Weekly Roundup – The Way Things Are Done
Colin A. Young
STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, SEPT. 13, 2024…..”Oh the thinks you can think, if only you try.”
You can think of gooley and you can think of grupp; you can lash significant energy policy to a supp!
Watch Beacon Hill for long enough and you’ll see all kinds of things that can — but often do not — happen, and you’ll learn that “the way things are done” is not necessarily always the way things get done.
When a bundle of her priorities fell short of the finish line at the end of the usual lawmaking period — including “pre-conferenced” language overhauling the process of permitting and siting clean energy projects that are key to the state’s climate promises — Gov. Maura Healey pledged that it wouldn’t be the end of the road.
“We’re gonna continue to work on that,” the governor said about the clean energy reforms on Aug. 1 as reporters prepared obituaries for an issue that seemed doomed to perish in conference committee.
Usually, “we’re gonna continue to work on that” is the kind of response politicians give when they don’t want to admit defeat or that they don’t have a plan.
But the governor did continue to work on that, and this week she filed the permitting and siting language as a rider to her fiscal 2024 closeout budget, an end-run around the way these things are usually handled by long-entrenched Democratic supermajorities in the House and Senate.
The supp has to pass for the comptroller to close the books on the last fiscal year, so Healey is giving lawmakers the choice: either finish the job on her priority clean energy policies, or move to eliminate the idea from consideration in favor of conference committee talks that never looked particularly promising in the first place.
The House is gung-ho about Healey’s approach, and why wouldn’t it be? House point person Rep. Jeff Roy has been lobbying for weeks for a narrow bill that includes basically just the mutually-agreed-upon permitting and siting language, but talks were ongoing as Sen. Michael Barrett tried to convince Roy and the House that the expensive electric grid expansion will need to be paired with moves to ramp down the gas system in order to protect residents’ pocketbooks.
“The governor is all but killing the negotiations,” Barrett told the News Service this week. “You can’t create an altogether second track that gives one side almost everything it seeks and still claim to be interested in a true compromise.”
Barrett isn’t the only one upset by the governor’s new strategy. Climate activists said this week they are “furious” with the governor for her action, with Mothers Out Front saying that “Governor Healey and the House are choosing to prioritize corporate profits, caving to lobbying by National Grid, which stands to make large dividends off replacing gas pipes.”
Other environmental groups, particularly in western and southeastern parts of the state where decisions around solar siting have caused friction, are opposed to the permitting and siting language itself, on the grounds that it strips away local control in favor of the expediency the state wants.
Another eyebrow-raising move Healey made in the same supplemental budget bill this week has caught immediate flack from an influential labor union.
The governor said Wednesday she wants to “strategically allocate” $225 million of revenue brought in by the state’s surtax on income above $1 million to plug a budget gap. The state collected more surtax revenue than it planned to spend, as required, on education and transportation initiatives in fiscal 2024 while general tax receipts underperformed.
Healey wants to use some of the surtax overage to more-or-less retroactively fund things like early education grants, universal school meals, MassDOT operations and more, freeing up money originally paid from the General Fund or Commonwealth Transportation Fund to close the gap.
That’s not OK with the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which said its members “are vehemently opposed” to Healey’s “proposed misuse of Fair Share funds.”
“Fair Share funds must be used to build upon the existing spending for public education and transportation, and not become dollars lost on balance sheets,” MTA President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy said in a statement Friday morning. “Gov. Healey’s supplemental budget proposal defies the will of the voters and the spirit of Fair Share, which is raising money to grow our public education and transportation systems.”
No matter how long they’ve been observing Beacon Hill for, a number of experienced hands said this week they’ve never seen anything quite like what’s playing out between Treasurer Deborah Goldberg and Shannon O’Brien, the former state treasurer whom Goldberg fired this week from the Cannabis Control Commission.
It had been months since closed-door meetings between Goldberg and her hand-picked CCC chairwoman and the treasurer’s decision came without much in the way of explanation. But as they prepare to appeal the firing directly to the Supreme Judicial Court, O’Brien’s lawyers this week spread various documents among reporters and shed some new light on the messy inner workings of one of the state’s youngest agencies.
In her testimony given at one of those springtime meetings, O’Brien said the CCC is “beset by a toxic internal work culture” and “plagued with fiefdoms fighting for power and using the HR process to take control.” She says that she tried to clean up the agency, including by thinking about moving on from Goldberg ally Shawn Collins as executive director, and that it was her attempts at reform that chafed others and made her “toast” as far as Goldberg was concerned.
After two separate investigations of O’Brien and the CCC were conducted, Goldberg pointed to four things she was considering as she weighed whether to fire the chairwoman. The allegations against O’Brien were that she bullied Collins, created a hostile work environment, was evasive in some answers to investigators and “made rude and disrespectful comments, remarks, statements, and presumptions … that were or were perceived to be race-based or, at minimum, to be racially, ethnically, and culturally insensitive.”
Goldberg has refused to release a detailed report laying out her rationale for firing O’Brien, but said this week that the now-former chairwoman “committed gross misconduct and demonstrated she is unable to discharge the powers and duties of a CCC commissioner.”
Saturday marks one year since Goldberg initially suspended O’Brien, but the saga might only be getting started as it heads back to the courts, with one O’Brien lawyer raising the possibility of information being dredged up in discovery.
“Don’t forget that at the end of this, your power is gone. Your power to keep this private is gone,” O’Brien lawyer Max Stern told Goldberg in his closing arguments this June.
LOOSE ENDS: Which case do you think the justices of the august Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court are most eager to tackle: the one stemming from a dispute between state treasurers past and present, the one that deals with making public the identities of potentially high-profile johns who bought sex through a busted brothel operation, or the one related to the globally-watched murder trial that ended in a hung jury? … Are you part of the 1 percent? No, not the economic elite targeted by the Occupy movement of the early 2010s, but the 1 percent of Massachusetts sports bettors who have wagering limits imposed upon them by sportsbooks for trying to gain an advantage over the house. The Gaming Commission this week dug into that controversial topic, but regulatory action doesn’t seem imminent. … If you get health insurance through the Mass. Health Connector and see your premium go up (they’re rising about 8 percent on average), popular weight loss drugs like Ozempic might be to blame. … You’ll probably hear a different level of alarm depending upon whom you talk to, but it looks like the state’s Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund is on track for trouble by the end of the decade.
SONG OF THE WEEK: Healey to the Legislature on clean energy reforms: Maybe for you it’s not that late. But as for me, I don’t know how much longer I can wait.
-END-
09/13/2024