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Maura Healey

Procedural battle playing out on Beacon Hill over controversial budget bill

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House Republicans blocked a controversial $3 billion supplemental budget that closes the books on fiscal year 2023 from advancing Thursday after Democrats said they reached a compromise that includes funding to respond to an influx of migrants in Massachusetts.

Republicans had warned for weeks that any deal on the budget bill could be met with opposition if it included migrant aid without major policy changes. At the end of a day-long session that included a push to move consideration of the bill into a formal session, Rep. Paul Frost, an Auburn Republican, effectively blocked its path forward for the day.

“This voluminous document, that spends nearly $3 billion of funding on a wide range of items, needs and deserves to be taken up in a formal session, where it can be carefully scrutinized, debate can occur, and members can be recorded through roll calls, none of which can occur in informal sessions that are reserved for non-controversial matters,” Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr said in a statement just before Frost made his move.

Democrats, who have a supermajority in both chambers, scheduled informal sessions for Friday morning, when more back and forth could play out in the two chambers. House budget writer Rep. Aaron Michlewitz said Democrats will again try to push the budget forward during Friday’s session.

“Every day that goes by is another day that the shelter money doesn’t get fully fully funded, it’s another day that goes by that those contracts that have been ratified don’t get fully funded,” Michlewitz said.

Beacon Hill lawmakers broke for the holidays two weeks ago without an agreement on the nearly $3.1 billion supplemental budget, kicking negotiations into informal sessions where any one legislator has the power to block advancing policy.

After weeks of closed-door negotiations, Democratic negotiators filed a compromise that included $250 million in shelter aid, nearly $400 million for 95 union contracts, and $15 million in disaster relief for communities hard hit by extreme weather this year, according to a summary.

House and Senate Democrats want to require the Healey administration to use up to $50 million to set up a state-funded overflow site for families waiting to be placed in emergency shelters. The site must be set up by Dec. 31 and last through the end of fiscal year 2024, at most, the bill said.

The compromise bars the Healey administration from using any other portion of the $250 million until the site is “secured and operational,” a move advocates said represented stronger language than originally proposed.

House Speaker Ronald Mariano said it was “incredibly disappointing” that Republicans stalled the supplemental budget.

“This bill includes $3 billion worth of critical funding for state employee raises and for a number of other pressing issues. Despite that, House Republicans are willing to jeopardize the entire package over $250 million that will be used to provide shelter for all vulnerable families in Massachusetts,” Mariano said in a statement shortly after the House adjourned for the day.

Republicans have met the funds for a struggling shelter system housing local migrant and homeless families with skepticism and called for the union contract funding to be split off and passed separately from the main proposal.

House Minority Leader Brad Jones blasted Democrats Wednesday for not producing an on-time agreement on the supplemental budget, and warned of potential pushback from Republicans. He called on both branches to reconvene in a formal session to take up the bill.

“The fact that the speaker, Senate president and governor have been unable to reach consensus on the migrant issue shows that this is too contentious an issue to take up in an informal session,” he said in a statement.

Michlewitz said the legislation kept together union contract dollars and funding to respond to the influx of migrants in Massachusetts “because that was the way the bill was structured.”

“I think we felt it was important to have it in its entirety, come out the way it was,” he said.

A proposed overflow site was one major sticking point between the House and Senate heading into negotiations.

Senators wanted to give Gov. Maura Healey more flexibility to spend $250 million in state dollars while the House proposed more requirements like mandating an overflow site for families waiting for shelter placement.

Michlewitz said House Democrats felt it “was critical” to include the overflow site in the final compromise.

“It’s a conversation between the two branches and it took two weeks to get to a resolution, but we’re here,” he said.

Still no deal on $2.8B supplemental budget that includes dollars for unions, shelters

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House and Senate lawmakers walked away from lightly attended sessions Wednesday without a deal on a supplemental budget that would close the books on the last fiscal year, and includes crucial funding for union contracts and emergency shelters.

Nearly two weeks after the Legislature finished formal law making for the year, Democratic leaders in both chambers have so far failed to find consensus on a $2.8 billion supplemental budget that includes $250 million for the besieged shelter system and nearly $400 million for public employee contracts.

Informal sessions Monday were held open for hours before legislators adjourned with no public deal and Wednesday sessions lasted only minutes in each branch.

Both the House and Senate are scheduled to meet again Thursday at 11 a.m. in informal sessions, where any one lawmaker has the power to block advancing bills.

