t get any information about the differences in the bonding. There were major differences in what the House wanted to put in. We were in line with the governor,” Mariano said at the time. “We couldn’t get it to an agreement so consequently, we didn’t do it.”

Beyond the borrowing, the proposal included a wide array of policy matters, including a measure backed by the Kraft Group that would have cleared the way for a soccer stadium in Everett and an effort to rename the convention center in the Seaport after former Mayor Thomas Menino.

Disappointment has grown since legislators held a pair 23-hour final formal meetings earlier this week that resulted in Democrats failing to find compromises on many high-profile proposals from hospital oversight to responses to the opioid crisis.

Legislative rules require the House and Senate to cease all formal business in the second year of a session by July 31. Lawmakers then historically break for the following five months to in-part focus on their reelection campaigns.

During the break from formal business, lawmakers cannot hold what are known as formal sessions, where they can take roll call votes. Some bills, like ones that borrow money or transfer land, require recorded votes to advance.

Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation President Doug Howgate said to call a special formal session, Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate would need to agree to suspend their rules that require formal lawmaking to end on July 31.

Both branches agreed to a similar move in 2020 when legislators, mired in the dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic, decided to extend formal lawmaking beyond the July deadline to tackle myriad issues, including a landmark police reform bill and the state budget.

Howgate said returning to work “sends an important signal to folks about what people are taking seriously.”

“In this case, I do think that the value of getting done, certainly the economic development bill — I think there’s some other important bills as well — for me, would trump the importance of that relatively arbitrary date,” Howgate told the Herald.

House Minority Leader Brad Jones said he was opposed to calling a special formal session before Democrats announced a deal on the economic development bill.

“We just had a year and a half of sessions, and they didn’t file a report. So it seems to me, maybe they should sit down and work on an agreement and then say, ‘how do we get this done?’” the North Reading Republican told the Herald. “They weren’t able to reach an agreement in a year and a half, what makes us think they’re going to reach an agreement in the next four months?”