Senate passes $61.4B annual state budget
Photo I Chris Lisinski/SHNS
(Center) Senate President Karen Spilka speaks with reporters on Tuesday.
On the same day the U.S. House approved a sweeping package of tax relief and funding cuts that could impact state finances, the Massachusetts Senate approved an annual state budget that presses ahead with a sizable spending increase.
The Senate voted 38-2 on a roughly $61.4 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2026, capping off three days of deliberations in which senators tacked on tens of millions of additional dollars and wove in a handful of major policy riders like prescription drug price controls and liquor license reforms.
Republican Sens. Kelly Dooner of Taunton and Ryan Fattman of Sutton cast the two no votes.
Elected officials on Beacon Hill for months have been voicing concerns about potential budgetary upheaval as a result of federal funding rollbacks. Partway through the Senate's deliberations, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a package that would stanch hundreds of millions of dollars per year from flowing to various state programs.
Yet the Senate, like the House did last month, opted to proceed on a path that mostly mirrored the typical approach.
The final Senate budget increases state spending more than 6% over the version Gov. Maura Healey signed last summer, more than twice the rate of growth in the prior year. It's built on revenue -- and federal reimbursement -- forecasts crafted in January, before congressional Republicans made significant progress on their attempted spending cuts.
Senate budget chief Michael Rodrigues said at the outset of debate that lawmakers here would not "freeze in place" waiting to see what happened in Washington, D.C. Soon after the U.S. House muscled through its sweeping package of tax cuts and spending reduction, Rodrigues said he had not yet "had a chance to analyze it."
After the final vote Thursday evening, Senate President Karen Spilka told the News Service she felt it made sense not to change the chamber's spending plan at this point because "there's so much uncertainty."
"It's impossible to build a budget on data and information that we have no idea what it is or what it means, because it's not stable -- it changes by the hour, forget about day, week, month or more," she said. "We have to build a budget. What do we do, what do we cut without knowing what it is?"
The Senate added $81.1 million to the budget through amendments, mostly in the form of local earmarks, according to a Spilka aide. That pushed the final bottom line to about $61.4 billion, a bit lower than the House's nearly $61.5 billion plan.
Rodrigues said most of the growth in spending is on non-discretionary areas. Nearly two-thirds of the increase is attributable to higher caseloads at MassHealth, he said.
"There's really little discretion we have there, unless we want to take people off the rolls of MassHealth," he told the News Service. "We looked at, literally lifted every rock and looked under every mattress to try to find any sort of savings we could."
Sen. Patricia Jehlen said Thursday that she views the Senate-approved spending plan as "an austerity budget."
"It does not meet the needs of our commonwealth; it is the best we can do with the resources we have," she said.
Fiscal year 2026 begins July 1, but Massachusetts is unlikely to have a budget in place by then. House and Senate Democrats for years have felt comfortable stretching their private negotiations into the next fiscal year and keeping state government funded with holdover budgets, at times producing some of the latest annual budgets in the nation.
The last time a governor signed an annual state budget into law before the start of the fiscal year was in 2010.
Lawmakers on the budget conference committee will have a long list of points to deliberate, including the amount of one-time revenue redirection, how much money to provide to the MBTA as well as other transportation and education initiatives funded by the surtax, the specifics of regulating broker's fees, and whether to pause admissions reforms at vocational and technical schools.
The Senate tacked several substantial policy measures onto the conference committee agenda. One amendment the Senate adopted Wednesday would allow state health care regulators to cap prices for some medications, an idea that proponents say will help reduce quickly accelerating prescription drug spending but opponents warn will wreak economic harm.
Another provision adopted Thursday as part of a larger amendment bundle would overhaul the process by which municipalities petition for additional liquor licenses and give cities and towns greater control over the number of licenses available.
The Senate also added language calling on the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education by June 30, 2026 to recommend improvements to the foundation budget formula, which dictates aid that municipalities receive for K-12 education and how many of their own dollars communities need to contribute.
Despite the uncertainty fueled by Washington, D.C., Spilka and Rodrigues said they do not expect the imminent conference committee negotiations to play out much differently than usual.
Asked if she'd be comfortable with the panel slashing spending during its talks if Congress finalizes cuts, Spilka replied, "We'll have to see how it goes."
"Both branches have produced solid, responsible budgets, so I think from there they can go forward and we'll see," she said.
"We'll deal with the facts presented to us, not with rumor or assumption," Rodrigues added. "It has to be the facts. The budget that we engrossed tonight is based upon the facts as we know it today."
Senators pushed most of the amendments filed by Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr to the final day of deliberations. Tarr, as is often the case, deployed a series of props to argue in favor of some of his proposals. This year's theatrics included an aide wearing a "Backpack of Budget Burden," who attempted to climb a ladder on the Senate floor adorned with cardboard printouts declaring the rungs representative of health care costs and taxes.
After about an hour of debate, the Senate voted 34-5 to reject a Tarr measure that would have allowed cities and towns to petition the state for relief from the mandatory zoning reforms under the MBTA Communities Act if they could demonstrate an inability to fulfill drinking water, wastewater, transportation or environmental requirements as a result of compliance.
"We are not saying we believe there shouldn't be more housing in the commonwealth. We understand that we're at least 200,000 units short. We understand that we have to take bold and decisive action. We understand that our future hinges on being able to build that housing," Tarr said. "But the question is, how do we best do that, how do we do it with protecting due process, how do we do it so that we're not going out on a fool's errand and creating a zoning district where housing cannot be supported with the resources it needs?
Democrats argued that an appeal process would allow resisting communities to avoid zoning reforms intended to spur much-needed housing production.
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