Passing $61.4 bil budget, Senate plans to 'go forward and we'll see'
The Senate voted 38-2 on a roughly $61.4 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2026, capping off three days of deliberations in which senators tacked on tens of millions of additional dollars and wove in a handful of major policy riders like prescription drug price controls and liquor license reforms.
Republican Sens. Kelly Dooner of Taunton and Ryan Fattman of Sutton cast the two no votes.
Elected officials on Beacon Hill for months have been voicing concerns about potential budgetary upheaval as a result of federal funding rollbacks. Partway through the Senate's deliberations, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a package that would stanch hundreds of millions of dollars per year from flowing to various state programs.
Yet the Senate, like the House did last month, opted to proceed on a path that mostly mirrored the typical approach.
The final Senate budget increases state spending more than 6% over the version Gov. Maura Healey signed last summer, more than twice the rate of growth in the prior year. It's built on revenue — and federal reimbursement — forecasts crafted in January, before congressional Republicans made significant progress on their attempted spending cuts.
Senate budget chief Michael Rodrigues said at the outset of debate that lawmakers here would not 'freeze in place' waiting to see what happened in Washington, D.C. Soon after the U.S. House muscled through its sweeping package of tax cuts and spending reduction, Rodrigues said he had not yet 'had a chance to analyze it.'
After the final vote Thursday evening, Senate President Karen Spilka told the News Service she felt it made sense not to change the chamber's spending plan at this point because 'there's so much uncertainty.'
'It's impossible to build a budget on data and information that we have no idea what it is or what it means, because it's not stable — it changes by the hour, forget about day, week, month or more,' she said. 'We have to build a budget. What do we do, what do we cut without knowing what it is?'
The Senate added $81.1 million to the budget through amendments, mostly in the form of local earmarks, according to a Spilka aide. That pushed the final bottom line to about $61.4 billion, a bit lower than the House's nearly $61.5 billion plan.
Rodrigues said most of the growth in spending is on non-discretionary areas. Nearly two-thirds of the increase is attributable to higher caseloads at MassHealth, he said.
'There's really little discretion we have there, unless we want to take people off the rolls of MassHealth,' he told the News Service. 'We looked at, literally lifted every rock and looked under every mattress to try to find any sort of savings we could.'
Sen. Patricia Jehlen said Thursday that she views the Senate-approved spending plan as 'an austerity budget.'
'It does not meet the needs of our commonwealth; it is the best we can do with the resources we have,' she said.
Fiscal year 2026 begins July 1, but Massachusetts is unlikely to have a budget in place by then. House and Senate Democrats for years have felt comfortable stretching their private negotiations into the next fiscal year and keeping state government funded with holdover budgets, at times producing some of the latest annual budgets in the nation.
The last time a governor signed an annual state budget into law before the start of the fiscal year was in 2010.
Lawmakers on the budget conference committee will have a long list of points to deliberate, including the amount of one-time revenue redirection, how much money to provide to the MBTA as well as other transportation and education initiatives funded by the surtax, the specifics of regulating broker's fees, and whether to pause admissions reforms at vocational and technical schools.
The Senate tacked several substantial policy measures onto the conference committee agenda. One amendment the Senate adopted Wednesday would allow state health care regulators to cap prices for some medications, an idea that proponents say will help reduce quickly accelerating prescription drug spending but opponents warn will wreak economic harm.
Another provision adopted Thursday as part of a larger amendment bundle would overhaul the process by which municipalities petition for additional liquor licenses and give cities and towns greater control over the number of licenses available.
The Senate also added language calling on the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education by June 30, 2026 to recommend improvements to the foundation budget formula, which dictates aid that municipalities receive for K-12 education and how many of their own dollars communities need to contribute.
Despite the uncertainty fueled by Washington, D.C., Spilka and Rodrigues said they do not expect the imminent conference committee negotiations to play out much differently than usual.
Asked if she'd be comfortable with the panel slashing spending during its talks if Congress finalizes cuts, Spilka replied, 'We'll have to see how it goes.'
'Both branches have produced solid, responsible budgets, so I think from there they can go forward and we'll see,' she said.
'We'll deal with the facts presented to us, not with rumor or assumption,' Rodrigues added. 'It has to be the facts. The budget that we engrossed tonight is based upon the facts as we know it today.'
Senators pushed most of the amendments filed by Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr to the final day of deliberations. Tarr, as is often the case, deployed a series of props to argue in favor of some of his proposals. This year's theatrics included an aide wearing a 'Backpack of Budget Burden,' who attempted to climb a ladder on the Senate floor adorned with cardboard printouts declaring the rungs representative of health care costs and taxes.