A panel of six lawmakers is negotiating the supplemental budget, which includes money for more than 90 collective bargaining agreements and allows the state comptroller to close the books on fiscal year 2023.

But negotiators rarely talk about the status of discussions in public, often leaving residents and stakeholders in the dark until after a deal is reached or time runs out for consideration of the bill. The top House and Senate budget writers, Rep. Aaron Michlewitz and Sen. Michael Rodrigues, both Democrats, are leading the talks.

A spokesperson for House Speaker Ronald Mariano said negotiators “continue to talk and exchange proposals.” A Rodrigues spokesperson declined to comment on the status of negotiations.

Senate President Karen Spilka said she is “optimistic” a deal could be reached this week but did not dive into specifics on what the public could expect.

“I’m hopeful that we can do the whole thing,” she said of differences between House and Senate versions of the bill.

Republicans have pushed Democrats to split off the funding from the main proposal, which includes the more controversial shelter aid.

The collective bargaining agreements contain pay raises for roughly 100,000 workers across the state, legislative Republicans have said. And the failure to act on the raises “would represent a severe injustice” to public sector workers, one Senate Democrat has said.

“This is a supplemental budget that should have been passed at least a month ago and maybe more so that we could close the books on fiscal year 2023,” Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr told reporters Wednesday. “That is the first consequence of not having a document passed at this point. Along with that consequence, there are many others. And it is not a positive situation. However, we are here not merely to be critics. We’re here to try to move us all toward a solution.”

The bill also includes millions in disaster relief funding for communities hard hit by natural disasters this year and allows the state comptroller to file a statutorily required end-of-fiscal-year report that was due at the end of October.

Legislative Republicans have threatened to block the proposal if it comes up during informal sessions with language around shelter funding they do not agree with.

“I hope people realize it’s critically important that we get this done as soon as possible and that it will move forward,” Spilka said of potential Republican resistance.

House lawmakers proposed placing rigid requirements on the Healey administration’s ability to spend $250 million in shelter funding, including specifically carving out $50 million for an overflow shelter site for families waiting for shelter placement. Senators argued Gov. Maura Healey should have more flexibility with the money.

Spilka did say which path negotiators may choose to go with.

“You’ll see that soon, hopefully,” she said.

Chinatown YMCA opens as day site for migrant, homeless families waiting for shelter

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The YMCA of Greater Boston started Monday offering day programming and warm spaces for migrant and homeless families staying at a temporary overnight shelter inside the Park Plaza Transportation Building, the organization announced Wednesday.

Staff from the Wang YMCA of Chinatown said they will provide food, programming, and a “warm and welcoming environment” for migrants during the daytime hours while temporary shelter is not available at the transportation building only blocks away.

Emergency Assistance Director Lt. Gen. Scott Rice said the handful of community rooms and gym at the YMCA playing host to families during the day is “an ideal place” for people during the winter.

Families are “integrated” into all the daily rhythm of the Wang YMCA, said YMCA of Greater Boston CEO David Shapiro, but are moved around throughout the building so as to not take away from members’ experience.

Shapiro said there is no formal contract between the state and the YMCA of Greater Boston to offer daytime services to families. The organization was already talking with state officials about offering overnight shelter when the idea of daytime services came up, he said.

“We’re just doing it. It’s the right thing to do for newcomers coming here,” he said.

Rice said the temporary sleeping space set up earlier this month for up to 25 families at the transportation building is expected to stay open until Dec.7 as officials look for more “overnight overflow facilities.”

Shapiro said day services are “connected” to shelter space at the transportation building because they are near each other.

“We’ve already begun talking about where else we might be able to coordinate or not. I mean, proximity is a big part of things here that works well. So we’ll keep it open as long as the state needs us to coordinate,” he said.

But families staying in the shelter space at the transportation building must travel to one of two intake centers — either in Quincy or Allston — to recertify themselves for another night’s stay on a cot in a Massachusetts-owned conference room.

The intake center in Quincy, located at Eastern Nazarene College, is a roughly hour commute from the Wang YMCA on public transit, assuming there are no delays, or a nearly three hour walk. The Allston intake center is nearly an hour bus commute or one and half hour walk.

The use of a state building came as emergency shelters across Massachusetts reached the Healey administration’s self-imposed capacity of 7,500 families, which triggered a waitlist that sat at 91 families as of Tuesday.

