Lawmakers returned to work Wednesday with two significant goals to complete: get a state budget bill to Gov. Charlie Baker’s desk and finish work on a compromise bill rewriting the state’s marijuana law, both by July 1.
Those deadlines, the only major legislative efforts in the works on Beacon Hill so far this summer, came and went last week. Now, the dozen or so top Democratic leaders who call the shots in the Legislature are back in Boston and say they’re working hard to get things done.
“I don’t think anybody’s being lazy. I just think they’re up against it,” Greg Sullivan, a former state inspector general and now research director at the Pioneer Institute, told WGBH News.
Sullivan defended the late negotiations because of the drastic revenue problems state budget writers have to contend with this year. Forecasts for how much the state will take in next year have been below expectations, meaning budget writers have to spend less, or cut more, to balance the budget.
“Whenever something like this is proposed at the State House, debate goes on for months,” Sullivan said. “But because of the fiscal emergency, it’s all being debated behind closed doors among the members of conference committee, so [a] lot [is] going on on Beacon Hill with the budget.”
Even though the fiscal 2018 budget year has already started, the Commonwealth is operating under an emergency one-month spending plan to keep the state from shutting down the way New Jersey and Maine have done in recent days because of their own budget deadlocks.
Political scientist Dr. Peter Ubertaccio said as long as lawmakers finish the budget and marijuana bill within the next week or two, voters won’t take it out on their representatives or senators.
“The Legislature and Beacon Hill always has a bad reputation. And so you have to balance that with the reality that individual legislators are really quite popular in their districts,” said Ubertaccio, the dean of Stonehill College’s School of Arts and Sciences.
What could hurt Beacon Hill, Ubertaccio says, would be if lawmakers continued to stall on a marijuana rewrite bill that strays too far from the language passed by voters last November or that leads to more delays opening retail shops next year.
“To the extent that the Legislature ignores something that the voters have weighed in on pretty definitely, that does end up hurting your overall political culture,” Ubertaccio said.
credit:news.wgbh.org
