Massachusetts budget update and the summer of climate change

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Today we give you an update on the budget for the state of Massachusetts -- a few good things that are in it, but also a 30,000-ft view of why it does not meet the needs of our residents. We also cover the climate crisis this summer and how our state government and the media are not doing their part to avert even deeper crisis.

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan as we chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 21. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Transcript

Hey there and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. We are here to help us all transform state politics. We know that together we can make the policies here in Massachusetts match the needs of the vast majority of our residents of our beautiful state.

And today we are going to cover a few topics. We're going to give you an update on the budget. We are all also going to talk a little bit about climate change and how it's affecting people worldwide and here as well.

And then we'll cover just a little bit of the cycle that we're in in this session, right? So right now the legislative session is taking their August break. So we'll talk a little bit about the whole cycle and what that means in terms of getting policies passed. But before we do, I am going to introduce my two super amazing co hosts.

I will start with the sleepy Jordan Berg Powers. 

Jordan Berg Powers. For those of you who can't see, I'm celebrating in the same shirt I wore last night for the US women’s national soccer team.

I have several years working in politics in Massachusetts and I'm currently recovering from watching the thing at 03:00 in the morning, watching the soccer game at 03:00 in the morning. 

And the fantabulous Jonathan Cohn. Jonathan Cohn, he/him, joining from Boston, been active for a number of years in issue and electoral politics both in Boston and statewide.

I am Anna Callahan, she her coming at you from Medford, been deeply involved in local politics across the country and also been doing some stuff with these guys around state politics for a little bit too. Love them both. So let's go ahead and dive in.

Let's give just a little bit of an update about the budget. We had a previous whole episode on the budget so please do see that one if you want to know more details. But today we'll just give you a little bit of an update.

Who wants to give that? Jonathan, I'm picking you.

So I can do, let's say, a few things that are good and then Jordan can go into why some of the easy good, easy top lines merit further consideration. So the few things that are nice wins to be able to highlight from the budget are that their inclusion of permanent universal school meals got into the budget. That's something that there was federal funding for during the pandemic for schools to do, and federal funding was kind of being so.

We've seen in other states like Minnesota got a lot of attention for doing this recently as an example of states kind of saying, well, we want to actually put money into being able to guarantee this on a permanent basis because it's good for the kids, it's good for their parents, it's good for the cities and towns that are budgeting on this proven to improve student performance and student health, et cetera. And that was one of the uses of the money from the fair share folks, remember the millionaires tax from last year that had created a pot of money devoted to education and transportation spending? That was one of the uses.

One of the other things in terms of those policy wins in the budget was the passage of tuition equity for undocumented students. So, as has been like in Massachusetts, what has been the case is that if students are undocumented, they don't benefit from the in state tuition rates at Massachusetts colleges and universities. So they have to pay more money than other Massachusetts high school graduates, which is a very unequal system.

They've gone through the schools just like everybody else and should be able to get the same treatment. It's something that 23 other states and DC already have established, including Republican states.

Thank you. Exactly. That's what's always jarring.

It's something that we're not a leader in doing it. We're catching up to where Texas is for a while. But that's important because that had been something that seemed like something that the legislature just didn't want to touch at all for many years after I think it had gone down in a vote many years ago.

But the thing I would like to hope is that the successful protection of the Work and Family Mobility Act, the driver's license bill on the ballot last year, made legislators realize that there can actually be public support behind things that strengthen the protections of the immigrant communities in Massachusetts. So one can hope. And one of the other quick policy wins I wanted to be able to highlight was the kind of inclusion of no cost calls, not charging kind of incarcerated individuals and their families for phone calls.

It's been a predatory practice where you have for profit companies making a lot of money on people who are often disproportionately lower income, so that when one that's terrible for the families. We also know that it's just bad. That practice of charging is bad for public safety because people having connections to the outside world are vitally important for the work of reentry kind of in rehabilitation.

And it's something that the legislature passed last year. Charlie Baker vetoed it. It got caught up in end of session drama, and nothing happened.

And it's nice that they finished something that would have been nice to have seen be finished in July of last year, but better late than never and better now than July of next year, since it is something that has a real material benefit to many families. During the steering for it last week, it was drawing to hear just how much some people are paying to keep contact with. Yeah.

So those are a few things, and we might notice that none of these are affecting 7 million people in Massachusetts. None of these are wide policies. None of them are ones where Massachusetts is like leading the country to do something new and amazing.

