The smoky back room where political deals used to get made has been replaced by a Zoom meeting from a Massachusetts lawmaker's home office.
The Massachusetts House budget debate begins this week. Usually a lot of negotiation happens in the members' lounge. But with the pandemic, many of those lawmakers are going to be remote.
Matt Murphy of the State House News Service joins us to talk about the week ahead, and what he's hearing about how all these budget details are getting sorted out.
Jill Kaufman, NEPM: Should we expect any surprises?
Matt Murphy, State House News Service: Yeah, they're working on all of this, as they usually do. The House Ways and Means Committee spent the school vacation week combing through the more than 1,150 amendments that were filed to this bill. And they are preparing for the typical multi-day affair.
But a lot of this will be happening remotely. The speaker's office is encouraging members that don't need to be at the Statehouse or in the chamber not to come. Staff will be limited inside the chamber. And these meetings that usually happen as they bundle amendments by subject matter in the members' lounge is also going to be happening remotely.
But they will be Zooming in, and going through these amendments with the members. Every member will get to make their pitch for these amendments, and debate them if they want to. We're just going to see a lot more of this happening over Zoom.
It'll be interesting to see how efficient this will be. This is probably going to be more like the usual budget debates that we've seen in the past, unlike last year — that happened late into the fall, early winter, at the end of 2020 — when they were just trying to get a budget in place.
This is a chance the lawmakers are trying to use to get a lot of their priorities into this budget after more than a year of sort of pent-up energy, if you will.
The state Senate is working on its own version of the bond bill for a new Holyoke Soldiers' Home. And it's $200 million more than the one passed by the Massachusetts House. So what's making up the difference, and will that extra cost imperil its passage?
This is an interesting bill. This was something that the governor filed to build a new soldiers' home in Holyoke, but it had a time-limited deadline. The governor wanted this bill, actually, by April 1 to meet a federal deadline to apply for federal matching assistance. The governor has submitted this application, as this bill moves through.
But during the hearing, we heard some lawmakers feeling a bit rushed. And we're seeing, perhaps, some of the effects of that in this Senate version of the bill.
The $400 million to build the Holyoke home is in there, but the Senate has added an additional $200 million in authorization — the governor doesn't have to use it — but in bond authorization, to fund studies of what it would take to increase and improve care for veterans in different ways, and potentially build satellite campuses that would improve geographic equity for veterans, who can't easily access either the home in Holyoke, or the second home in Massachusetts, in Chelsea.
So that is a wrinkle in this bill, as well as the Senate's decision to remove a project labor agreement, which would force a lot of the construction on this project to be union labor. But some have raised concerns about whether or not that would discourage the use of minority-owned firms.
So both of those things could delay this a little bit, but shouldn't impede its passage in the end.
The state has now followed the feds in saying it's OK to resume the use of the Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine. One of your colleagues reported last week that even during the pause, providers around Massachusetts kept reporting uses of the vaccine. So what was going on there?
We had some trouble figuring out was going on. But in the daily reports, Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses kept being reported.
The administration said this was due primarily to a lag in reporting. But typically, we're told, the lags in reporting usually last one to two days. We were seeing a new J&J doses being reported up to a week after its delay.
But over the weekend, the administration authorized the resumption of Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is welcome news for communities who have been trying to use the single-dose shot to reach hard-to-reach populations like the homeless and homebound people.
