After hours of debate, a $3 billion supplement to the main $56 billion budget for fiscal year 2024 remained unresolved as the statehouse emptied for the Thanksgiving holiday and the end of the formal session until January.
“Clearly, we have some serious problems- I mean, very diverse opinions between the House and the Senate, which we could not come to an agreement when midnight struck," Smitty Pignatelli told WAMC. "So, I'm not sure what's going to happen.”
Democrat Pignatelli is the dean of the Berkshire legislative delegation, and represents the region’s 3rd House district, which comprises the southern portion of the county. In the face of the state’s emergency shelter system being pushed to its limits by a new influx of migrants, the administration of first-term Democratic Governor Maura Healey has stressed the need for the spending package to go through. Despite this, Pignatelli says major differences between the legislative chambers prevailed.
“I think the frustration that the House leadership itself – I can't speak for the Senate, obviously – but the frustration the House leadership has is they've been asking the administration for a plan and a cost estimate, of which we have none," he said. "So, there's been talks of $250 million with no plan in sight. And I think that's this concern that we have and the fear that we have that with no federal governmental support this could bankrupt the state of Massachusetts. There is rumors it could be close to a billion dollars. That's an awful lot of money. And when you look at the last three of the last four months, our revenues have failed to meet projections. I don't think we're ready to sign off on a bottomless pit of taking care of folks from other countries without a plan from the administration.”
Pignatelli says the House offered a conditional path forward — one that his colleagues in the Senate rejected.
“What we were trying to do is commit $50 million, but only give the administration $50 million until they came up with a plan within 30 days," he told WAMC. "The Senate disagreed with us. They wanted to give her the money and say take your time figure it out. I think that's a poor approach. It's fiscally irresponsible, and I think the position the House took is much wiser, and smarter for us going forward.”
The frustration of the extended, fruitless debate to cap the formal session was apparent in the Senate as well.
“We were there to 1 a.m., and then around 12:45 a.m., we got an announcement that a conference committee was going to be appointed for the budget instead of us taking a vote and that there wouldn't be any further roll calls, which felt like a lot of effort and a lot of work for something that I knew was going to be frustrating," Democratic State Senator Paul Mark of the Berkshire, Franklin, Hampden, and Hampshire District told WAMC. “What I'm seeing is that the governor's administration is asking for money, but don't seem to have a concrete plan. And that is certainly bothering both members of the House and members of the Senate.”
Mark broke down the Senate’s approach to the problem.
“The Senate, in the version that we passed, focused on a working group that would try to figure out, so what are we going to do about this?" he explained. "We're hitting our capacity limit, we don't want to end the right to shelter for families and children that exists in our state and has existed in the state since the 1980s, but we also need some kind of a plan that, as we hit this cap, what are we going to do? How are we going to find overflow? And also, what about when the tab gets to be $1 billion? $2 billion? $3 billion? What are we going to do in the long term in addition to just asking the federal government to step in and take care of a problem they've largely created themselves?”
Mark says that while the debate between House and Senate was difficult and unproductive, the distance between the two bodies is tantalizingly close to being bridged.
“It feels minimal, the differences, in the big picture, but, boy, the differences- The devil can be in the details sometime, and there seems to be a surprising amount of distance on the leadership end between the House and between the Senate on what's the best way forward,” he said.
Mark says that both chambers seem to want oversight over the Healey administration’s plan.
“Personally, I'm certainly in support of more concrete plans, and certainly not in favor of some kind of a blank check because that's just not going to be sustainable," he told WAMC. "It's not going to be workable. But in Massachusetts, again, we're in this unique situation where you're guaranteed shelter if you're here, regardless of how long you've lived in the state, regardless of what your original origin is, anything like that, and I haven’t heard from anyone in a serious manner talk of, we want to end that. And so, it's important to make sure that we stay true to our ideals. I heard some of my colleagues talking, if Massachusetts ends that, the signal that is sent to the rest of the country is, this is not a good idea. And I don't think that as a leader, I don't think that's the position Massachusetts wants to be in.”
If the two bodies can’t reconcile their differences before the session fully comes to a close on January 2nd, they will have to start from scratch on the entire $3 billion supplemental budget.
