End of legislative session sees health care, jobs, and energy bills unresolved
Photo | Courtesy of Chris Lisinski, State House News Service
The Massachusetts State House
Democrats who control the House and Senate failed to reach deadline-day agreements on popular efforts to impose new oversight on hospitals, supercharge business and job growth, reform clean energy infrastructure, and more.
Lawmakers completed work on bills modernizing parentage definitions, reforming veterans services, and borrowing money for housing affordability efforts, but abandoned -- for now -- work on a whole host of other topics that both lawmakers and Gov. Maura Healey had cited as priorities for the past 18 months.
The collapse of negotiations across a spectrum of topics leaves several priorities in limbo, on life support or effectively dead as most rank-and-file legislators shift their attention to summer vacations and, for the few who face a contested road to reelection, campaign season.
At one point during the home stretch, the Legislature had an even dozen conference committees tasked with hashing out final accords on bills that already passed both chambers. By the time the final gavel rang out Thursday, only three of those panels (parentage, housing bond and veterans services) produced deals, and the others were left idling.
Other bills that had not yet made it to formal talks, like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu's property tax rebalancing plan that cleared the House but not the Senate, face a similarly uncertain fate.
Top House and Senate Democrats said they will try to find paths forward for incomplete bills during the informal sessions that will take place until the next term begins in January. Less controversial measures such as awarding more liquor licenses to Boston and using state savings to compete for federal funds could find success in that span, if negotiators can find agreements.
House Speaker Ron Mariano said he's "pretty confident" that several health care bills can advance during informal sessions, including a hospital oversight measure pitched as a way to prevent the still-unfolding Steward Health Care crisis from happening again. Mariano said he, himself, decided to take the hospital bill and a Senate-priority prescription drug bill off the table "for the better good."
Some other ideas could be doomed until supporters restart the process from square one in 2025.
Because legislative rules require roll call votes for bond authorizations, and do not allow roll call votes during informal sessions, the House and Senate are likely blocked from taking up the billions of dollars in bonding that featured in economic development bills.
Healey kicked off debate in March with a $3.5 billion economic development package that featured $2.8 billion in bond authorizations combined with tax credits. The proposal's marquee investments would reauthorize state investments in the life sciences industry and launch similar support for the nascent climate tech industry.
That effort will now be largely pared back until at least next year because House and Senate Democrats could not agree on an approach. Mariano said lawmakers will try to salvage the remainder of the bill during informal sessions, adding that "obviously, the bonding part of it is a problem."
"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 told reporters shortly before 7 a.m. Thursday. "The Senate, for the first time in about 20 years, stepped away from the commitment to [life sciences], which is something that we wanted to know why and we didn't get any answers, so we couldn't get it to an agreement."
Minutes later, in their own press availability, Senate President Karen Spilka and Senate budget chief Michael Rodrigues defended their approach to the life sciences and biotech industry. They sought fewer years of state dollars than the House and Healey recommended.
"We made significant investments in that area, and we plan to do so again. It's an industry that we invested a lot to nurture it and have it grow in Massachusetts. It's now beyond its pubescent stage," Rodrigues said. "It's now -- it's not even a child anymore, it's a mature industry here in Massachusetts. We need to continue to support them to keep them here because there's lots of competition from around the country."
Inaction on the economic development bill also leaves uncertain the fate of a proposed professional soccer stadium in Everett, which the Kraft family has been seeking as a potential new home for the New England Revolution.
The Senate led the push this term to clear the way for the stadium development, but the House -- which previously backed the idea without Senate buy-in -- never got on board.
"I'm committed to continuing to try to find a way to a path forward on this, and in the next few days, we will examine that process and that path," said Sen. Sal DiDomenico, an Everett Democrat. "I'm not giving up. I'm committed, and I think it's the right thing for my community, the right thing for my region."
House and Senate Democrats also failed to agree on whether to deploy their supermajority margins to muscle through annual state budget spending that Healey trimmed, effectively ensuring that her $317 million in budget veto overrides will stand.
The House voted to override more than a dozen vetoes this week totaling tens of millions of dollars, but the Senate never took up the cause, leaving Beacon Hill insiders scratching their heads for most of the overnight stretch.
Shortly after 6 a.m., the Senate's budget chief revealed he had no plans to pursue veto overrides and thinks the governor made the right call.
"We believe that the governor was very judicious and thoughtful in her vetoes," Rodrigues said. "We know that we're going to have some very bad news on the economic front in just the next few days, that July's [state tax revenue] numbers are going to be very bad. July is a small month, by the way, so it's concerning for all of us."
Rodrigues did not specify how much the forthcoming monthly tax revenue report will lag expectations. He said he does not see any need yet to implement additional cost controls or alter the fiscal 2025 consensus tax revenue forecast.
Legislative leaders offered mixed explanations the struggles that punctuated the end of formal lawmaking in the 2023-2024 term. Mariano -- and his deputies who spent much of the buildup publicly complaining about the Senate -- largely attributed the collapse to the approach senators took.
"We kept talking the entire way on the [ideas] that the other side was willing to engage with. Some of them, there just was no engagement," said House Ways and Means Committee Chair Aaron Michlewitz. "We kept trying and trying and trying and just ran against brick walls. Eventually, we had to stop running into the brick walls."
Asked why many big-ticket items fell short of the finish line, Spilka said, "The Senate understands these bills are very complicated."
"You can make blame, but that gets us nowhere," she said. "I believe that these are complex bills. They take a lot of time and energy, and I'm proud of the Senate for rolling up their sleeves and working hard."
Cross-branch rivalry has for decades been a defining feature on Beacon Hill, but recent results point to a deterioration in the working relationship between House and Senate Democrats.
This is now the second straight term that the branches left an economic development package unfinished after the final adjournment on Aug. 1. The final adjournment times of 9:19 a.m. in the House and 9:57 a.m. in the Senate were the second-latest since a 1995 rules reform created the even-year July 31 deadline, trailing only last term's 10:10 a.m. and 10:13 a.m.
Asked what changed in the past four years to cause that trend, Spilka replied, "That's certainly something that we will be taking a look at."
"Working around the clock happened all the time when I first came in in '96, in the late '90s and early 2000s when I was in the House," Rodrigues added. "We would work around the clock during budget week all the time. I think now, we have much less of that happening, and we have different rules as far as how to extend the time now."
"So I think it's gotten better, not worse, over my career," he said.
Mariano defended the Legislature's approach, calling it "just the nature of the business that we're in."
A reporter asked if Mariano thought crafting new laws during the overnight hours was an efficient approach.
"Sure. Why wouldn't it be?" the speaker replied. "Everyone sits across and has an ample opportunity to meet and discuss the priorities in the bill. You get to argue your points to the opposing committee members, and you usually walk away with a solution."
It's not an opinion shared unanimously.
"We may want to look at going back to a one-year session," Sen. Marc Pacheco, the retiring dean of the Senate, told his colleagues on the floor shortly after 9 a.m. Thursday. "I won't be here for that, but it's something that those of you that will may want to consider."
Michael P. Norton and Sam Doran contributed reporting.
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