Christmas is still more than seven months away, but some Massachusetts lawmakers are hoping it’ll come early for them and their constituents.
Lawmakers in the Bay State’s majority-Democrat state Senate gussied up the $57.9 billion 2024-25 budget plan now scheduled for debate next week with 1,100 amendments, totaling $2.9 billion, according to a newly released analysis.
And nearly 6 in 10 of those amendments, 58%, are earmarks for pet projects back home that range from $250,000 for a right whale patrol program and a clean energy workforce development program at Roxbury Community College to $200,000 to support the Salvation Army’s food aid, according to a sprawling summary posted to the Legislature’s website.
The other 42% of those amendments fund what’s referred to in legis-speak as “outside policy sections,” such as health and human services or education spending; or they support “programmatic funding increases, or introduce new line-item language,” according to the analysis.
But caveat emptor: That $2.9 billion price-tag “may be conservative, (because) the fiscal impact for all amendments is not yet known,” according to the Boston-based Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, which compiled the data.
Most of the amendment proposals put forth by the 40 state senators stand very little chance of ever becoming law, veteran western Massachusetts political consultant Anthony Cignoli told MassLive on Tuesday.
But more than ever, the annual amendment derby has become “the way the process gets done,” with lawmakers trading support for the others’ amendments as they try to deliver for the taxpayers in their hometown districts, Cignoli said.
“The pressure on members of the Senate at this time of the year is major,” Cignoli said.
The same process unfolded in the state House last month, where lawmakers at first tacked 1,500 amendments onto their version of the state’s fiscal blueprint.
All told House lawmakers added $15 million to the bottom line as they rolled four “mega-amendments” into their version of the spending plan, State House News Service reported.
On the other side of the State House, senators filed 51 more amendments than they did in the current year’s budget and 78 fewer than they did in fiscal 2023, according to the new analysis.
And between the 2022 and 2024 budget years, upper chamber lawmakers added an average of $80 million in additional spending during the Senate’s debate, according to the analysis.
Speaking to reporters earlier this month, Senate President Karen Spilka, D-Middlesex/Norfolk, said the chamber’s budget proposal represented its “vision for an affordable, equitable, and competitive commonwealth.”
The Senate’s plan is a $1.8 billion, or 3.3% increase, over currently approved spending, Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairperson Michael Rodriques, D-1st Bristol/Plymouth, said.
Spending on education, child care, and mass transit figures prominently in the Senate’s budget plan. It calls for $1.58 billion to expand access and affordability for child care, $117.5 million to expand free community college to all state residents, $361.5 million for the MBTA and $325.3 million for the state’s emergency shelter system, MassLive previously reported.
Senate lawmakers are set to begin debate Monday on the spending plan for the new fiscal year that starts July 1. It could take them up to four days to wade through all the amendments, according to one veteran budget watcher.
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