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Massachusetts Legislature Approves Transportation Earmarks

Money

The Massachusetts Legislature has approved a roughly $1.4 billion transportation bond bill loaded with election year earmarks. WAMC’S Paul  Tuthill reports.

The bill authorizes the state to borrow for major state highway and public transit projects, along with more than 200 earmarked local transportation projects in every region of the state.

The authorization to borrow does not guarantee that all of the projects will ultimately be built. Those decisions will be made by state officials in the future.

The bill was approved late Tuesday night in the closing hours of the two-year legislative session.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.