HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania state government’s new fiscal year started Tuesday and arrived with an election-year budget bill approved in a rigidly partisan vote by the Republican-controlled Legislature, but not Gov. Tom Corbett’s signature or a clear picture of what he planned to do with it.

The Republican governor, who used to boast about his perfect record in signing budgets on time, said early Tuesday he would not immediately sign the $29.1 billion spending plan that lawmakers sent him.

“We have to take a look at it,” Corbett said as he left the Capitol around 1 a.m. “There was not an agreed to budget, necessarily, to the details, so we’re going to look at it.”

His office remained silent about its plans Tuesday night and Corbett stayed out of sight during the day as lawmakers continued their work. The administration released a statement saying state agencies were continuing normal operations and employees would be paid and on the job.

The state constitution bars the government from making most payments without the authorization of a budget.

The government can keep funding its most important public health and safety functions, including prisons, state police and medical care for the poor. Debt payments and pension checks will continue to be sent out and self-funding agencies, such as the Liquor Control Board, will not be affected. During a 2009 budget stalemate, about 80,000 employees began seeing their biweekly paychecks diminish and vendors began missing payments in the third week of July.

After 10 days, the constitution allows a bill to become law without the governor’s signature.

What happens next is unclear, and Corbett has said he will consider every option, from vetoing the budget to issuing a line-item veto that scratches certain funds.

Meanwhile, changes engineered late Tuesday night by House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny, to a key budget-related bill — including stripping out two provisions favored by Senate GOP leaders — virtually guaranteed a rocky spring session for Republicans would drag farther into lawmakers’ traditional summer break.

The spending increase in the budget plan, supported by more than $2.5 billion in one-time stopgaps to plug a massive deficit, would go toward public schools, prisons, pension obligations, health care for the poor and social safety-net programs. It does not increase taxes.

The 108-95 House vote Monday and the 26-24 Senate tally earlier in the day followed nearly straight party lines and culminated hours of often heated debate.

All 115 Democrats in the 253-member Legislature voted against the budget, saying it is built on gimmickry while it punishes the working poor and does little to reverse budget-balancing cuts in aid to schools and safety-net programs that Republicans engineered over the last three years under Corbett.