Back in May (which seems at once like three years and three minutes ago), the Senate passed its version of the Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 budget. Over four days of debate and 43 roll call votes, our team worked to include district priorities among the 400 amendments adopted in the $58 billion budget proposal.
On July 18, the House and Senate voted to send the negotiated Conference Committee budget to the Governor’s desk for her consideration.
The final budget, signed by the Governor on July 29, is full of team wins that are now law.
The budget is a piece of legislation and so it can include policy changes in addition to spending.
Before signing the budget into law, the Governor vetoed specific items, sending them back to the legislature with proposed reductions in spending. The fate of these vetoes is not fully known.
K-12 education
As I’ve written to you many times, some of the deepest frustrations and greatest pain I have witnessed from constituents is rooted in the way the state funds K-12 education. While the legislature was able to raise the funding increase for “minimum aid” districts to $104 per student in the final budget, we didn’t come close to meeting the needs in the communities I serve.
I also pushed for the final budget to include the Chapter 70 working group I helped add in the Senate budget (Chapter 70 is the state’s K-12 education funding statute) — but this provision was not included in the final budget and so did not make it to the Governor’s desk.
Gender X
For six years I have filed legislation to require a non-binary identification option on all state forms that require gender identification, like birth records, adoptions records, driver’s licenses, marriage licenses, and all other state forms. Working with the Governor and Representative Mindy Domb, my partner on this bill, we successfully added these provisions to the budget.
Disaster relief
July 2021 and 2023 saw natural disasters cause tens of millions of dollars of damage across our region. We learned the hard way that Massachusetts was one of two states in the nation without some sort of disaster relief procedure, protocol, or disaster funding. Even though I worked with colleagues to secure $7.5 million for communities affected in 2021, and $20 million for farmers and $10 million for municipalities affected in 2023, I knew we had to do better.
That’s why my team and I partnered with Representative Natalie Blais to research, draft, and launch legislation to create the first ever state disaster relief fund. Working with the Governor and House, the policy was included in the FY25 budget and it is now law, with an initial capitalization of $14 million.
Changing the state flag and seal
A state commission on the state flag, seal and motto recommended changing all three, but stopped short of finalizing a new design or a new motto. I worked with Senator Jason Lewis to ensure that the FY25 budget allocates $100,000 for an advisory commission to make recommendations for a new design of the state seal and state flag and a new state motto. The new design would replace the racist elements of the current flag and seal. I hope that this is the last big push, and I promise to see this work through to the end.
Montague’s David Detmold has been leading statewide advocacy on this critical issue. Please read his timely summary here.
Home equity theft
Spurred on by Greenfield constituents, I filed a bill to end “Home Equity Theft” — a practice in which a city or town is permitted to keep the full value of a home foreclosed upon due to back taxes owed, above and beyond the amount of back taxes owed. Several colleagues filed similar bills. After the bills were filed, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the practice is unconstitutional, and later a Massachusetts court applied the decision to Massachusetts. I am pleased to report that the budget includes provisions ending home equity theft, thanks especially to Senator Mark Montigny. What’s more, the new law also requires clear, multilingual notices to warn homeowners of the impacts of owing back taxes, lower interest rates on past due tax bills, and additional consumer protections.
Read more details on the new law here.
Higher education
The budget includes provisions to significantly reinvest in higher education which I championed as Senate Chair of the Higher Education Committee. You can listen to a WGBH Morning Edition interview with me here. Or an episode of CommonWealth’s CodCast here.
Here’s a round up of some of the provisions:
Free community college for all: This initiative builds on last year’s measure to provide for free community college for students age 25 or above, and for nursing students.
Expanded student support program: The SUCCESS program provides wraparound supports and services to improve outcomes and graduation rates for the most vulnerable populations, including low-income, first-generation, students of color, LGBTQ, and disabled students. This program had been operating well at community colleges. Our budget expanded the program to state universities.
Expanded financial aid: The budget adds $80 million to the MassGrant Plus program to provide additional financial aid for low and moderate income students attending UMass and other state universities. These funds are in addition to $176 million for the MassGrant program which provides need-based scholarship assistance for low-income students in both public and private higher education.
Seamless MassTransfer: The budget establishes a more seamless system for transferring community college credits to four-year Massachusetts state schools.
Public higher education capital needs: The budget establishes a working group to develop recommendations for a financing structure for public higher education capital needs, including funding for decarbonization, deferred maintenance, and facilities improvement.
Higher Education Quality and Affordability Commission: The budget establishes a commission to make recommendations on reducing the cost of attendance and student debt, and on improvements needed to increase the recruitment and retention of qualified adjunct and full-time faculty and staff.
Beginning to celebrate local wins
Over the next months, we’ll tell you about the funding flowing into the Hampshire, Franklin, Worcester district, most of it in larger line items and grant programs, but we’ll start with a handful of key earmarks:
- $350K for Seven Sisters Midwifery & Community Birth Center
- $294K for a new police training program at Greenfield Community College to help comply with police reform
- $250K for Baystate Health’s Family Medicine Residency program in Greenfield
- $106K for improvements to doors at Swift River School
- $50K for the construction of an outdoor stage at Forbes Library
- $50K for updates to the New Dawn Arts Center