Rice said there are no plans to use another state building for shelter “but that’s not out of the question ever.”

Expert: School aid funding vulnerable to ‘glitch’

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BOSTON — The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will get a more in-depth look next month at what one longtime budget watcher called a “glitch” in the school aid funding law that could lead to “a pretty serious funding crisis, particularly in low income districts.”

Noah Berger, director of the Mass. Teachers Association’s Center for Education Policy and Practice, brought up the issue with the Chapter 70 funding law at Tuesday’s board meeting and called on Gov. Maura Healey “to just fix that glitch, it’s pretty easy to do technically and it will have a very significant effect on funding for school districts.”

The problem has to do with the formula’s inflation calculations, according to Berger, who is the former longtime head of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.

“There’s a provision in the law that caps inflation adjustments in Chapter 70 at 4.5 percent. That meant that while districts were experiencing 8 percent inflation and costs [last year], the actual resources coming to them through Chapter 70 were only going up based on a 4.5 percent inflation rate. That did lead to significant funding, even at that cap,” Berger said. “But this year, the situation will be much worse.”

Depending how inflation behaves in the near future, Berger said that it could lead to unexpected decreases in the state school funding that districts receive every year.

“The inflation factor that looks like it will be used this year, and you can check with your technical people, but it looks like it’s gonna be about 1 percent and we don’t yet have the final data. If that happens, then the amount of Chapter 70 aid that districts get will be, the new aid will be less than half of what it was last year,” said Berger. “A reduction, probably, of over $300 million in new aid, which will have a pretty devastating effect on school districts.”

The $56 billion annual budget that Healey signed in August contains a $594 million, or 9.9%, increase in Chapter 70 funding as state government continues to move toward full implementation of the 2019 school funding law known as the Student Opportunity Act.

The board did not discuss Berger’s comments, but member Mary Ann Stewart brought up the idea of a “glitch” after a discussion of the board’s Budget Committee’s report on fiscal 2025 planning. She asked if it was “something we need to have a better understanding of.”

Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Jeff Riley suggested the topic be put on the board’s December meeting agenda so that Bill Bell, DESE’s chief financial officer, can go over it in greater detail.

“As was noted, again, the inflation number has come down a little bit, but that thing moves. So I think Bill doing kind of a primer on that would be a good idea for the December meeting,” Riley said.

Pressure mounts on Beacon Hill to pass bill with migrant aid, union contract dollars

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Pressure mounted Monday on Beacon Hill lawmakers to find a deal on a $2.8 billion bill that includes money for more than 90 collective bargaining agreements and strained emergency shelters across the state housing migrant and homeless families.

House Republicans pushed Democratic negotiators in a letter to split off the union dollars from the main proposal as the shelter aid continued to hold up talks that broke down at the end of formal law making last week.

There is clear consensus in both the House and Senate to fund the union contracts, most of which were agreed to months ago, Republicans wrote in the letter.

“These (collective bargaining agreements) contain pay raises for approximately 100,000 workers, many of whom have gone without a COLA or raise in quite some time, even as the cost of living in Massachusetts has continued to climb. These CBAs were negotiated in good faith, and it is imperative that the state fulfill its obligation to fund these contracts,” the letter said.

Sen. John Keenan, a Quincy Democrat, also called on negotiators to advance the collective bargaining agreement money and funding for school districts impacted by special education tuition rate increases.

“Regarding the collective bargaining agreements, the failure to act immediately on these overdue raises would represent a severe injustice to workers who serve the Commonwealth and negotiated in good faith. I respectfully implore the conference committee to report out these and other agreed upon provisions of the spending bill for consideration during an informal legislative session before Thanksgiving,” he said in a Friday letter.

Legislative conservatives made their push to advance the contract funding as hundreds of public employees rallied at the State House early in the day as both branches held their first informal sessions of the week.

SEIU Local 509 President David Foley said members of the union were “preparing to navigate winter holiday and heating bills with wages that were already insufficient last year.”

“Because the Commonwealth has continually failed to make a meaningful investment in our agencies, our members are also facing major staffing, caseload and workplace safety issues daily,” Foley said in a statement. “We’re floored by the total disregard the Legislature has shown for our agencies and our families, and all of our public-sector union siblings.”

The spending bill, which also closes out the books on fiscal year 2023, includes just over $378 million for bargaining agreements. House Republicans told the Herald last week that this may be the latest closeout spending bill in years, something that could have negative effects on the state’s financial health.

