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U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, helped lead a compromise effort on a stimulus package being considered in the Senate.

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins has told President Obama that she will withdraw her support for the $827 billion economic stimulus bill if House leaders add back "bloated" spending provisions that she and a small group of other centrists had trimmed from the measure Friday.

"He said he understood and would continue to work with me," the Maine Republican said Saturday, describing the phone conversation she had with the president Friday after she helped lead a compromise effort that gave Obama what appears to be enough votes to win passage in the Senate.

Collins and Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska, led an effort to cut about $100 billion from the bill, making it more palatable to Republicans and Democrats who were uneasy with the $900 billion price tag.

They drew up a list of $77 billion in spending cuts and $30 billion in savings by scaling back tax breaks.

Collins said she expects a key Senate vote on the measure Monday night.

A House-Senate conference committee would then meet to reconcile the two measures and bring the bill back to each chamber for approval. Collins said she may serve on that committee.

Collins said that brokering a political deal on the stimulus bill was "extremely difficult," culminating Friday with a meeting in the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

In the room were Collins, Nelson, Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, and Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Collins, who was elected to a third term in November in a tough environment for Republicans, had repeatedly said during her campaign that she would work in a bipartisan manner in Washington.

She said she is now trying to fulfill that pledge.

Collins in recent days has been featured prominently in national television and newspaper coverage of the debate. She said her role in negotiating a compromise has been one of the highlights of her career.

"A lot of people back in Maine have been contacting me to say they are delighted that I played a key role in bringing people together," she said. "And they didn't want to see partisan gridlock, which is what we were heading towards."

Collins said she sought to remove expenditures that didn't seem to belong in a stimulus bill, such as $870 million to help the nation prepare for a flu epidemic.

While the compromise bill lacks some of the tax breaks that Republicans had sought, it does include $70 billion for a one-year fix for the alternative minimum tax.

Collins said the bill helps Maine in a number of ways:

• Maine would receive hundreds of millions of dollars for rebuilding infrastructure, such as roads and sewer systems, she said.

• The bill contains $4.2 billion for upgrading electrical transmission capacity, an issue that is important to Maine, and $7 billion in rural broadband infrastructure funding.

• Because of the efforts of U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, Collins said, the bill includes an $87 billion increase in federal matching funds for Medicaid. That would be a huge help for a poor state like Maine, she said, and bring $490 million in additional Medicaid relief to the state.

• The bill also includes $13.9 billion for Pell Grants, to help low-income students pay for college. It also contains $13 billion in additional funding for special education.

Collins said the special education funding would make it much easier for local school districts to deal with cutbacks in state education aid.

• The bill also includes $1.87 billion for community health center infrastructure.

Staff Writer Tom Bell can be contacted at 791-6369 or at:

tbell@pressherald.com