The plan, passed just before midnight Thursday, includes no tax increases or reductions.
The Massachusetts Senate approved its $30.5 billion budget late Thursday. By Kyle Cheney
BOSTON — Furiously racing to squeeze deliberations into a two-day span, the Senate passed a $30.5 billion budget Thursday, just before the clock struck midnight, setting up a negotiation with the House over the annual spending document due to take effect on July 1.
"We have completed another budget, but it has been an extremely difficult budget, and while we've acted cautiously, I know we would all like to have done more," Senate President Therese Murray said, shortly before 11:30 p.m. on Thursday night. Murray described as "extremely painful" presiding over a session in which she gaveled "no, no, no on things that I've built up over the years."
The Senate budget, like the House's passed last month, includes no tax increases or reductions, and would drastically reduce the heavy use of non-recurring revenues, a practice that has left budget writers to solve large gaps year after year. The plan relies on $440 million in onetime revenue, down from $1.75 billion in the current fiscal year, according to Ways and Means Chair Stephen Brewer (D-Barre).
While midyear spending, which has been heavy this year, looms as a possibility next fiscal year, the Senate plan features the smallest year-over-year increase in state spending in the past decade, Brewer said.
Stephen Brewer, D-Barre.Brewer hailed the budget's inclusion of a $61 million increase in special education funds and $500,000 in funds for communities that host Department of Correction facilities.
The Senate budget includes a revised version of a House plan to curb municipal health costs, in part by curtailing the collective bargaining rights of local unions. By adopting that plan, the Senate virtually assured that Gov. Deval Patrick will receive a budget that diminishes the bargaining power of municipal workers, one favored by city and town leaders who say they must tackle the growing cost of municipal health care that has swallowed up investments in education and public safety.
Like the House and the governor's proposed budgets, the Senate would reduce local aid to cities and towns by $65 million and the plan counts on hundreds of millions of dollars in avoided cost increases in Medicaid, a massive program featuring costs and enrollment demands that have surged in recent years.
The proposal also depends on $30 million saved through reform of homeless shelter programs and tens of millions of dollars in savings through hiring more state attorneys to act as defense counsel for the indigent, shifting the caseload away from private attorneys and capping their annual workload at 1,400 billable hours per attorney.
The Senate budget relies on $209 million from the state rainy day fund. With tax collections this fiscal year running more than $1.9 billion ahead of the same period in fiscal 2010, Brewer said rebuilding the balance in that fund, to prepare for the next recession, was one of his top priorities.
Senators raced through their budget process in two days of debate, whipping through hundreds of amendments in rapid-fire succession. In addition, of the 599 amendments filed at the start of the process, members withdrew more than 120. Senators also resumed their yearly "bundling" process in which dozens of amendments are grouped together into "yes" piles and "no" piles and dispatched within a single motion, with no explanation or debate. About 60 amendments were addressed in bundles on Thursday.
Over the two days of debate, only 25 amendments featured debate from members with opposing views on an issue, and about half of those were brief back-and-forth exchanges. The two days featured
21 roll call votes on amendments. The budget itself passed on a voice vote.
"We appreciate the fairness you have shown and the tremendous spirit of public service you have invigorated in this chamber," Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr (R-Gloucester) said to Murray after the vote.
Tarr called the budget debate a "vigorous, passionate exchange of ideas" that he said "fulfilled" the promise of democracy.
Immediately prior to passing the budget and delivering nearly 40 minutes of congratulatory speeches, senators tacked on a lengthy, redrafted amendment without explanation dealing with punishment for employers who hire illegal immigrants. There was no debate or discussion of the proposal.
Highlights from debate on amendments
Sen. Michael M. Knapik, R-Westfield • MEMORIAL DAY: Despite an impassioned speech by Sen. Michael Knapik about what he sees as diminished respect for Memorial Day, senators rejected a proposal that would have forced stores to stay closed on Memorial Day until noon. Knapik read from a slew of ads -- from furniture stores to apparel shops -- offering Memorial Day sales.
"There's an offensive quality to the Memorial Day mattress sale," Knapik said. "Is there a better way that Massachusetts, which leads the way in its treatment of veterans, could take this day, bring it back to the fundamentals that really made Memorial Day a day to remember when we were young?" The amendment failed on a voice vote without response to Knapik's comments from other members.
• NURSING HOME BEDS: In their final roll call of the budget debate, senators voted down a proposal by Sen. Mark Montigny to require nursing homes to hold beds for residents who are transferred to a hospital for emergency care. Montigny said the budget passed by the Senate was the first in "years" to lack any provisions dealing with so-called bed holds. The result, he said, would be that any time a nursing home resident is sent to the hospital, he or she may lose access to the nursing facility. "I've listened to passionate senators stand within a tightly balanced budget and advocate for things that are important to them, but in my estimation I have yet to hear an argument or amendment more important than this," Motigny said. "This is the real world."
