Senate Democrats released a package of internal rules that would allow Beacon Hill lawmakers to work past a key summer deadline on bills that manage to make it into closed-door negotiating committees, a change top senators argued would boost transparency and efficiency.

Legislative leaders pledged last month to rework their calendar after a two-year session that saw Democrats fail to agree on major bills by their self-imposed due date but finish work on the issues during a stretch of time they typically take off to focus on reelection campaigns.

Sen. Joan Lovely, who helped write a new joint rules package that governs interactions between the House and Senate, said giving legislators more time to privately negotiate compromise legislation will allow them to work “to their fullest potential.”

The Salem Democrat said compromise bills that emerge from private negotiations, or so-called conference committees, after the July 31 deadline to finish work in the second half of the legislative term could be taken up in formal sessions where recorded votes are allowed.

“When these conference committees have completed their work, the matters will go before a formal session to be able to have the votes recorded so that members can make their votes known. There’s the transparency issue as well,” she told reporters Thursday morning.

The joint rules proposals from the Senate, which the chamber plans to debate next week, will need buy-in from House Democrats. House Speaker Ron Mariano has suggested he is open to reforming the July 31 deadline.

Beacon Hill first implemented the summertime cutoff date in 1995 after public outrage swelled over the appearance of a backroom deal between legislators and then-Gov. Bill Weld to boost legislative pay in return for passing a phase-out of the capital gains tax.

The deadline was meant to keep lawmakers accountable and prevent formal policy work after July of each even-numbered year when elections are held and elected officials learn whether they are being sent back to the State House for another term.

But Democrats who control the two chambers have soured on the due date over the last several sessions, with Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka each describing it as arbitrary and artificial.

Under the Senate’s joint rules package, legislative negotiators would have until the last day of the two-year session to consider bills that make it into private talks.

Lovely argued another portion of the joint rules package — requiring the first meeting of a conference committee to be public — would provide more insight into the legislative process.

“Will we hear any negotiating (during the first meeting)? I hope so,” Lovely said. “I hope that there would be some transparency to that negotiating process.”

Senate lawmakers also want to change the structure of subject-specific committees made up of lawmakers from both branches to allow Senate members to vote only on their bills and House members to weigh in only on their proposals.

House and Senate legislators would still hold joint committee hearings together but Lovely said allowing each branch to decide the initial fate of their bills would prevent a “stalemate among committee chairs.”

Lovely said under the arrangement from prior sessions, both the House and Senate chairs of a joint committee needed to agree to advance bills out of the panel.

“If one chair doesn’t agree to poll a bill, the bill gets held up,” she said. “This is why we’d like to separate how bills get reported out of a joint committee to allow the Senate chair to report out Senate bills and the House chair to report out House bills.”

Rep. Michael Moran, a Brighton Democrat who served as majority leader last session, floated completely splitting up the joint committees into separate panels but the idea was later shot down by Mariano, who said this week it was “not my intention to separate the committees.”

The Quincy Democrat said he also did not think Lovely’s suggestion “separates the committees.”

“A change in separating the committees is very, very significant, requires an awful lot of prep work that would have to be done,” he said. “My intention is to submit some joint rules and to also submit work on our House rules.”