You know it's mid-July when there's no deal on a Massachusetts state budget, a hands-free cell phone bill, and others. Negotiations on those are behind closed doors. But not all is silent on Beacon Hill.
There's a bill to set guidelines for police body cameras across the state. It got a hearing last week, and it was hit from all sides.
This comes as Springfield's mayor says the city's police body camera contract is going to be put out to bid this week. What's the deal with the bill?
Matt Murphy, State House News Service: Body cameras have been gaining traction in a lot of police departments, not just in Massachusetts, but around the country.
The city of Boston has been piloting and using them. But developing the rules for how and when these are used can be complicated and controversial depending on where you are.
Rep. Denise Provost of Somerville has filed legislation that would sort of standardize and develop regulations and rules for how police departments would use body cameras. But it would not require these police departments to use body cameras, just set an established set of guidelines for police departments if they want to go in that direction.
These rules would be uniform across the state. Of course she did spark a bit of controversy with her proposal in that bill to exempt any footage that should be recorded on these cameras from the state's public records laws.
And Secretary of State Bill Galvin weighed in that the footage should be made public.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's a lot of people who already look at Massachusetts public records laws, and see them as rather weak, particularly when it comes to state government. A lot of things are shielded, including the work of the legislature.
Secretary Galvin wrote asking if this bill is to move forward, that provision be removed from proposed legislation, calling it completely unwarranted and unacceptable. He said that these body cameras are meant to improve transparency, not shield this from the public view.
We're approaching a disclosure deadline. Lobbyists on Beacon Hill encountered software glitches with a state website last week. What do we know about that reporting system?
Speaking of transparency and Secretary Galvin, the secretary who's in charge of the lobbying division late last month started implementing and trying to transition over to a new system for lobbyists and their clients to report to the state.
Those reports are due at the end of business Monday for the first half of the year. This is everything from their expenditures, to campaign contributions, to what bills they're lobbying on.
But as the deadline approached, and lobbyists were starting to go into the system, we heard from numerous lobbyists who said that it just kept crashing. They couldn't load their information.
Some of the larger firms who have reports that run in the hundreds of pages would get halfway through try and save their work and just see it all erased. So the state government hasn't had a particularly great track record in recent years with these information technology projects, and this just seems to be another one that's encountering some glitches.
The latest casino revenue report is due Monday. Those June numbers are going to be our first clue as to how much of an impact the new Wynn casino in Everett will have on MGM Springfield. How closely do lawmakers watch these monthly reports?
I think they'll be watching very closely. It'll be interesting to see how they performed in this big first week, when they were trying to encourage a lot of people to get out there and see this casino, this resort that's been in the works for years now.
It's certainly not a predictor of future performance and future revenues for the state. But this will be a good indicator and a good benchmark, something to measure against Springfield, both opening at the end of a month.
So we'll see a few weeks of revenue, and it should be an interesting place holder as we look to see what kind of revenues gaming will generate for the state moving forward.