Sen. Brewer argued that funds for important programs had been exhausted. "Right now, the well is pretty much dry," he said. "I know how you care about these issues. Gruesome is not just a political word I pulled out for a speech my friends. It is a reality. There are some real challenges out there, my friends. I do not do this with a light heart." Sen. Patricia Jehle (D-Somerville) joined Montigny in supporting the amendment. "I think it's important for us to say, as the gentleman from Ways and Means said, this is not the kind of budget, this is not the kind of commonwealth I want to live in," she said. "I want to build for a better future where we don't tell people they can't go home again." Brewer later said that a "corrective amendment" to the budget adopted late Thursday night included $30 million for nursing home payment rates.
• MUNICIPAL HEALTH CARE: A plan to curtail some collective bargaining rights for municipal employees appears to have been left intact with little public resistance and is now bound for negotiations between the Senate and House.
Senators on Thursday evening passed a so-called technical amendment, making changes to a plan included in the Senate budget that left the core elements of the plan unchanged. The amendment was adopted without debate and with minimal explanation. Afterward, Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, praised the plan as a positive step.
He said the Senate plan makes it slightly more difficult for cities and towns to join the state Group Insurance Commission -- they must demonstrate a savings of 10 percent more than they would otherwise save with the plan design tools that the Senate plan will authorize -- but that he thinks the plan is a workable solution.
Unions were muted after the Senate adopted the amendment. Ray McGrath, political director of the state chapter of the National Association of Government Employees, said the Senate plan was preferable to the House's but added that each represented a curtailment of collective bargaining rights. The Senate plan, like the House's, provides for a 30-day bargaining period between cities and towns and local unions on the health care benefits. However, unlike the House plan, if no agreement is reached, the decision is left to a three-member panel with one member appointed by each party and a third appointed by the state secretary of administration and finance, who must pick from a list of "neutral" officials with expertise in dispute resolution.
After the budget passed, an AFL-CIO spokesman issued the following statement: "Throughout the debate on how to handle the impact of rising health insurance costs on all our budgets - governments, businesses and working families - unions have eagerly sought to be part of the solution to keep police on the streets, fire fighters at the ready, teachers in our classrooms, and parks, sanitation and others keeping our communities clean and functioning well in these tough times. We have said all along that achieving savings and collective bargaining rights are not mutually exclusive. While certainly not perfect, this Senate proposal is fair and goes a long way to proving that point.
Collective bargaining over the quality of health insurance and mitigating increased out-of-pocket costs for the very sick and retirees on fixed incomes will allow municipalities to save $100 million. That $100 million in savings and the substantial cost shifting inherent in all agreements is a sacrifice we are willing to make in tough times, whereas collective bargaining rights are not. We hope the Conference Committee, Governor, and the legislature will build on this fair proposal and choose to deliver savings through collective bargaining in the final analysis."
• AVERSIVE THERAPY: In the wake of an indictment against Matthew Israel, the head of the Canton-based Judge Rotenberg Center, senators unanimously backed a plan -- with the support of Senate President Therese Murray -- to bar any new students at the center from being subjected to electroshock therapy. The therapy has been cited by supporters as a last resort for children and adults with severe disabilities who are often self-injurious. The therapy, which typically entails students at the center wearing a pack that emits an electrical shock at the discretion of the center's employees, has been hailed by backers, including Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez (D-Jamaica Plain), whose nephew is a student at the JRC, as a favorable alternative to mind-altering, powerful medications.
But critics have called the therapy cruel and barbaric, and they point to scandals in recent years in which students shocked dozens of times required hospitalization. Sen. Brian Joyce (D-Milton), sponsor of a budget amendment to ban the practice for future JRC students and to require staffers administering shocks to current students to be professionally trained, said that had Osama bin Laden been captured alive, the use of electroshock therapy would likely be banned as a tool against him under international law. "I know of no other nation in the world that allows this action," Joyce said. "Yet, we have continued to allow this practice on innocent, poor, disabled children in my district." Murray and Joyce have backed bans on aversive therapy in the past but the measures have failed repeatedly in the House, which did not address the issue in its version of the budget.
• GAMBLING AMENDMENTS: Sen. Marc Pacheco's proposals to introduce expanded gambling in Massachusetts were rejected Thursday evening.
Pacheco, who depicted the amendments as an immediate boost to local aid, said he hopes that if lawmakers fail to act on gambling this session that the issue of expanded gambling is the subject of a ballot initiative. Legislative leaders and Gov. Deval Patrick have indicated that action is likely on expanded gambling after the House and Senate iron out a compromise budget. Patrick said Thursday that he had not reached a deal on the parameters of a gambling bill but that he was still talking with legislative leaders.
• HUMAN TRAFFICKING: Sen. Mark Montigny withdrew his budget amendment to address human trafficking in Massachusetts. Legislative leaders in both branches have said they intend to pass human traffic legislation, with House leaders planning to pass legislation next week.