Lawmakers at the Presidential Palace will return to work tomorrow to begin formal legislative sessions. GBH State House reporter Mike DeHaan joins host Aaron Schachter at morning edition To review what the legislature aspires to achieve this year.
Aaron Schachter: So, legislators will be back to work tomorrow, but are they back in business at State House? Is the building open?
Mike DeHaan: not yet. It is really the only state or county capital in the country, possibly on the continent, that is still closed to the public, according to some reports. There is a plan in place to bring back employees, bring back lawmakers, open these offices and eventually open them to the public. But, with Omicron rising, as with any kind of plan in the hands of the legislature, it will be a slow plan. So, I don’t expect to see the doors open any time soon.
Schachter: Well, there is still some work to be done. Before the holiday, Governor Baker signed a bill that would distribute a portion of the federal ARPA money, while keeping about half, just over $2.3 billion, for future use. Do we know yet if lawmakers intend to spend any of that money at this hearing?
Dehan: They can very well. I think that was really the intention to put the federal funding bill for ARPA together in the first half of the session, and now that’s the second half of the two-year cycle. So there could be an intention to do another big spending bill. I think one of the questions here now is, do they put it in the annual state budget, which keeps the state running, funds all the agencies, departments, public sector workers, things like that. Are they just gaining a very large budget, including all that one-off federal money? Or, do they separate it — is it just the budget with state money and they make a federal spending bill?
But it’s really important because if they put things on budget in the budgeting process, it can slow things down. It can be long as we’ve seen these things go before. There can be quite a bit of excitement about another spending bill that will occur after the budget. Then we look at the spring budget cycle and then another spending bill, probably in the summer, which will be a lot for these guys here.
You know, there is a narrow set of priorities, and this kind of spending will occupy a lot of things, perhaps at the expense of other policies. Maybe they can chew gum and walk at the same time.
Schachter: You just said the word we’re looking for: priorities. What then? What are the priorities that will be raised in the second half of the session?
Dehan: If you turn to other types of no-spending priorities, and what laws and policies the legislature might want to pass, you’re looking at two different houses with very different ideas. There are some big problems in the world, like healthcare reform and improving healthcare in general, on the advice of many languages here at Beacon Hill.
But if you look at what the Senate wants to do, which is a massive increase in mental health services, behavioral health, the Senate wants to get insurance companies to cover a lot of mental health services, things like annual checkups, things like that we don’t have in the state so far. This aligns slightly with what Governor Baker has in mind. However, the House of Representatives hasn’t paid much attention to whether or not they approve of this kind of thing. House Speaker Mariano said he wanted to pass a bill to stabilize local and community hospitals, but he never thought about the mental health care aspect of this.
We can see Bill do all of that or we can see them kind of compete with each other and not get on the same page and then nothing happens. I think you see that the priorities of the House and Senate have been very different outside of COVID – which they have been very consistent with. Outside of that, their policy preferences were completely different.
“You look at two different rooms with very different ideas.”
-Mike DeHaan, GBH State House reporter
Schachter: What are the other big issues?
Dehan: I think sports betting is definitely a thing that will happen. This is something the House of Representatives really wants to do. The Senate doesn’t seem to have any interest – they’re kind of swaying about what their plan for that would be.
You know, in all this time and all these hearings and process, it’s about two rooms that might have radically different bills and different plans, and then they try to put them together and come to a compromise very late in the day, usually within days or hours of the end of their sessions. And this is where things tend to fall apart — they put it off, and then the two chambers, controlled by the Democrats, don’t get along head-on and can’t make these compromises increasingly happen.
Schachter: What is the pressure this year to accomplish?
Dehan: Really, pressure is that spending; The pressure is sports betting from these outside industries. [They] They say, what we need to do is – other countries have certainly already legalized this, and other countries are doing [it, and] Massachusetts may be seen as lagging behind.