With school vacation week behind us, state lawmakers are looking at tackling a $425 million shelter proposal that has system reforms and differences between versions passed by the House and Senate which will need reconciliation. But there is some urgency to passage, as the state's emergency family shelters ran out of funding a few weeks back. Colin Young , deputy editor at the State House News Service, explains what we should expect to see happen this week before the bill lands on Governor Maura Healey's desk.
Colin Young, SHNS: Yeah, so right now the House and Senate have to reconcile the differences. We expect that that's happening between really a small group of lawmakers at the very top of each chamber. And we're likely to see this get resolved with a simple amendment.
They'll come to an agreement over a compromise version and fairly swiftly whisk it through each branch to get it to the governor's desk. But it is just, you know, one of these other things that they have to take care of while the legislature is still trying to really get going for the new term.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: And speaking of the governor, Healey's 2024 housing law made some changes to policy and authorized borrowing with a goal of turning around the state's housing production crisis. Of course, Massachusetts doesn't have a reputation for being an easy place to find a home. A recently released study suggests lawmakers will need to make additional changes to state law before Healey's housing law has an impact. What did that study find?
Yeah, this study from the Pioneer Institute was based on conversations and interviews with planners, developers, municipal and state officials and others. And basically, it said the process to permit housing production in Massachusetts takes too long. It's too complicated, and there's not enough certainty in how those decisions are actually made. So, this group suggested that state lawmakers might want to think about things like limiting how much is required to be reviewed at the outset of a project, shortening the time frame for review, or the time between public hearings requiring abutters who might object to a project to do so in a certain way, so that all projects might be treated the same. A lot of this, of course, would require action from the Legislature.
And that lawmaking process in the state is not known as zippy and quick. Leaders in the Massachusetts House have already signaled that they're looking to avoid that logjam of bills that lawmakers see at the end of the session in recent years. They want to change the lawmaking timeline and move bills at a good clip now. Is House Speaker Ron Mariano taking a page, in a way, from the federal government and speeding up lawmaking? What's likely to change?
There's an interesting dynamic there where [it's] sort of more like the federal government under the proposal that Mariano and the House are putting out. The timeline would be based on each individual bill more so than the calendar itself. So, one thing the House is proposing is a 60-day deadline for action. [That means] once a committee gives a bill its public hearing, that 60-day clock would start for that bill, and you'd sort of have these deadlines coming up in a rolling fashion throughout the term, which hopefully would start to spur more action and spread it out more evenly. Of course, it remains to be seen whether that could just sort of change where things get caught up in the process and when and where we have logjams.
I'm thinking that's sort of like competitive runners who closely monitor finish times, of course, but their pace along the way to getting there is of utmost importance. So, is that sort of what Speaker Mariano is thinking here and in sort of not just blazing through all the bills in one sprint?
Yeah, there's another thing here that I think the House is trying to avoid, or at least steer away from, which is what we've seen in the last couple of sessions when everything gets left until the very final deadline, and then it becomes so much harder to actually get anything done because they've left all of the biggest decisions to the very end.
So, Mariano expressed a desire to move away from these giant omnibus bills that have become popular in recent years, and hopefully, by giving bills these rolling deadlines, they can get some of these really consequential issues off of their plate to clear room for all of the other ones coming down the pike.
Those omnibus bills are ones that just have everything but the kitchen sink thrown into them. Diverse and unrelated topics?
Exactly. And it makes it hard for lawmakers to really express their opinions on issues, because when a bill has 12 different policy ideas in it a rep or senator might agree with 9 or 10 of them, but not agree with 2 or 3, and has to vote yes or no on the whole thing.
And so, this is [in] a proposal that we've heard from Mariano. What if lawmakers don't agree on pressing the gas pedal on lawmaking? Is there anything at stake?
Well, lawmakers in the House and Senate haven't been able to actually agree on new sets of these joint rules since 2019. So, there is that definite possibility that that happens again this term. And we're just left with the status quo.
