A clarification has been added to this story.

THERE IS A CONSTANT on Beacon Hill and gubernatorial campaign trails, and it’s tax talk: Whether to hike taxes, cut them, or leave them alone.

Deval Patrick ran on lowering local property taxes, and ended up raising the state sales tax, among others, after wrestling with state lawmakers, who as CommonWealth’s archives note, live in “mortal fear of tax votes.” His predecessor, Mitt Romney, closed loopholes, to the agitation of the business community, who didn’t let him forget it when Romney ran for president. Patrick’s successor, Charlie Baker, largely left taxes alone.

Maura Healey on the campaign trail supported raising taxes (the millionaires tax, to be precise) and then signed a $1 billion tax relief package once in office. Now she’s ruling out raising taxes or creating new ones, though for how long is unclear. [CLARIFICATION: Healey backed the millionaires tax but also supported tax cuts while campaigning.]

If that sounds familiar, that’s because she sounded the same note while pushing her fiscal year 2025 budget proposal. But ears perked up anyway when she spoke to the business-backed New England Council, whose members packed a banquet room inside the Boston Harbor Hotel earlier this week.

Asked by reporters afterwards about a timeframe for the no-taxes talk, Healey said, “That’s how I see it now and for the foreseeable future. Yeah, no taxes. I’ve been focused on trying to lower taxes.”

The comments put her between two unhappy camps: the GOP, which is hoping to take back the governor’s office when Healey is up for reelection, and the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, which wants Democrat-dominated state government to move leftward.

Jonathan Cohn, policy director for Progressive Massachusetts, said Healey’s “clichéd ‘no new taxes’ line is out of step with her own promises and the needs” of the state. He pointed to high child care costs, health insurance premiums, and traffic as forms of taxation that hit working and middle-class residents.

Amy Carnevale, the GOP chair, hit Healey for “championing tax increases at the municipal level.” Healey, for her part, has repeatedly made a distinction between the state tax policy and backing legislation that allows municipalities to raise taxes themselves.

How all that affects a task force, which includes members of her cabinet, trying to figure out how to pay for major upgrades and improvements to the state’s beleaguered transportation system, remains unclear. Her own transportation secretary and most members of the task force have been talking about tax, toll, and fee increases to accomplish that.

What Healey made clear at the very least this week is that, whatever happens, it’s down the road.

Pay change for Rollins

The revelation that Rachael Rollins quietly landed a well-paid, part-time job at Roxbury Community College, as first reported by CommonWealth Beacon, sparked a wave of headlines and new scrutiny on the former US attorney, who stepped down from her federal post last year after an ethics probe that found “extraordinary abuse” of her power in meddling in Boston politics.

The articles, and follow-up stories on the status of her law license, all noted the $96,000 annual rate she was getting paid for the part-time job, based on publicly available payroll records from the state comptroller’s office. The Herald noted the rate put her among the community college’s 40 highest-paid workers.

But a recent look at the state comptroller’s website shows that Rollins’s rate is now just under $80,000.

Asked about the change, a spokeswoman for the community college called the $96,000 number an “administrative error,” and said the correct number is what’s up on the website now. The spokeswoman declined to answer additional questions about the change, which appears to have happened as quietly as her hiring.

Who is Jeanne Louise?

That was the question that investigators kept asking Rep. Chris Flanagan of Dennis. Jeanne Louise was the woman who ordered a campaign mailer in 2022 promoting Flanagan’s candidacy among Dennis conservatives, but the investigators couldn’t locate her. Flanagan described her and their first meeting, but he said he didn’t know her last name or how to reach her.

In the end, the Democratic lawmaker confessed to orchestrating the mailer himself and said the name was part of the coverup. Then we heard from Jeanne Azarovitz of Falmouth, whose mother passed the Flanagan story along to her. “Jeanne Louise, that’s my first and middle name,” Azarovitz said in a message. “Weird.”