THOUGH THE CROWDS at meetings have shrunk and the outrage on social media has subsided to a degree, tensions from this year’s budget season are still popping up in Leominster.
During an unusually short hourlong meeting of the City Council last week, Ward 1 Councilor Gail Feckley vented her frustrations at not being able to get Mayor Dean Mazzarella or members of the School Committee down to council meetings to ask them questions.
“If you request a meeting, this is just common courtesy. You should get a response,” she said. “This has happened quite a few times since I’ve been a councilor. We’ve asked the mayor, the chair of the School Committee, in different ways and different reasons, questions to come down and see us or answer our questions. We’ve heard crickets and I think that’s rude.”
At-large Councilor James Lanciani Jr. also shared some of his frustrations with the mayor during this year’s budget season.
“If the front office can’t get off his duff to see the fact that we are trying to help and not hinder, then it’s time (to say) see you later, bye-bye, auf wiedersehen,” he said.
CURRENT LEOMINSTER CITY Councilor and state Senate hopeful Sue Chalifoux Zephir announced this past week that she will step down from her at-large seat on the council if elected to the Legislature in December.
“I am in this race 100 percent because this election is a critical opportunity to help local families in our part of the state,” she said in a statement released Wednesday. “We need to shake things up if we’re going to provide more state aid for our schools, attract good paying jobs, and get control of skyrocketing health care costs that are hurting our seniors.”
In her statement, Chalifoux Zephir also urged her fellow candidates to pledge not to serve in two offices at the same time if they were elected. Three of her fellow candidates, Leominster City Councilor Claire Freda and Fitchburg councilors Michael Kushmerek and Dean Tran, would also have to serve in two offices if they were elected to the Senate.
THE LEGISLATURE CONTINUED the budget process for Fiscal year Two Thousand Infinity this week — well, half the Legislature.
A budget document unveiled when President Donald Trump’s approval rating exceeded his disapproval sauntered through its eighth month, still not truly final, as the House replaced $275 million of the $360 million in vetoes Gov. Charlie Baker made in July. The next step in the saga must be taken by the Senate.
The hangup for now is that there’s a rhythm to legislation and, as fortune would have it, that rhythm is the same as a Viennese waltz: ONE-two-three, one-two-three … And the third step of the override process was paused for the moment, as senators awaited the return of their leader from Austria and the Czech Republic.
Senate President Stanley Rosenberg was in Europe — a development that first surfaced publicly when his staff said he wouldn’t be at the weekly leadership meeting Monday with Gov. Baker and House Speaker Robert DeLeo, and would phone in for the session. He did.
The president, normally quite eager to share the details of his public schedule, made no mentions of his planned sojourn in the weeks and months leading up to his departure. His travels through Vienna, Graz and Prague were underwritten by the United Nations Association of Austria, the City of Graz and the Senate Presidents Forum, which collects money from corporations like Coca-Cola, Pzifer and Reynolds tobacco and passes it on to presidents in the form of grants for such policy and cultural forays. Thomas Finneran, late of the Massachusetts House speakership, is on staff as moderator of Forum discussions — a role he filled during the Central Europe sessions, said Rosenberg’s spokesman.
And so the Senate, eager as it may be to restore spending after senators decried vetoes as severe and unnecessary, extended its six-week summer formal-session hiatus. The vetoes may be taken up the last week of the month, after the Autumnal equinox.
The 62 overrrides processed in the House chamber covered statewide programs and accounts, and Ways and Means Chairman Jeffrey Sanchez said another batch, addressing local needs and services, will be forthcoming.
Republicans said the Senate should in fact be in no rush to follow the House’s lead. With state leaders mired in a years-long inability to accurately project tax revenues and then keep spending within actual receipts, GOP representatives said both branches should wait at least another month, preferably two, to see if the overrides are affordable.
For their part, the Baker administration said there was “no basis” to restore spending now, given revenue performance so far.
