IT’S BEEN A WEEK and change since Gov. Maura Healey signed the $56 billion state budget for fiscal year 2024. The Democratic governor signed her first budget flanked by Democratic leaders in the Legislature, a sign of executive and legislative branch harmony not always present under her Republican predecessor, Charlie Baker. House Speaker Ron Mariano called it a new precedent.
All the one-party comity notwithstanding, the Legislature and its Democratic supermajority are usually eager to have the last word. And some legislators are already starting to push for veto overrides.
A youth-oriented suicide-prevention helpline has become an early flashpoint. Healey cut down a budget item funding suicide-prevention organization Samaritans, Inc. by $1.4 million, eliminating $1 million in funds for the “Hey Sam” help line.
“I was a bit surprised and certainly concerned about the cut to Hey Sam,” said Democratic Sen. Becca Rausch of Needham, where the program began. Hey Sam allows young people to text trained peers for help dealing with suicidality, and “has been a 100 percent successful program,” Rausch said on The Horse Race podcast.
Since its launch last year, about 1,700 young people in Massachusetts texted the hotline. Samaritans CEO Kathleen Marchi told GBH News that she hopes lawmakers will vote this fall to put the money back in the budget for the Hey Sam program.
“In order to balance the budget without one-time revenue sources, we needed to reduce spending and make sure important programs and services were funded with ongoing resources,” a Healey spokesperson said in a statement. “We strategically chose areas where we could reduce spending without impacting service levels or utilize other funding sources to support the same mission.”
After Hey Sam launched, the state began offering the 988 suicide prevention and mental health hotline, a 24/7 operation required by the federal government, which connects callers to national suicide prevention services. According to the Healey administration, having the Hey Sam text line operating in parallel with the 988 text line could create confusion.
Proponents of the texting hotline say it is not duplicative of existing services, as it is staffed by locals who can refer callers to local services, and the peer-to-peer structure makes it more accessible to young people who may be reluctant to reach out for help through other channels.
Rep. Ted Philips, a Sharon Democrat, in a letter to House Ways and Means chairman Aaron Michlewitz reported by the State House News Service, called the cut “needlessly cruel.”
Though Rausch said Healey “had a very light pen overall, as far as the vetoes are concerned” in her first budget, many of the cuts targeted programs that “support children and families.” Rausch ticked off several examples of particular concern: about $2.8 million cut from substance use supports, $1 million from civics education, another $400,000 cut from Samaritans, and $1 million cut from Head Start, which provides early education and care programs and services for low-income families.
In many of these cases, Healey’s notes accompanying the veto say the remaining funding will be “sufficient to meet projected demand” and alternative funding sources are available.
Rausch is not the only Senate progressive looking askance at the vetoes. Sen. Jason Lewis, who co-chairs the Joint Committee on Education, said he is hoping for overrides on the Head Start cut and a $35 million item to assist the early education workforce with personal child care costs and increase reimbursement rates at center-based child care providers.
These represent “critical funding that we need for the sector, which has been under tremendous stress,” Lewis said. “Those amounts being cut from the budget would be very unfortunate if they were not restored.”
A spokesperson for Mariano said the governor’s vetoes and amendments are under review in the House, where any overrides have to originate. Veto discussion may begin in earnest once legislators return from their August recess, with a November 15 deadline to take up veto overrides.
“Each individual dollar amount in the grand scheme of a $56.2 billion budget is not that much,” Rausch said. “But to each of those individual line items, each of those individual programs, each of those grant recipients under the nonprofit security grant program, it’s a huge hit. So I am very much looking forward to override season.”
