State House News as of August 16, 202
Weekly Roundup: “Every Day You Get One More Yard”
Colin A. Young
STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, AUG. 16, 2024…..How come the future has to take such a long, long time?
This summer has shown what Tom Petty was talking about when he sang about the wait from the time between recognizing a goal or desire and actually achieving it.
On two of the biggest, most existential questions states have to address — What kind of health care is available to citizens and where can they get it? Is there a way to power the economy with an energy source that won’t contribute to the planet’s decline? — Massachusetts has recently been dealing with the brunt of the hardest part.
It’s been delay after delay after delay on the Steward Health Care front and nothing seemed to be going the state’s way. Things may have started tilting in the state’s favor, at least if you take Gov. Maura Healey’s light-on-specifics Friday press conference statements at face value, when the governor announced that all five Steward hospitals still up for sale have new owners lined up. Steward officially had no comment on the governor’s announcement.
Though her administration had previously been telling reporters that it was up to Steward to announce next steps related to its efforts to sell off its assets, Healey said Friday that she decided to preempt the company and publicly disclose details of yet-to-be-finalized transactions “because the people of Massachusetts deserve this information.”
But the governor apparently does not feel the same way when it comes to the details of the actions that state government will have to take to “save” those hospitals. Healey, Health and Human Services Secretary Kate Walsh and Public Health Commissioner Robbie Goldstein declined Friday to get into specifics of the financing that the state is promising to get Steward’s hospitals into new hands.
Healey’s announcement said her team had been working with legislative leaders on “a fiscally responsible financing plan that includes cash advances, capital support and maximizing federal matches.” Asked Friday what exactly that meant, Healey declined to explain further. Walsh at least said that the transition funding will stretch over a three-year period, but not one of the officials at the podium Friday offered a dollar amount for the state’s commitment.
Healey did associate a dollar figure with the state’s dramatic announcement that it intends to seize St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton through its eminent domain powers. The governor said the state would offer $5 million, but Walsh quickly corrected her to say the state was actually only offering $4.5 million to Apollo Global Management for the property. If Apollo does not accept, then the state “will go forward from there with a further submission of an order, essentially to take that property,” Healey said.
And at least according to the governor, lawmakers will not get a say in the state’s exercise of its property-taking powers.
“It’s one of those things I can do,” Healey said, though she also acknowledged that she is still working out exactly where that $4.5 million would come from. She said the sum represents “the appropriate and fair market value of that property.”
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution gives governments the power to take private property regardless of the owner’s wishes so long as the government proves the property is needed for a public use and the owner is paid fairly for the property. A 5-4 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 held that government could use eminent domain powers to seize private property and, rather than keeping it for public use, hand it over to another private corporation in the name of economic development.
While that decision in Kelo v. City of New London led to a public outcry and spurred at least 44 states to take legislative action to strengthen private property rights, Massachusetts was not one of them.
The state does not plan to hold onto St. Elizabeth’s, and it seems likely there will have to be a similar transaction to get the hospital into the hands of buyer Boston Medical Center. That transaction was not addressed Friday by either Healey or Walsh, who worked 13 years as president and CEO of BMC before she joined Healey’s Cabinet last year.
More details could emerge early next week. A Steward lawyer said in U.S. Bankruptcy Court on Friday that the company hopes to be “reporting a favorable result on signing the asset purchase agreements for Massachusetts on Monday.” But Massachusetts will still be waiting, possibly for “a few weeks,” before anything is finalized, Healey said Friday.
But still, Healey took something of a victory lap Friday on her goal to get Steward out of Massachusetts. “Effectively they’re out of the state with what we’re announcing today,” she said.
The governor and others took similar victory laps this week on the clean energy front. For one, there was a press conference in Mattapan to celebrate that the Fairmount Line will be served by electric, rather than diesel, trains…maybe by 2028. Healey mentioned that the idea had been talked about for years “but we’re doing it, we’re finally doing it.”
Well, will be doing it later this decade.
It’s a similar story for offshore wind, a storyline that shares some similarities with the Steward situation. Elected officials swear there is a brighter future if they can only get an antagonist (fossil fuel interests or Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, take your pick) out of the way, numerous delays have repeatedly pushed the promise of that brighter future further away, state government has appeared powerless to address some of the shifts, and exactly what it’s going to cost Bay Staters to get to where state government says it needs to go is unclear.
“As the offshore wind industry grows and expands, so does Massachusetts’ port infrastructure,” Healey said this week as the state announced a $45 million expansion of an offshore wind staging and deployment facility in New Bedford.
But the offshore wind industry isn’t exactly growing here, at least not actively. The one and only project that Massachusetts has finalized since a 2016 law jumpstarted the state’s offshore wind efforts is offline and currently being investigated by federal authorities following the catastrophic failure of one of its turbine blades.
And the Healey administration last week chose to delay its selection of the next round of projects. Only one project submitted for the state’s consideration could conceivably come online this decade, the others said they would need until at least 2030 or 2031.
But hey, by then maybe there will be battery-operated trains running on the Fairmount Line.
ODDS & ENDS: Legislative Democrats made good on their pledge to keep working on all the loose ends from the underwhelming July 31 end of formal sessions, this week agreeing to a compromise maternal health bill and quickly moving it to the governor’s desk. That’s one conference committee down, still eight more to go … Don’t let anyone tell you that no work gets done at the State House in August. The House and Senate chambers were hubs of activity this week, just not much involving reps or senators. Workers were busy installing new tally boards, voting buttons and speakers in the House while the Senate Chamber this week hosted a theatrical production. And directly above the Senate, on the building’s iconic gold dome and roof, other workers drilled “exploratory” holes as part of the early phase of a dome restoration project … Bay State Democrats got a little preview of next week’s Democratic National Convention when VP nominee Tim Walz made a fundraising stop in Boston on Wednesday. While most of America is still getting to know the Minnesota guv, he said he and Maura Healey forged a bond doing bumper car battle in Atlantic City.
SONG OF THE WEEK: Until things change, keep working for the future like some kind of mystic jewel.
-END-
08/16/2024