SENATORS PLOWED through more than half of their 1,000+ budget amendments during their first full day of deliberations Tuesday and recessed just before 8 p.m.

The additions tacked on roughly $43.5 million onto the budget’s bottom line, according to Senate President Karen Spilka’s spokesperson Gray Milkowski. The Senate Ways and Means Committee proposed an underlying budget that started at $61.32 billion, as Democrats forge ahead with their spending appetite despite modest state tax revenues and federal funding uncertainty.

The branch tackled 671 amendments Tuesday, adopting 301 proposals while rejecting 208 others, Spilka’s office said. Successful amendments included ones directing the Department of Public Health to create a task force focused on the continuity of abortion and abortion-related care in “the event of a loss of federal funding,” $150,000 for the Reproductive Equity Now Foundation to operate its free abortion legal hotline, and $220,000 for new perinatal mental health support programs for new parents, the office said in its end-of-day recap.

Senators will resume deliberations Wednesday, with a new bundle of amendments available for review at 9 a.m. to address the remaining four budget categories, Majority Leader Cindy Creem said from the rostrum. Those topics include transportation, judiciary, public safety and local matters. Debate is planned to resume at 10 a.m.

When senators recessed for their dinner break just after 5:30 p.m., Sen. Will Brownsberger told his colleagues they were at “mile 13” of budget deliberations. Leaning into his Boston Marathon reference, the Belmont Democrat said they had made it to the Scream Tunnel in Wellesley.

The Senate had handled 530 out of 1,058 amendments before dinner, budget chief Sen. Michael Rodrigues told the News Service around 6:20 p.m.

“So, it’s going very smoothly,” Rodrigues said. “Of course we can’t say yes to everything, but we say enough yeses that members are happy, and we’re accomplishing some great things.”

Senators installed some guardrails around Department of Mental Health case managers without directly protecting endangered jobs. Gov. Maura Healey wants to slash that workforce in half to save money, and DMH is also eyeing a more flexible, open-access care model in which case managers are no longer paired up with specific clients.

Under Sen. Cindy Friedman’s successful budget amendment (#536), DMH must submit monthly reports to the Legislature on the number of active and inactive client cases; the active and inactive caseload among workers; the number of case manager positions that are filled, vacant or on extended-leave status; target caseloads and encounters to meet client needs; the waitlist for case management services; and the number of applications that are accepted or denied for services, among other information. DMH must also notify the Legislature 90 days before changing its care delivery model and submit a “report and a catalogue of best practices for publicly-operated case management services.”

Friedman, co-chair of the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing, told the News Service her amendment would not block the 170 case managers from being laid off.

“Look, if they’re going to cut case managers, they’re going to cut,” Friedman said. “There’s not a whole lot — I mean, we could pass an amendment, but I think the Senate feels that there’s a labor dispute going on. But I’m much more focused on what they’re doing, and what they’re trying to do, and why they’re cutting caseworkers.”

She called DMH’s open-access care model “absurd.”

“The people that are DMH clients are the people who are the most vulnerable and have the most serious needs. It’s very hard to become a DMH client — they don’t make it easy,” Friedman continued. “So if you’re in that cohort of people, you are there because there is a crisis. And if you help people by giving crisis management and then you take it away, they’re going to go back to being in crisis.”

Ahead of the debate, Sen. John Keenan withdrew his budget amendment (#433) that would have prevented DMH from reducing the workforce “below fiscal year 2025 case manager staffing levels.” The House had adopted that language in a consolidated budget amendment.

“It was clear that there wasn’t enough support for that,” Keenan told the News Service. “So what we heard was that Sen. Friedman’s amendment would most likely pass.”

The Senate Ways and Means Committee budget already allocated money to maintain operations at two health care facilities that Healey initially proposed closing: Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital for Children in Canton and Pocasset Mental Health Center on Cape Cod. But senators more explicitly pledged state funding support Tuesday, as they unanimously voted for a Sen. Dylan Fernandes amendment (#543) to dedicate $31 million to Pappas and $4.8 million to Pocasset.

Rodrigues said the amendment will not increase the budget’s bottom line, though the language clarifies the funding levels for the facilities in the budget.

“We have really dire need for mental health resources,” Fernandes of Falmouth said on the Senate floor. “The Cape and Islands has one of the highest suicide rates in the commonwealth, 50 percent higher than the state average. In Plymouth County, we continue to see incidents of suicide above the state average, and people struggling with substance misuse disorder.”

Working groups are also navigating the future of Pappas and Pocasset. Fernandes said stakeholders may evaluate how to handle the partial hospital program — which functioned similar to an outpatient program — that the state closed at Pocasset last year.

“Does that mean expanding services? Around a third to a half of the Pocasset site was closed,” Fernandes told the News Service. “Does that mean that we can expand services there that have higher reimbursements to help sustain this facility in the long-term? What does it mean for interconnection with Cape Cod Hospital and other inpatient beds in the region?”

Through a series of amendment bundles Tuesday, the Senate also added:

  • $50,000 for the Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence for “comprehensive educational programming”;
  • $250,000 for the Brookline Community Mental Health Center;
  • $300,000 for the International Institute of New England for “culturally and linguistically appropriate mental health services”;
  • An infectious disease elevated risk community outreach pilot program at the Department of Public Health for schools or early education programs that have not reached herd immunity against one or more “vaccine-preventable infectious diseases”;
  • $330,000 for a pilot program at Community Services to provide “medically-tailored” meals for veterans;
  • $25,000 for North Suffolk Community Services to coordinate and implement eviction sealing outreach;
  • $150,000 for a Greater New Bedford Community Health Center program to treat patients with “co-occurring mental health disorders by a nurse practitioner”;
  • $75,000 for Labouré College of Healthcare in Milton for an advanced Vocational Nursing English for Speakers of Other Languages program to boost the nursing pipeline;
  • $150,000 for the Southcoast Health New Beginnings Moms Do Care Program in New Bedford, which supports mothers and infants affected by perinatal substance exposure;
  • $75,000 to OpenCape Corporation to support “high-speed internet access” in Plymouth and Falmouth;
  • $250,000 for a grant program to support youth sports nonprofit programs primarily serving low-income or marginalized students;
  • and $250,000 to Concord for planning the redevelopment of the former MCI-Concord.