After about an hour of debate, the Senate voted 34-5 to reject a Tarr measure that would have allowed cities and towns to petition the state for relief from the mandatory zoning reforms under the MBTA Communities Act if they could demonstrate an inability to fulfill drinking water, wastewater, transportation or environmental requirements as a result of compliance.
'We are not saying we believe there shouldn't be more housing in the commonwealth. We understand that we're at least 200,000 units short. We understand that we have to take bold and decisive action. We understand that our future hinges on being able to build that housing,' Tarr said. 'But the question is, how do we best do that, how do we do it with protecting due process, how do we do it so that we're not going out on a fool's errand and creating a zoning district where housing cannot be supported with the resources it needs?
Democrats argued that an appeal process would allow resisting communities to avoid zoning reforms intended to spur much-needed housing production.
[Colin A. Young contributed reporting.]
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
13 minutes ago
- The Hill
Mike Collins rolls out 159-county organization in Georgia Senate bid
Rep. Mike Collins's (R-Ga.) campaign is rolling out a grassroots organization in all of Georgia's 159 counties in support of his Senate bid as he vies for the GOP nod to take on Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.). The news of the 159-county organization, which was first shared with The Hill, includes 413 county captains across the state and is aimed at turning out low-propensity voters. The campaign noted the last few Republicans to have county-level mobilization campaigns who were successful in statewide reelection bids were President Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R). In a press release, the Collins campaign touted the initiative's creation, noting the Georgia Republican had only been in the race for two weeks, and calling it 'a testament to the appeal of Collins' message, authentic brand, and his team's experience in the state.' The Collins campaign noted it included leaders who had previously served on Trump's and Kemp's county-level mobilization efforts. Collins is vying against Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) and former football coach Derek Dooley, seen as Kemp's preferred candidate, for the Republican nomination to challenge Ossoff next year. Collins has gained several endorsements from his congressional delegation in addition to state legislative leaders, which include some of Kemp's allies. Meanwhile, Carter has a financial edge so far with more cash on hand than Collins. Carter ended the latest quarter with $4 million in the bank while Collins, who's been in the race for several weeks, ended the last quarter with $1 million. Carter loaned himself $2 million in the last quarter as he puts some of his own financial resources into the race. Dooley, meanwhile, enjoys connections to Kemp's political orbit. Collins and Carter have both hammered the former football coach hard since Dooley announced, setting up what's expected to be a hotly contested primary.
The Hill
13 minutes ago
- The Hill
On gerrymandering, Democrats should fight fire with fire
If you want to understand how Congress became so polarized, look no further than Texas. Egged on by President Trump, Gov. Greg Abbot (R) and Republican leaders in the state are trying to engage in mid-decade redistricting, bucking the norm of waiting until the conclusion of the census every 10 years to redraw congressional maps to accommodate population changes. Both Democrats and Republicans have weaponized gerrymandering over the years. But only Texas Republicans have tried twice — in 2003 and now — to exercise the nuclear option of mid-decade redrawing of districts twice. I understand the motivations of these Republicans — and the desire of Democrats to take revenge. In 2012, I chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and we had a score to settle with Republicans for eliminating six Democratic seats in Texas in their 2003 mid-decade assault. We might have tried to persuade Democratic governors and legislators to strike earlier than the typical redrawing of maps after the 2010 census, but we decided not to retaliate against Republican rule-breaking with rule-breaking of our own. Instead, we waited for the regular process to take place ahead of the 2012 election. Once the decennial census concluded, we quickly realized that our best opportunity to pick up more seats was in Illinois, where the House delegation had eight Democrats and 11 Republicans. Gov. Pat Quinn and Democratic leaders in the statehouse became political Picassos, redrawing districts to create three more Democratic seats after the 2012 elections. That was not a one-off. Both parties have regularly engaged in designing their own abstract district art. Pennsylvania's old Seventh District — designed in 2011 to protect Republican incumbent Rep. Patrick Meehan — was famously called ' Goofy kicking Donald Duck ' for its bizarre resemblance to the Disney characters. In 2000, Arizona created a district that snaked oddly along the Colorado River so as to include the Hopi Reservation but not the surrounding Navajo Reservation, circumventing longstanding tensions between the two tribes. In 2022, a plan favored by Democrats in New York extended my former Third Congressional District across several bridges and the Long Island Sound, into the Bronx. But that gerrymandering plan backfired, as a state judge struck it down. The result of this map madness is that the moderate, competitive districts have shriveled, while the number of highly partisan districts has skyrocketed. When I first entered Congress in 2001, there were 29 districts with a partisan voting index within a range of four