Senate Begins Look At Economic Development Bill
With the state budget now on the governor’s desk, the Senate has turned its attention to the economic development bill written in the House, reviewing the far-ranging proposal during a committee hearing.
“There is a lot to dissect,” Sen. Brian Joyce, chairman of the Senate Committee on Bonding, Capital Expenditures and State Assets, told the News Service after the hearing Monday morning.
Joyce said the committee’s review would entail “a couple of weeks’ worth of work” and envisioned “one or two modest suggestions for improvement” to what he said was a bill with “very, very good components.”
With formal sessions due to end for the year July 31, time may represent one of the bill’s biggest obstacles. If the House and Senate bills end up featuring significant differences, lawmakers will have little time to resolve them.
The legislation crafted by Rep. Joseph Wagner, D-Chicopee, sailed through the House in May, accompanied by an open letter from Speaker Robert DeLeo to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, touting the bill’s “talent pipeline” and urging the entrepreneur to come back to Massachusetts, where he founded Facebook as a Harvard University student in 2004. Neither DeLeo nor Wagner spoke at the Senate hearing.
“Although the economy is improving, I think there are ways we can hopefully improve upon it,” DeLeo said. He said that when he last spoke to Senate President Therese Murray she told him “as soon as” the budget is finished the Senate would take up the economic development bill.
Monday’s hearing was the Senate’s first public look at the bill. Joyce said it had “extraordinary broad-based support from the business community,” but also said he would take note of concerns raised by Rep. Denise Provost, D-Somerville, about the lack of oversight contained in a provision that would allow municipalities to borrow funds using local land values as leverage.
“There’s always a temptation I think to approve any program that appears to be cost free,” said Provost, who warned that securing loans with local property values would make cities and towns “vulnerable to economic downturns and over-optimistic calculations.”
While voicing support for the rest of the bill, including other debt-financing provisions, Provost also spoke out against a provision that would give developers an automatic two-year extension of permits, allowing them to put off the actual start of construction.
“We have a landowner [in Assembly Square, Somerville] that has been sitting on land, which it got permitted and, you know, promised to develop years ago,” said Provost. “Obviously if that landowner continues to sit on the undeveloped land, the tax revenues are not going to come in as anticipated.”
Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Greg Bialecki also broadly supported the bill but said tax incentives should go through a new vetting process.
“What we’re asking here is for improvements and expansions of the infrastructure programs that have proven themselves best at leveraging private investment,” Bialecki said.
Bialecki said the bill’s passage would help MassDevelopment provide expanded assistance to manufacturers, enable matching investments from Mass. Technology Collaborative for research and development initiatives, and establish a “creative economy network.”
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