The school year starts in just a few weeks. State lawmakers gave all Massachusetts students free meals, but that bill first needs the Gov. Maura Healey's signature.
Lawmakers last week forwarded a $56 billion budget to Healey for her review and signature. Some uncertainty remains about what Healey may veto, but her comments indicate some items are safe, including the free school meals.
Chris Lisinski of the State House News Service says advocates feel they're getting what they wanted.
Chris Lisinski, SHNS: There’s a whole lot in this bill beyond just the free school meals that advocates all across the spectrum have praised and have long been working for.
There are things in here like a revival of a pandemic-era eviction prevention program that will require eviction cases to be paused while a tenant has an application out for rental aid that could help ameliorate the situation. There's funding in here for job training, for youth programs, for reentry.
So, really, this is a budget bill just packed top to bottom with all sorts of different items that advocates are going to be really happy to see — assuming the governor signs most of them into law.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Well, Healey is still waiting for lawmakers to deliver on some long promised tax relief. If you remember back, the governor proposed tax cuts to help low- and middle-income families and to make businesses in the state more competitive. So how likely are we to see lawmakers move on that soon?
I would say we're very unlikely to see them move on it soon. All of Beacon Hill typically takes August as a vacation month. You know, it is always within the realm of possibility that a deal could come together this week, right now, and that lawmakers could advance it quickly.
But far, far more likely is that there won't be any movement on this until after Labor Day at the earliest, when things start to pick up again in the House and the Senate.
One top senator, Senate President Pro Tempore Will Brownsberger said that his goal is to get this done before Thanksgiving. So the goalposts, at least among some lawmakers, are now targeting late fall.
Do we know any more about the status of the $2.5 billion spent by the Baker administration on unemployment benefits that the federal government might be demanding back?
No. That's a great question. The last that I've heard is that the federal Department of Labor is still reviewing that whole situation and trying to figure out what, if any, action to take of what — if anything — Massachusetts owes back to the federal government. So, that seems to be still unresolved with a pretty big potential price tag.
So, we've now passed a deadline for filing potential 2024 ballot questions with the Massachusetts attorney general. There were rumblings of a question to gradually raise the minimum wage beyond the current $15 an hour. But Raise Up — the big coalition on wages — decided not to make that push. Do you see the Legislature acting instead?
It's another situation where it's — of course always possible — but I don't think there's all too much appetite among lawmakers to impose another minimum wage increase across the state.
The most recent series of wages we had only really got approved by lawmakers to avert a ballot question that would have imposed those minimum wages, plus indexing them to inflation. This is part of the “grand bargain” back in 2018.
So, just based on recent history, I think it's less than likely that lawmakers themselves are going to be the ones to really launch a deliberate push to increase the minimum wage again.
What ballot questions are we likely to see on the 2024 ballot?
We're very likely to see at least one, if not two different ballot questions dealing with app-based drivers for platforms like Uber and Lyft. The companies, if some of our listeners will recall, had pursued a ballot question last year, but it got tossed because of a drafting technicality. They're going to be making a second pass at that, and I imagine they've fixed the issues.
Unions are also pushing their own app-based driver ballot question that would let drivers on Uber and Lyft form a union and collectively bargain for better rights and pay. I think those two are pretty, highly likely to head to the ballot question.
Another one removing MCAS as a graduation requirement for high schoolers has the support of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. Given the amount of resources and interest there, that one seems a pretty good chance to make it all the way to the ballot in 2024.
Full disclosure: Some NEPM employees are in an employee union affiliated with the Massachusetts Teachers Association. That affiliation does not affect how we cover the news.
