Mass. House unanimously passes $56 billion state budget

The Massachusetts House unanimously passed a $56.2 billion budget for next year on Wednesday, after tacking on tens of millions of dollars in spending and new measures responding to federal court action on health insurance coverage and medication abortion.

The 157-0 vote, one major step in a monthslong budgeting process, sends the Senate a spending bill that hews closely to the version top House Democrats released earlier this month.

It would increase spending by more than 5% over this year’s budget, steer money from the state’s new tax on incomes over $1 million toward free school meals, and revive pandemic-era eviction protections for tenants with pending applications for emergency rental assistance.

House Speaker Ron Mariano said in a statement that his chamber’s budget will “help to make Massachusetts more affordable for residents, while allocating support for the Commonwealth’s most consequential institutions.”

Like the initial budget blueprint Gov. Maura Healey filed in March, the House’s budget — which will be rewritten and debated by the Senate next month — would make phone calls free for people incarcerated in state prisons. The House budget expands on Healey’s plan, extending no-cost calls to county jails.

Last year, lawmakers and former Gov. Charlie Baker sparred over no-cost calls budget language, which Baker’s objections ultimately scuttled.

"We applaud the current governor for including provisions in her budget proposal that would enable some incarcerated individuals to have access to no-cost calls,” Rep. Mike Day, the House chair of the Judiciary Committee, said Tuesday. “We in the House, however, reaffirm and believe that all inmates, all incarcerated individuals, from county lockup to our houses of corrections to our state facilities, deserve access and ability to talk to their loved ones while behind bars, to prepare them to reenter society.”

The House budget would also let the state Lottery offer tickets and games online, and use the revenue from those sales to help fund grants to child care providers. While Healey didn’t include similar authorization in her budget, she’s said she’s on board with the idea of bringing the Lottery online.

Representatives began considering the budget bill on Monday and made substantial amendments over their three days of deliberations.

In a move Rep. Marjorie Decker, the House’s Public Health Committee chair, said would “address the attacks on reproductive health,” representatives agreed to allocate $1 million to reimburse the University of Massachusetts for the purchase of abortion medication. At Healey’s request, UMass Amherst earlier this month ordered 15,000 doses of one such medication, mifepristone, with future access to the drug in question after a federal judge’s ruling out of Texas.

In a separate case, another Texas judge in March struck down the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that most insurers cover a range of preventive care services, like certain cancer screenings and treatment to prevent HIV, with no out-of-pocket costs for patients.

The Massachusetts House responded by adopting budget language that Rep. John Lawn said would require state-regulated health plans to maintain, without out-of-pocket costs, “access to the same scope and level of preventative services” that their enrollees have had for the past 13 years under the ACA.

Lawn, the House chair of the Health Care Financing Committee, said more than three million people in Massachusetts with private health insurance coverage “benefit from preventative services without cost-sharing.”

Representatives filed 1,566 amendments ahead of this week’s deliberations. In keeping with the House’s usual practice for its budget, most decisions about which amendments would make it into the final bill occurred out of public view.

After a series of private meetings in a room next to the House chamber, top Democrats compiled the individual amendments into multimillion dollar packages called consolidated amendments, which were presented to representatives for a single up-or-down vote after about a half hour for review.

Embedded in a $5.3 million amendment package covering the categories of “Constitutional Officers & State Administration/Transportation,” adopted Tuesday night, is a pay raise for members of the Governor’s Council. The elected councilors — there are eight seats on the body but one is currently vacant — meet once a week to vet judicial nominees, pardons and commutations. Under the House’s plan, they would see their salaries rise by $9,000, to $45,025.

Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance spokesman Paul Craney called the proposed pay hike, added into the budget with no public discussion or debate, “just one example of how taxpayer dollars get thrown around with no account.”

The final 25-page mega-amendment, adopted Wednesday evening, added $32 million in spending for various labor and economic development initiatives. Most of that money would go to local projects and organizations, including $50,000 for the Lowell Southeast Asian Water Festival, $10,000 for Boston’s South End baseball program, $50,000 for the Boys and Girls Club of Chicopee to build a teen center, $45,000 to replace a “Welcome to Marlborough” sign and $75,000 for a full-time maritime director at the Hull Lifesaving Museum.