These are nibbling at the edges of policies. And Jordan, I would love to hear from you a little bit about and by the way, we should say that the budget is not like these things have passed, but the budget, the entire budget has not yet been passed. And Jordan, do you want to talk a little bit about kind of the situation with the have to – the governor still has to sign it and can veto any of these things and then they'll have to figure out what they're going to do.

I think the good thing that they did is I feel like we bullied them successfully into increasing rental vouchers. So the Senate had better money. The House had a terrible, they still did increase the gentrification fund for developers, free money for developers.

But they did also combine that with above-inflation increase in housing support. But to have the sort of support we need, we would have to spend, according to some reports, $3.2 billion on rental support based on the need that's in Massachusetts.

And we currently have $493 million. So we are far below. There's a good graph on that.

But I think the easy thing is I just want to step back for people who are thinking about the budget because the media just sort of reports numbers and it reports that there's an increase from the year before. But let's just step back and just think a little bit about this. Those of you who have had to purchase anything in the last year, things cost more money.

They cost more money. Things just generally cost more money. And so if things cost more money and you don't raise how much money you have, you have less money for things or you have less of that thing, right? It's a very simple idea that's inflation, if you have the same income and things cost more, your ability to get those things is less.

So you have less of those things. You have less eggs, less milk, right? All of us have sort of gone to the supermarket and had to make some of those decisions. So when the state budget says, when they say like, oh, we've increased it, you need to remember that everything costs more, they failed to address health care.

That costs more. People cost more because health insurance costs more, actually more than inflation. Everything costs more.

So unless they raised the budget above the cost that things the inflation rising the level that things cost, then actually it's a cut. And it appears that the state budget is a cut from the year before. And I think that that's important because they're all going out celebrating 100 million here, 200 million there, and some good things in the budget that we can all agree are good.

But overall, they are doing Republican style cuts to our spending. They are doing a tax cut and likely going to do a tax cut, and they are spending less on us even as the state voted to increase, so we voted to spend more on us. And they're either going to level set it or cut.

And so what does that mean? That means that for every program that they're touting that they've spent more money. That means that something else is being spent less on, right? So housing is a good example. They spent more money for, around rental and other things and then a million cuts to a lot of smaller programs that actually also help people, right? A little bit of here from housing, a little bit of here for homeless, for the unhoused, a little bit of here they just cut, cut, cut because they got to make it work.

Because overall this is a flat budget even though we've increased the funds into the budget. So just remember that that you need to temper whatever your because our media isn't going to give you the review and because they are just touting more money because they themselves don't actually know what's in the bill. They don't know what's in the budget.

They haven't line items even if they wanted to. They couldn't have had time. It got released and then they voted on it.

So they don't know what's in it except for the press releases that they told them what's in it and except for those few people at the top who were the ones in those sessions, they know. But the vast majority of legislators like your legislator, you listening to this, they probably did not know, right? And they had no impact. Even if you're negotiating it might not know everything that's in it, I'm sure.

Because I feel like if you're negotiating something that yeah, it takes time, but it is something that is jarring to speak to this kind of practice that regardless of, let's say, the content of specific bills, it's an appalling matter of process that they were given such little time to actually look at the things that they're voting on. And you don't need to believe that there's some nefarious thing being snuck into the budget to think that people should actually look at what they're yeah, I mean there's just moral decisions in every single line item that when you're making a budget, you always are balancing, you're balancing good things against each other. Even in the best case scenario where we have, where they spent all this money, you could spend the $1 billion voters voted to raise just on education and then the T would be suffering.

Ultimately you are always balancing needs against each other and that's an imperfect process but that requires oversight and lots of input, expertise, things that none of the when you only have five or six staffers and one or two people you just do not have. Right? That's why you want as many hands as possible on the budget process. I'll just give the other example too.

As far as I can tell for example, they increased the funding to UMass system. But it appears that they have level set the community colleges. But they're saying that they've raised money for this and made it more accessible.

And maybe that's true. I don't know how they're doing it. I don't know what program they've committed to it.

But I would guarantee you that your state rep and I know this because I've asked people who are in legislature if they knew that there was a cut to things that there aren't cuts to. They don't know what's in this thing. They don't know that $450,000,000 goes to Worcester State and then $450,000,000 again.

They don't know that they've never looked at it. And so that's what I mean is when I say they're not inputting, that the Worcester reps don't know how much Worcester State's getting. They don't know that it hasn't raised with inflation.

And so there's just a lot of pieces that are totally obscure for people. And it's frustrating that the media can't just do simple math and simple things around. Like inflation happens, things cost more.

