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Chief among the recent activity on Beacon Hill is the FY25 budget, which allocates $58 billion for a host of expenses. This year’s spending bill marks a $2 billion increase over FY24, and includes increases in local unrestricted general government aid and education funding for each of the communities that I represent. To get a fuller picture of the budget and its local focuses, I recommend you read my press release.
The budget also allowed me and opportunity to continue efforts to curb problem gambling. I successfully inserted language restricting the types of advertising the Commonwealth’s new online lottery can use and requiring lottery officials to provide anonymous player data to the Department of Public Health to track and study problem gambling.
Each year, I make a big push to assist our local governments as much as possible through the state budget. This year, we reached record funding of $6.86 billion for Chapter 70 school funding, a 4% increase over FY24. There is also a 3% increase in unrestricted general government aid, which municipalities in my district use to help fund public safety, public works, library, veterans, and senior programs.
On July 22, the Senate approved An Act Relative to strengthening Massachusetts’ economic leadership (S.2586), an economic development bill that authorized capital funding totaling nearly $9 million for projects in Abington, Hanover, Holbrook, Quincy, and Rockland. Working with colleagues who represent Quincy in the House of Representatives, we also successfully authorized capital funds to cover the costs of dredging Quincy Bay and for related beach restoration.
One week later, the Senate passed the ambitious Act enhancing the healthcare market review process (S.2871), a wide-ranging collection of policies addressing Steward Healthcare’s reckless management of local hospitals and the potential for future, similar situations. I successfully amended the Senate version of this bill to require the Health Policy Commission to take testimony on the compensation of executive officials in financial stakeholders invested in for-profit hospitals. The Senate also adopted my amendment requiring the Commonwealth to track out-of-pocket costs patients incur when paying for prescription medications.
Formal legislative sessions under the joint rules are required to end on July 31, which usually prompts a bit of a mad dash to get bigger bills passed. Unfortunately, too much was left to the end, and many bills that should have passed did not. A bond bill investing $5.2 billion for housing passed, along with parentage, veterans, and wage transparency bills. However, several large, critical bills did not come to the Senate floor for votes. Let unaddressed was an important climate bill, a supplemental budget, and a bill to address the ongoing drug epidemic, Also, an important $2.9 billion economic development bill, to fund investments for economic growth all across the Commonwealth, failed to come up for a vote. I am hopeful that the legislature will meet in a special session to address these outstanding matters.
Though formal sessions have ended, the Legislature will continue to meet throughout the coming months in informal sessions, addressing a myriad of local and smaller impact bills.
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