Lawmakers on Beacon Hill closed out their formal sessions for the year with a lot left undone. To discuss what’s next for the federal ARPA spending bill and other bills in their session, GBH News State House reporter Mike Deehan joined host Henry Santoro on Morning Edition. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Henry Santoro: Two days before Thanksgiving, the Massachusetts House and Senate are on a break without a promised spending bill, which is intended to help not only the economy, but municipalities and individuals recover from the pandemic. This really set you off the other day when they left without passing this thing. What is the latest?
Mike Deehan: I wish I could say I was shocked. It's nearly $4 billion in federal funding from the American Recovery Plan Act that Congress passed back in March, and that's supposedly filtering down to states and cities and towns now. So, when it comes to what Massachusetts did, the House and Senate just couldn't come to an agreement in time before they recessed for the holidays. This is something that we see happening time and time again. House and Senate leadership, all Democrats, just couldn't make the deal. So they walked away from the negotiating table, at least when it comes to these formal sessions, that won't be back until January 5th.
There's a chance that they could get a deal done in the intermediary here, but people aren't very hopeful. They passed their own versions of the bills and kind of clap themselves on the back, but really [lawmakers] did those bills quite late and only gave themselves three days to negotiate a final bill between the two chambers. And that's when the negotiations fell apart.
Santoro: What are House and Senate leaders saying about the failure to pass this bill? It seems like more and more often we hear about how they ran out of time, even though they set their own schedule. But everything always gets pushed to the eleventh hour.
Deehan: And that's when deals are done, when they have a deadline. There's really no incentive to get the deal done before that, other than to get it done, which doesn't really motivate them here at the State House. There's billions in spending here that they do agree on. And what's coming down to the wire here is multiple millions of dollars that's really stopping them from coming to a deal.
Some think that the other side's numbers are too high or they think that the other ones aren't quite right and they just can't get it together, especially in only three days. But of course, they keep all that secret because they do these negotiations behind closed doors. The public won't know what the holdup was. They'll just say that they got it done.
So Democratic leaders, they could come up with a deal and pass it over the break, like I'm saying, but it's been almost a week with no real movement on this ARPA funding bill. So it's really anybody's guess whether or not they're going to get something done. And in the meantime, nearly $4 billion in aid is just kind of sitting there instead of going to the organizations and people that it was meant to help.
Santoro: And that money will not go away, correct? It's just going to sit there until they decide what to do with it.
Deehan: Exactly. And what a lot of the leaders will tell you is that the feds put some strings on this, that they have to spend it between [now] and 2026. So again, the deadline in their mind is, "oh, we have all the time in the world to spend this," whereas a lot of organizations that are lined up to receive money are saying, "no, the pandemic recovery is happening right now." There's a lot of long-term spending in this — it's upwards of $5 billion. But there's an awful lot of millions that could be spent immediately to help people.
"It's really anybody's guess whether or not they're going to get something done."-Mike Deehan
Santoro: There was some action in the final days of the session when it came to health care legislation. What can you tell us about that?
Deehan: Well, if you're looking for a new health care law to get passed and signed, don't hold your breath. The House passed a bill near and dear to Speaker Ron Mariano's heart to help out community hospitals that are facing competition from big hospital chains expanding into the suburbs and threatening their client base. That's something that he's fought for for years. The Senate on the other side of the third floor, they passed a huge package of reforms that would really change the way people Massachusetts access mental health, including mandating insurance coverage for an annual mental health checkup. So, both chambers rolled out these bills. They celebrated passing them as huge victories.
But there's really no guarantee the House is going to take up the Senate bill, and there's no guarantee the Senate will entertain the House bill. So this is going to be a big theme in the spring. If they can come together, look at each other's versions of a health care bill, they're very disparate issues — and maybe get something done through there. They do have time now if they start on it in the spring, but this is something that could get punted down to the summer or the fall, which is the real drop dead deadline.