That's a basic thing. Right. And I think there is this incentive for them to just find one or two or three good things and only talk about those because it's not actually great if people look at the big picture.

They don't want us to look at the big picture because they get it. They're not able to accomplish the things that people want. So distraction by just talking about, hey, there's free school lunches now.

Hey, we finally passed no cost calls for incarcerated people. They call those out and no one is looking at the bigger picture. Yes, that's ultimately their purposes.

And also, I want to always say that those are really good things that people work really hard on, harder than they should have to work for these sorts of programs. But yeah, right. They celebrate because we should celebrate those wins.

And also it obscures the fact that there's a lot of other stuff happening that's not as good a story. Yeah, so we're going to talk in a second about the cycle that we're in. Like the whole thing about getting the budget passed before they took a break this session.

They're on their break now. It's August and we're going to get to that in a second. We're just going to take a little interlude to talk a little bit about all the news headlines last week about climate change.

With the incredible heat in cities like Phoenix and in many other places, with floods happening in Vermont and in lots of other places with wildfires Canada and the United States and smoke drifting hundreds of miles into cities so that people couldn't breathe. Really, there are so many things happening from climate change in the last couple of weeks that there has been finally, a lot of attention given to this topic. And I remember hearing someone saying that the month of July was in fact a month where we hit 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels. And this 1.5 number is a number, normally it's a number we're trying to avoid and what they mean is average of 1.5 C above. So just one month hitting 1.5 does not mean that we have reached the number 1.5 that we are all trying to avoid. But wow, it sure is not looking good.

I keep saying this, I'm going to say it again. Every time we turn around, climate scientists are saying, oh no, actually 30 years ago we got it wrong. It's much worse than we thought.

It is worse. So whatever they're predicting now, you have to understand that they are not exaggerating. Whatever they're predicting now is probably conservative and it is probably actually much worse than what they're saying.

And ten years from now it'll be much worse than what they are predicting. So we have to keep that in mind and I'm going to go, oh, I'll just say that. My brother lives in Tempe, Arizona, which is like right, tempe and Phoenix are right next to each other and so he has been one of those people suffering through the two straight weeks where every single day it hit over 110 degrees.

There were times when it was over 118 degrees. And in case you don't know, human beings cannot survive outside at that temperature. You will die if you're in 110 degrees for too many hours.

You can't survive. Your body breaks down. So there are now places that used to be habitable, that are becoming phases, even in America, right? We're not just talking about in other countries, but phases of the year where it is uninhabitable.

If you are an unhoused person, if you do not have an air conditioner, if your power goes out for so many reasons, then there are a lot of deaths happening anyway. I will stop right there and I will let you guys jump in. But we are truly seeing the devastating effects of climate change right now.

It's not in the future, it's happening now and it's only going to get worse. I really want to underscore that last point because there's been something that's so common in climate change related rhetoric that talks about keeping the planet safe for, let's say, like the grandchildren, and talking about a predominantly kind of future generation lens, whereas all the stuff from this month especially is underscored that we're actually talking about those of us alive today, that it will be worse for those in the future. But it's not just something far off in the abstract, it is something that people are experiencing today.

Yeah, I just want to add that again, as we've talked on this podcast, we're not hitting our climate goals even for the state, even for blue Massachusetts. And the media is covering the sort of ins and outs of the inability to have offshore wind, which is bonkers. We should have offshore wind.

The inability to have offshore wind. They cover it like it's a soap opera, right? Like, oh, they're fighting and we can't get a contractor. And the legislature continues to just dilly dally around and oh, it needs to change the rules rather than just mandate to the private corporations that somehow are controlling our public lines, our public resources, our public utilities, to tell them that they are going to accept offshore wind, they're going to get paid this amount and that's it.

And if they can't do it, then we're going to bring then the government's going to do it. Someone's going to do it because they are treating this like we have time and the media is covering this like the interesting thing is the lack of agreement, right? They are covering it like the soap opera piece and the infighting rather than like this is a climate catastrophe. As the UN chief said, we're not no longer in global warming, we're in global boiling.

And that's the way you need to cover. So I think the other piece that I'm thinking about in terms of this is there's a debate right now and again, I cannot believe this is a debate about whether or not we should be building new homes in way that is more sustainable, that's more climate, that doesn't add to the climate crisis in the middle of this scorching heat. And yet reporters are reporting on this.

Not from the perspective of look going outside and it being too hot to open a window. Not from the dire consequences that climate scientists are saying we are facing from inaction. They literally covered these small regulatory changes to make it just a little bit better when we're consuming products and building homes as a problem for developers.