points, reliably swinging between a two-point Republican or Democratic advantage, depending on national trends. In other words, they were toss-ups, and the incumbents needed crossover voters to win reelection. Bipartisanship wasn't a fuzzy goal — it was an urgent strategic imperative. Today, the number of those districts is just 16. Most of the other districts have been drawn to be more red or blue. That means that many House members don't lay awake at night fretting about being defeated in the general election by someone in the other party. Instead, they lay awake thinking about being defeated by a fringe, extreme candidate in their next primary. The political gravity of Congress has shifted. Our system forces legislators to the ideological extremes, when most Americans fall closer to the center. That's without even accounting for the trend of partisan residential sorting, as Americans increasingly live with ideologically likeminded neighbors. We've divided ourselves into Fox News and MSNBC districts, where contradicting views are rarely found on any given block. Of course, some states have attempted redistricting reforms. California and Arizona adopted independent commissions. New York has a bipartisan redistricting commission that places guardrails on just how much Democrats can gerrymander. And that's part of the problem Democrats face: Republicans in Texas and elsewhere play to win by breaking the rules, while in Democratic controlled states, leaders often play to protect the rules, even when it costs them. Over the years, many have argued that Democrats need to fight fire with fire. Instead, Democrats have historically focused on writing a fair fire code even as arson consumes American bipartisanship. But this new Texas mid-decade redistricting push seems to have finally changed the Democratic mindset. Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, Kathy Hochul of New York and JB Pritzker of Illinois are teasing mutual assured gerrymandering destruction by threatening mid-decade redistricting in their own states if Texas Republicans go through with their plan. Each of these efforts faces an uphill legal climb, however, given that voters in two of those three states outlawed such practices. Democrats have realized that patiently waiting until the next redistricting cycle is not an option. Congressional majorities aren't won on a moral high ground but on the streets. Only when Republican members of Congress from New York, California and Illinois see their seats turn blue will national GOP leaders recognize that, in gerrymandering, 'an eye for an eye' makes the whole political system blind. And so to restore bipartisanship in the long run, Democrats may need to play by Texas Republican rules.
Axios
13 minutes ago
- Axios
Mayes hints at possible legal action if Corporation Commission repeals renewable energy mandate
Attorney General Kris Mayes signaled she might take the Corporation Commission to court if it dismantles renewable energy standards she helped create nearly 20 years ago. Why it matters: The future of Arizona's renewable energy mandate is on the line. The big picture: The commission last year instructed staff to draft rules that would repeal its renewable energy standards, saying they're unnecessary and appear to drive up costs. The Renewable Energy Standard and Tariff (REST) Rules require affected utilities to get 15% of the electricity they provide from renewable sources. Staff in late July issued a formal proposal to repeal the standards. Driving the news: Mayes on Monday sent a letter to the commission warning that repealing REST "isn't just nonsensical; it's unlawful." REST isn't perfect, the AG concedes, and she would "wholeheartedly support" efforts to modernize the rules, but she opposes outright repeal. A spokesperson for Mayes declined to comment on whether she'll sue the commission if it votes to repeal the standards. Flashback: Mayes was a Republican member of the commission — she's now a Democrat — when it passed the REST rules in 2006. She was part of the 4-1 majority that voted for the standards. Zoom in: A third-party economic analysis performed for the commission found that REST repeal "could marginally reduce monthly residential electric bills" by $1-$2 and result in minor administrative cost savings for utilities. But renewable energy-related costs for some utility customers would continue due to long-term financial obligations. And repeal would have indirect costs including "reduced transparency, regulatory certainty and potentially slower renewable energy adoption," the analysis said. Between the lines: Mayes argued in her letter that REST helps keep customer rates lower for millions of Arizonans and creates jobs in the renewable energy sector. She said rate-making decisions must legally be based on "high-quality evidence, not speculation and conjecture." "In addition to being bad policy, repealing the REST Rules as proposed here is an unlawful abdication of the Commission's duty to set just and reasonable rates," she wrote. The other side: Commission chair Kevin Thompson told Axios he's not surprised Mayes is "rattling her saber, considering she played a pivotal part in implementing this gravy train that has cost ratepayers billions of dollars." He said his focus is on protecting ratepayers and not pushing "costly ideological mandates." Commission vice chair Nick Myers said he's unconcerned about a lawsuit if the commission repeals REST. "We'll let her do what she thinks she needs to do, and if she has legal grounds, bring them up," he said. Reality check: Renewable energy accounts for about 19% of the energy that Arizona Public Service, the state's largest utility, provides its electric retail customers, the company tells Axios. What's next: The commission will vote at a Thursday meeting on whether to instruct staff to begin the repeal process.