Union leaders said they want to see the funding for the contracts land on Gov. Maura Healey’s desk before Thanksgiving.

“We are not interested in excuses. We are not interested in watching legislative leaders play the blame game and point fingers at each other. We view this as everyone’s responsibility, Democrats and Republicans alike, from the first term legislators to the member with the most seniority,” AFSCME Council 93 member Kelly Abreu said in a statement.

Six lawmakers were tasked last week to negotiate a compromise bill, a development Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr said allows for “the productive bi-partisan conversation we need among the conferees, representing the members, to at least have a chance for better results than we have seen so far.”

“With bond rating agencies on Wall Street watching, there is a lot hanging in the balance, including funding for a wide array of collective bargaining agreements for thousands of state employees that were negotiated in good faith and deserve to be funded, to millions of dollars in disaster relief for communities impacted by numerous severe weather events,” Tarr said in a Monday statement.

As legislators kicked off a seven-week holiday break that will take them into the new year, advocates for the homeless and migrants held a vigil outside the State House Monday afternoon where they called on Healey to create a state-funded overflow site for families placed on a waitlist for emergency shelter.

Emergency shelters hit Healey’s self-imposed max capacity of 7,500 families earlier this month, triggering a waitlist for future placements and uncertainty among advocates about where people would sleep during cold nights.

Democratic leadership in the House proposed funding a state-run overflow site in the $2.8 billion spending bill, a proposal counterparts in the Senate disagreed with and something that has since held up talks.

Healey has called on the federal government to stand up a large-scale overflow site and moved to create a grant program for overnight shelters administered by the United Way of Massachusetts Bay.

A conference room at the state Transportation Building in Boston will house 25 families, the Healey administration said Monday.

House Speaker Ronald Mariano said families sleeping in a government building is “emblematic of the need for funding that is specifically reserved for overflow shelter options with greater capacity.”

“The House remains committed to ensuring that families in Massachusetts have somewhere safe and warm to sleep at night, and will continue to urge the Administration to identify additional overflow shelter sites going forward,” he said.

John Walsh, Democratic activist and ‘titan of Massachusetts politics,’ dies at 65

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Democratic activist John Walsh, a “titan of Massachusetts politics” who helped propel former Gov. Deval Patrick to victory, died on Monday. He was 65.

Tributes from politicos across the Bay State were pouring in on Monday, as they reminisced on him bringing new energy into the state’s Democratic Party and his historic campaign wins as a “gifted political strategist.”

“Today we lost the incredible John Walsh,” Patrick posted about his former political adviser. “His memory lives forever in the legions of us he inspired, taught and cared about.”

Walsh was involved in many winning campaigns, including U.S. Sen. Ed Markey’s campaign in 2020. He became Markey’s chief of staff.

“John Walsh was a political genius and a transformational figure in the history of Massachusetts movement building,” Markey said in a statement. “He believed in the extraordinary capacity of ordinary people. He knew that the path to justice runs through the kitchen tables, civic centers, schools, and town squares in every corner of Massachusetts and our country.”

The Globe reported that Walsh died in hospice care. He was reportedly battling stomach cancer.

“Massachusetts owes John Walsh an enormous debt of gratitude for his lifetime of service,” Gov. Maura Healey posted. “John was one of the truly good people. He was brilliant while staying relentlessly humble, optimistic, inclusive, and empathetic to all.”

Walsh’s legacy will live on in the young political campaign staff he mentored who are now running campaigns, working in government or are elected officials, said Massachusetts Democratic Party chair Steve Kerrigan.

“He also will be remembered for his unrelenting efforts to bring new energy and people into the Democratic Party,” Kerrigan added. “John knew there was power in constantly growing and evolving our Party. The status quo was never good enough for John.

“It would be easy to say we are a better state Party today because of him, but the truth is his reach went well beyond our Commonwealth,” he said. “John Walsh was a gifted political strategist, but he was an even better American, husband, father and friend.”

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley called Walsh a “titan of Massachusetts politics.”

“When embarking on something others deemed impossible or improbable, John Walsh was the person you wanted by your side,” Pressley said. “John believed unshakably in the possibility of progress and gave generously of his time, his wisdom, and his joy.”

The Massachusetts Democratic Party has established an email address, walshfamily@massdems.org, to collect memories and condolences to be shared with John’s family.