The angle of the Telegram article in Worcester was from the perspective of the developers and then Master List, our so called place that creates sort of political news, covered it from the perspective of developers as if developers are the people who will be. And it's this is what I mean when I say it's really disjointing and people really can't fathom how bad this is to Anna's point, right? The reason they can't is because we continue to fail. How it gets talked about, how it gets treated.

We are not taking it seriously. And that's whenever I say I promise you, you're not taking it seriously as you like, this is what mean. Like we all treated as Jonathan said, like there's time and there just is not want to I want to bring back a message that we said about the budget, which is this idea that people will mention one good thing and not focus on the big picture of what it actually means.

And for example, with municipal policy there's a lot of effort to make new municipal buildings really environmentally friendly. There's all sorts of stretch codes and wonderful things that you can do and that's great. In Medford 67% of our emissions come from buildings.

And what percent of our buildings do you think are new? It's very small. The vast, vast majority, 90 some-odd percent of buildings are not new buildings. We have to tackle that problem.

So of course, new buildings should be as environmentally friendly as they possibly can. Of course they should. But we cannot rest and not talk about the elephant in the room, which is the 90 some odd percent of buildings that are going to remain in our city and are not meeting those codes because we haven't passed anything to retrofit buildings, the older buildings.

So we also, again, with climate change, we have to look at the big picture and we have to think to ourselves, okay, it's fine to pass one bill or another bill, but what is the majority of our emissions coming from? How can we tackle that problem? We are going to take a brief pause and we are going to remind you that we do appreciate your support. We love to be in contact with everyone. We take topics.

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We really appreciate it. And go ahead and click that link below right now. Yeah, you do have time.

It'll only take a minute. Thank you. And we are going to come back to talk about the state House and the session right that our state legislature goes through.

It's a two year session. Certain things happen at certain times. It's very prescribed.

It doesn't have to be this way. We're talking about it now because they're in August break. They take a big break in August, they have another break in the wintertime where they take a long break.

And certain things happen at certain times in this two year cycle, and they are not allowed to happen at any other time in the cycle. So we're just going to talk you through a little bit of how that cycle happens and why it's a little dumb. It doesn't have to be that way.

We would get a lot more accomplished if it were a little different. I was going to say I was hoping for the speaking of brief pauses, transition between the mid roll and talking about the August recess, but it is something that is a while to think of that despite the fact that we do have a full time legislature. However, there are long periods where they will simply not be doing work, and it's much longer periods of them not doing work than is the case with Congress, because Congress because with the Massachusetts legislature, August is off.

They'll be gone for late November and December of this year, and they will be gone after July of next year with some different bouts of breaks kind of in that. And the fact that the formal session ends in July 31 of next year is always fascinating because in Congress, where they don't do much around an election, they still expect that they might have to be working in the September before that, they might have to come back to do stuff in December. Granted, sometimes it's stuff that they could have done early, but they assume that the job's not done of policy making.

Whereas in the Massachusetts legislature, it's just like large blocks of time where you just kind of no legislating will happen. And in the beginning of the year, because of how long they take when it comes to rules, committee assignments, assigning bills to committee, treating the budget as all consuming and kind of displacing all other policy consideration, so much of the legislative session is simply just not for. I think it's I think it's wild that we take for granted.

So it's not just that Minnesota passed all of these amazing legislative things. It's that they passed things. It's July.

They started in January. What other job could you have where you did nothing for months on end? You don't hold hearings, you don't move anything forward. They all pretend like the budget is all consuming, but none of them are working on it.

You have 160 legislators, four or five of them worked on it. They're not doing anything. And the real reason they're not doing anything is because they don't have any control and they know it's a waste of their time.

Right. The real reason is why legislate when the only thing that matters is what the speaker wants to do. And so you're just waiting.

You know, the speaker allowed Mike day one state rep to work on the gun legislation, decided for himself, tried to push it himself. Nobody else was a part of that legislative process. We can all talk about the state senate and how wild it is that they're sort of pro gun and we're just like holding it up for no reason and that's all wild.

But at the end of the like, yeah, they wanted to have a process for legislation they wanted know talk about. Right? Right. So like they do so little and even their processes when they do do things is so broken, there's no conversation.

There's no try to move it through. Right. So they're not doing anything.

And they could pass something today just as a reminder. They don't have to wait till July 31 of next year. They could pass something right now.

They could pass something in August. There's no reason to be off in August. They're not doing anything that requires them to be off in.