But Sanchez, speaking for the Democrats, said a conservative approach was already baked into the budget that landed on Baker’s desk in July — that $400 million had been removed from the bottom line before Baker saw it. The spending restorations are sustainable, he assured.
By way more than the necessary two thirds, Sanchez and his boss Speaker DeLeo had the votes.
For much of Wednesday, House members sat chattering and nattering and fiddling with their devices, punctuated by the sonorous reading of one veto after another from the podium. Which items would come up and receive a “yes” vote had been decided in secret over the past eight weeks, so there was no debate. One by one, with nary a decrease in din, representatives added money back to the commonwealth’s fiscal 2018 bottom line — the scoreboard glowing green on its leftward Democratic side, and more or solid red on the Republican.
THE STATE WAS pleased learn this week that it’s once again below average. In unemployment, that is. The Mass. rate dropped to to 4.2 percent in August, the Commerce Dept. reported, down from 4.3 percent and below the 4.4 national rate. Employment in the Bay State has been so robust in recent years that when the rate equaled the national figure for July, that datum merited headlines. The state’s added 57,400 jobs in the past 12 months.
THE POVERTY RATE dropped here too, said the U.S. Census Bureau, down to 10.4 percent in 2016, from 11.5 in 2015. Personal income rose, by just over $4,600 a year. And the pay-equity gap narrowed, per a different set of new federal data, from embarrassing to slightly less embarrassing: women were paid 84.3 cents for their work for every dollar collected by men in 2016, up from 81.6 cents in 2015.
ON THE DOWN SIDE, advocates for the state’s nursing home industry warned that their facilities are so underfunded by MassHealth, the state’s public-health care system, that three quarters of the homes have a combined 4.4 percent negative margin. Two-thirds of residents are funded by MassHealth, which pays an average $37 a day less per person than quality care costs. “This rapid decline has pushed many high-quality nursing homes to the verge of bankruptcy and possible closure,” said MATT SALMON, the CEO of Salmon Health and Retirement and vice chairman of the Massachusetts Senior Care Association board.
THE FINANCIAL SITUATION at the Cannabis Control Commission is far less dire, but still must be addressed with Big Marijuana already very much a presence in the Bay State. At its inaugural working meeting Tuesday, the new regulatory body discussed its budgetary needs, which have yet to be addressed. The board has $500,000 cash to work with from the Cannabis Cost Reserve, and a $2 million budget allotment in Fiscal 20-Infinity (i.e., 2018), but Treasurer Deborah Goldberg estimates it actually needs $10 million a year to oversee the new industry. A deficiency Fiscal 20-Infinity (i.e., 2017) budget may address that gap, or it may not. Members named their chairman, Steven Hoffman, their interim executive director, while they look for a permanent chief administrator.
A LUNENBURG DEMOCRAT has a new post with a national non-profit, and non-partisan group that advocates for women’s representation in government. A spokesperson announced Thursday that Jennifer Benson, the fifth-year Massachusetts representative, was appointed as to the DC-based Women in Government’s board of directors as at-large member for the eastern region. Benson started working with the group in 2013, and became a state director in 2015. “I look forward to working with the Board to support and inspire women in public office to craft effective policy and advocate for bold solutions,” she was quoted as saying in the press announcement.
ONE OF THE few significant numbers of the week that wasn’t preceded by a dollar sign were 240 and 220 — the scores necessary to pass the 10th grade English/math and science MCAS exams respectively.
During an enormously busy hearing week, one of the most heavily attended and charged with rhetoric was on bills ending high-stakes academic testing. Business leaders said students who can’t pass such tests can’t hope to be good employees, but the obsession with MCAS turns schools into “warehouses for testing” and teachers into “proctors,” opponents said.
STORY OF THE WEEK: DeLeo shrugged off the president’s perambulations, but oh, you should have heard some of his members.
Contributors to the Sunday Notebook include Sentinel & Enterprise staffers Peter Jasinski, Elizabeth Dobbins and Amanda Burke and State House News Service reporter Matt Murphy.
