A KEY TO UNDERSTANDING Beacon Hill, particularly as lawmakers and advocates scramble to pass or kill bills as the legislative session comes to an end, is the dynamic between lawmakers.
Unlike other state houses, it’s not Democrats fighting Republicans, or the executive branch battling the legislative branch. It’s the House versus the Senate.
And as the clock ticks towards midnight Wednesday, the final day of the legislative session, each side makes a bid for leverage in the negotiations behind closed doors, with policies and legislation on the table as bargaining chips. Procrastination mixes with frustration that spills out into legislative leaders’ scrums with reporters.
When senators on Monday passed legislation allowing supervised drug injection sites as an opioid overdose prevention measure, House Speaker Ron Mariano offered up an exasperated response. He criticized the Senate for taking up the proposal at the last minute “because it’s a very difficult expectation for us to hear it, especially when it has proposals, major proposals, that we haven’t even had the opportunity to debate or vote on.”
“It sort of tells me you’re not really serious about passing the bill to begin with,” Mariano told reporters in the hallway outside his office. He later called it a longshot proposal.
A day later and down the hall, Senate President Karen Spilka spoke to a different huddle of reporters. When asked about a proposal to revise Boston’s property tax formula that was moving quickly through the House, Spilka began to read with relish from a crumpled piece of paper that had Mariano’s words from the day before.
The House proposal, a top priority for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, would temporarily shift more of the city’s tax burden onto commercial property owners in order to avoid a spike in residential taxpayers’ bills. Mayor Tom Menino pushed through a similar bill 20 years ago.
Business groups have scrambled to kill the bill, which finally emerged from the Boston City Council in June, was heard by a legislative committee five days ago, and then moved swiftly through the House on a 132-24 vote on Tuesday.
Pressed on whether she was saying that the Boston bill wouldn’t be taken up by the Senate in the waning hours of formal sessions, Spilka said she hadn’t seen it yet so she couldn’t comment on the proposal.
For his part, Mariano rejected the comparison between a proposal for safe injection sites, which are illegal under federal law, and the Boston tax bill, a home rule petition, calling the two proposals as different as “night and day.”
The Legislature already had nine bills in House-Senate conference committees trying to resolve differences between the two branches by midnight Wednesday. The addition of several more bills to the agenda at the last minute in each branch could lead to as many as 13 conference committees.
The Boston tax bill cleared the House, garnering opposition only from the Republican caucus. Ahead of the vote, Wu and Aaron Michlewitz, the House Ways and Means chairman who also represents Boston’s North End, put out statements saying Wu agreed to sign an executive order limiting the scope of the proposal and the timeline of the tax shift to three years from five.
The agreement also calls for expanding the personal property tax exemption for small businesses, and requires city officials to set aside up to $45 million over three years for small businesses with 50 or fewer employees.
“As Boston addresses economic shifts impacting cities around the country, it is imperative that residents in this far too expensive housing market are protected from drastic spikes in housing costs,” Wu said in a statement. “And it is also critical for local small businesses to receive support and protection in this time of uncertainty.”
As the House advanced the proposal, business groups turned their attention to lobby the Senate.
“The commercial real estate industry is experiencing a post-pandemic crisis that will take 10 years to sort through,” James Rooney, head of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement issued Tuesday night. “With this policy, vulnerable businesses – the commercial tenants who will be burdened by the tax increase – will consider difficult relocation and closing choices, entrepreneurs will look elsewhere, the jobs of residents will be jeopardized, the vibrancy of downtown will be harder to recapture, and our competitiveness as a city and a state will suffer.”
Sen. Nick Collins, who represents South Boston, did not take a position on the proposal when he was approached outside the Senate chamber, and declined to say whether he and his colleagues will take it up before the Wednesday end of formal sessions. Bills can be taken up during informal sessions, but a single lawmaker can make the road to the governor’s desk more difficult through parliamentary maneuvers.
“I can’t speak for what the agenda’s going to look like between now and midnight tomorrow night,” Collins said. “A lot of things are fluid. This is one of them.”