Just it's a wild ride. It's a wild how little work they it's not for me. It's not just that they don't pass things, which is true.

It's like they don't do any of the mechanisms. Mike Day isn't currently holding hearings about his gun bill. He's not going to the public and trying to build support for it.

They're not letting people know why it's different and how it will pass supreme Court. They're not doing anything. They're not legislating on it.

They're not holding hearings on it. It's just like we couldn't force it through overnight in ten minutes. So we're just going to pretend we're just not going to do anything, and we're not going to work on housing, we're not going to work on health care, we're not going to work on the environment.

There's nothing happening for those bills. What's wild is I don't know if folks saw that at the end of last week that several of the House sides of joint committees just started pulling fe bills to report things out after the House had told the Senate earlier, we will not report out a single bill in a joint committee until January. And then as a weird form of retaliation for the Senate not allowing them to report out the gun bill that still doesn't even have a committee.

The House just decided to House directed chairs to just pick a few bills and just do a poll and report them out on your own, which just shows that it's like weirdly high school pettiness between the chambers that is also a source of inertia. But the fact that they weren't planning to report anything out until January is like, not enough attention bonkers component of this. Well, this is part of what's so crazy about the Massachusetts state legislature in the state House specifically, is you know at the beginning of the two year session, everybody has to get their bill in, right? If you don't get your bill in in the first, like, two, three months of that session, forget it for two years, right? I mean, don't things happen in two years? Don't people have needs within two years? And then there's the hearing process.

All the hearings happen in the same few months, and then there's the committee process, and everything goes through committee in the same few months. It makes no sense, and it doesn't have to be that way. But this is part of why things don't get worked on, because you're not allowed to create a new bill.

If it's the other 20 months of the session, you're not allowed to do that. And I just think again, I just want to say how what Jonathan is saying is weird, that they were not going to do any they're not going to pull anything out. And then because they wanted to be petty, they were.

Like, pull to pull some things bills out, but not to move it just to be petty, not to make people's lives better, not to address long standing problems, not to things just to be petty. And none of the bills that they're going to try to push out to be like, look, we can move things without you. None of those bills are going to go anywhere.

They're not even taking them seriously. Like, oh, this is actually important legislation. It's just a tool to be petty.

And then I'm going to pause right here because this is where we're going to bring in the women's soccer team. Know we have a wildly Democratic sorry, capital D Democratic, right? As in the Democratic Party, state House, and state Senate. And yet they seem unable to have an agenda, right? They have a party platform.

Their agenda, they don't appear to have that on their agenda to pass the things in the party platform. They don't appear to have an agenda. And I love to talk about democracy and how you have to engage people in democracy.

You get to assume that people are going to be excited when nothing is happening. And Jonathan, you had a great point about the women's soccer team and about what it means to actually work and win and show your fans that you're doing. If your team is hardworking and they win, then you build a fan base and that you don't necessarily need to win every game after those because it's impossible to win every single game.

But if you have the track record of victory that you intend to try to continue to deliver on, people stay with you in the ebb of flow of it because they know that you have the potential to win, you have a frequency of winning, and that you actively seek that as your goal. And in Massachusetts, part of the problem is that they don't worry. They're not worried because all the fans are for their team, right? They're already there.

They're not going away. The Republican Party is not going to win over the state House or the state Senate. And so there's no real incentive for them to actually pass policy, I would say, and more importantly, because I would never want the Republican Party in its current state to have a thing, they don't worry that there will be pressure from any of the organizations.

The media will never you know, you listen to this podcast, you will know that they've done this petty thing, but it wasn't in the Boston Globe. There's no oversight of that in Mass Live. The press release press of Politico and Mass Live and Commonwealth aren't going to report on it, but they will, of course, copy and paste all of their press releases for this budget.

The oversight is not just like for me, there's not any infrastructure opposing this sort of structure in anywhere way. There's no other center of power. There's one center of power.

And there's nothing that can sort of pressure them to do things because they hold all the power. Yeah, but well, I'd say except for the one, which is that if you're listening to this, you have power, your oversight, your complaints. I joked that we've bullied them over Twitter into giving more rental insurance.

They are thin skinned. They are easily bullied. So there is pressure points for us to do good things.

It's just so rarely accessed by our larger progressive community. Absolutely. That's what we're doing here.

We're getting people to engage and step up and do the good work of making your representatives represent us all. Wonderful. Thank you so much to everyone in we are always appreciative for all of our listeners, all of our donors.

Thank you so much, and we look forward to talking to you all next week. Bye.