Massachusetts House and Senate lawmakers skidded into Thursday morning as their leaders appeared poised to wrap up formal sessions with major bills on economic development, health care, and climate change left unfinished, if not outright dead.
But as the sun rose over the Massachusetts State House, Governor Maura Healey, who made a late-night trip to House Speaker Ron Mariano’s office during the backroom dealing, did get her multi-billion-dollar housing bill, which she has said is a top priority as the state faces an affordability crisis. The Massachusetts House of Representatives approved the bill just before it recessed at 9:19 a.m. Thursday, August 1. The Massachusetts Senate followed suit shortly thereafter.
The $5.16 billion housing bond bill, with nearly half of it going to public housing, does not include Mariano’s proposal to expand the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority to his part of the South Shore.
As for the economic development bill, which in the Senate version had a provision to ease the approval process for a soccer stadium in Everett, much of the legislation can be taken up during informal sessions, according to Mariano. He said the House disagreed with the Senate’s lower commitment to funding the state’s life sciences sector.
A clean energy and climate bill was left unfinished, as well. “There seems to be a larger game afoot,” state Senator Michael Barrett (D-Lexington), the lead negotiator on the Senate side, said in the early morning hours. “There are all kinds of problems with all kinds of conference committees.”
Asked about Barrett’s comments, House Ways and Means chairman Aaron Michlewitz (D-North End), a key negotiator across several conference committees, said, “We kept talking on the ones I was on …We kept talking the entire way on the ones the other side was willing to engage with. Some of them, there was just no engagement. We kept trying and trying and trying, and just ran against brick walls. Eventually we had to stop running into the brick wall. So here we are.”
Also among the early-morning wreckage: Health legislation dealing with prescription drugs and hospital oversight, driven by the financial collapse of the Steward Health Care system. Mariano said he spiked the bills because he didn’t want to water them down and “we were frustrated by the progress we were making trying to do the two bills at once. It was very difficult and there were other health care items scattered in other [negotiations].”
Talks will continue on those bills, too, Mariano said.
“This has happened before. We’ve picked up the pieces, we’ll keep working on it, and we’ll get it done,” Senate President Karen Spilka (D-Ashland) told reporters, speaking generally about all that was left unfinished.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s property tax shift proposal, which drew intense opposition from real estate interests, appeared dead, as did overrides of Governor Healey’s vetoes from the $58 billion fiscal year 2025 budget. Both the tax shift and the overrides cleared the House but hit a wall in the Senate. Asked about the overrides, Senate Ways and Means chairman Michael Rodrigues (D-Westport) cited concerns about July 2024 state tax revenues coming in low.
As lawmakers turned a late Wednesday night into an early Thursday morning, the bills that saw the most action in that period dealt with booze and babies. A package of incentives for veterans also moved along.
Lawmakers said they reached agreements on bills that handed more liquor licenses to the city of Boston and modernized parentage laws for homosexual-and-transgender-led families and others, though only the latter advanced before the sun rose.
The concentration of power in the hands of just a few legislative leaders meant that for long stretches, their colleagues and staffers had little to do.
In the House, representatives ate candy and huddled in groups in between routine roll call votes on land takings. One reporter spotted state Representative Don Wong (R-Saugus) performing an energy healing practice known as reiki on another lawmaker.
Around the corner and down the hall, state senators sporadically wandered in and out of the chamber. Acton’s Jamie Eldridge (a Democrat) tapped away on his Apple laptop, while Needham’s Becca Rausch (a Democrat) briefly folded her arms and rested her chin on top of her chair as Belmont’s William Brownsberger (a Democrat) gaveled through another small-ball bill.
Across the street, in front of the 21st Amendment (a bar and restaurant named after the measure that ended Prohibition), aides and advocates buzzed over beers and plates of food.
As the clock ticked past 9 p.m., the House Ways and Means Committee kept pumping out bills, dealing with parcels of land in the town of Raynham and lease of land used by the Riverside Boat Club of Cambridge.
Just before 10:30 p.m., Governor Healey, sans her usual entourage, crossed the hall in the west wing of the State House and slipped through a side door into Speaker Mariano’s office. Nearly a half-hour later, she dodged a group of reporters who shouted questions at her as she returned to her office. “Thanks, guys. No, guys,” she said, and the door slammed shut behind her.
State Senator Bruce Tarr of Gloucester, the Republican leader in the Senate, seemed embarrassed early Thursday morning about the Legislature’s last-minute approach to law-making. “We cannot accept this,” he told his fellow senators. “It cannot become institutionalized.”
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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