With Governor Charlie Baker's State of the Commonwealth speech delivered and his budget unveiled, Massachusetts lawmakers, lobbyists, activists and reporters now have their chance to scrutinize it all.
Baker's budget plan makes a big push on transportation funding, with $135 million more for the Boston-area MBTA.
Regional transit agencies, such as the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority and those in Berkshire and Franklin Counties, are also going to see an increase, but of just $3.5 million statewide.
Matt Murphy of the State House News Service joins us to talk about this and other goings-on in Massachusetts state government.
Sam Hudzik, NEPR: Would you expect those regional transit authority (RTA) funding numbers to move at all before this is settled?
Matt Murphy, State House News Service: Yeah. I think you're probably going to see the RTAs be a focal point of a future debate moving forward in the House and the Senate as they start to both put together their own budget proposals, and the House puts together its revenue package for transportation — which they are not backing off, even with Governor Baker proposing to increase fees on Uber and Lyft to pay for a greater investment in the MBTA.
Speaker DeLeo and Senate President Karen Spilka both talked after the State of the State speech about the urgent need for new revenues for transportation. And the speaker has said that the RTAs will be a part of that debate.
So the governor is proposing a small increase for RTAs — about $90.5 million in base funding in this budget, as well as a $3.5 million grant program, for a total of about $94 million. But I think you could expect to see some more money being directed that way, if and when this revenue debate happens.
Governor Baker also announced a push to make the state net-zerofor greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Senators had the exact same goal in mind, so they're on board, and a few environmental groups also welcomed Baker's proposal. But we saw Environment Massachusetts skeptical. They said, "It may represent little to no progress over the state's existing commitments." Can you explain that?
Under the Global Warming Solutions Act the state currently has in place, the targets and the requirements are for an 80% reduction below 1990 emission levels by 2050.
We've seen environmental leaders on Beacon Hill, including Senator Marc Pacheco and others, pushing for a long time now to go to this new net-zero by 2050 standard. And when the governor came out — it was a bit of a surprise last Tuesday night — endorsing this, the Senate was getting ready to and eventually rolled out their bill last week that would codify this requirement in law. Even Speaker DeLeo said that he and the House are supportive of this goal.
A lot of environmental groups were very pleased to see the governor and the legislative leaders take this position. But some groups think that it's not even enough.
While you could go to net zero, there's still some math involved in that where you buy carbon offsets and allowances. And what they're really looking to do is see complete transition to renewable energy — 100% renewable across all sectors — basically zero emissions, not net-zero. That's the target they would like the state to reach for. But even at the net-zero level, this is certainly a move forward for environmentalists.
There's a big legislative deadline coming up in early February, and one bill that's getting watched closely would allow for driver's licenses to be issued to immigrants who are in the country illegally. This bill comes up every session, but keeps falling short. It now has the support of a police chiefs association. They say it's going to make the roads safer because these immigrants are driving regardless of whether they're licensed. But do you think it's actually going to happen this time around?
Yes, the Massachusetts Major City Chiefs of Police Association voted to support this legislation. This is something that's been kicked around for a long time.
It doesn't have a lot of support among the leadership, or at least it's not high on their priority list. It's hard to see this gaining a whole lot of traction this session, particularly with a lot of controversial issues on the agenda of legislative Democrats, including perhaps a tax debate and raising taxes. This would be another thing on their plate that I'm not sure that there's an appetite to tackle this session.
