House budget part 3: When vote trading may be the right thing

Third in a series of thoughts on this week’s budget battle.

When the Massachusetts House ignored my advice and passed a sales-tax increase Monday night--bumping the rate from 5% to 6.25%--Speaker Robert DeLeo was forced to scramble to put together 107 votes in an effort to build a majority large enough to override Governor Patrick’s threatened veto. Rep. Dennis Rosa of Leominster told the Telegram & Gazette the House leadership was working hard to get votes changed:

Freshman Rep. Dennis A. Rosa, D-Leominster, said he was asked to back the speaker’s tax plan repeatedly throughout the day, but held his ground to vote against it.

“My arm got twisted two or three times yesterday, but politely twisted,” he said. “It was fine with me. They made me a sales pitch and I made my case that I had to represent my district and stand up for my people,” Mr. Rosa said.

“Leadership wasn’t happy with it but I think they understand my decision.”

In my two earlier posts I was critical of Worcester Rep. Vincent Pedone for changing his vote for what appear to be less-than courageous reasons. But would it be different if a representative changed his vote in return for a project or funding that was vital to his community?

For instance, take the situation that may have faced Rep. Harold Naughton of Clinton. (And I want to make it clear here that this is a completely hypothetical situation. Not only do I not know if Naughton changed his vote from No to Yes, I don’t have any idea why he would have made a change if he did. I’m presenting this just for the sake of argument.) When the budget was first released a couple of weeks ago, Clinton was looking at taking a significant hit in local aid. Not only was the town facing the 32% cut in local aid that all cities and town are facing, but Clinton also faced the loss of an additional $500,000 in aid, as explained by the Times and Courier:

Half that cut comes via the elimination of an annual state payment of $500,000 to operate the wastewater treatment plant on High Street, Town Administrator Michael Ward said Tuesday. State Rep. Harold Naughton Jr., D-Clinton, vowed to fight the cut.

“I feel that’s not just a statutory obligation, but a moral obligation of the commonwealth,” Naughton said. “This will be my priority. Every resource that I have [will be brought] to the fight.”

The payment enables the town to pay its $500,000 annual bill to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which operates the sewer plant and the Wachusett Reservoir. Naughton said the payment is intended as compensation for the state taking Clinton land to build the reservoir in the 1890s and 1900s....

The article goes on to suggest that Naughton had not yet committed to raising the sales tax:

“I think we’ll see some proposals for taxes,” Naughton said. “I think you’ll see debate on a raise in the sales tax, I think you’ll see us return to debate on the statewide meals and hotel tax...I still need to listen to some debate and be convinced one way or the other.”

So in our scenario, we know that there is something that Naughton is willing to “use every resource” to fight for, and that he had not publicly committed to voting for a sales tax. Fast forward to Monday. In the Democratic caucus, Naughton does not commit to being one of the 81 yes votes Speaker DeLeo needs to pass the bill. Suddenly, the Governor’s letter hits everyone’s e-mail box and DeLeo starts to scramble to pick up an additional 26 votes to ensure a veto-proof majority.

If DeLeo heads down to Naughton’s office or pulls him aside on the floor of the house and asks “what will it take to get you to join us on the sales tax?” the answer is… “Put the $500,000 for the MWRA treatment plant back into the budget and I’ll vote with you.”

Again, I’ve made the DeLeo-Naughton scenario up in my head, so it may not have happened that way. But if it did, would that be reason enough to change a vote? Is raising the sales tax worth the additional $500,000 in local aid for Clinton?

I don’t know. I expect that this is one of the toughest parts of being a state rep or senator: how do you balance what you think is best for the state against what you think is best for your district? I hoped that Naughton would vote against the sales tax, but perhaps he had reasons other than tax philosophy to do so.

Or maybe he didn’t. Either way, it will be interesting to see if Clinton ends up with the $500,000 after all, and how much more Naughton will have to fight to get it.

Tags: Massachusetts Clinton Harold Naughton Leominster Dennis Rosa State House Budget Deval Patrick

House Budget part 2: The Governor wins by losing

Second in a series of thoughts on this week’s budget battle.

When the Massachusetts House ignored my advice and passed a sales-tax increase Monday night--bumping the rate from 5% to 6.25%--they did so over Governor Patrick’s threat of a veto. While Governor Patrick lost the vote—-the house approved the proposal by a bare veto-proof margin—-he is likely to have won the public relations battle. In the end, that might be more important than the vote on the tax increase itself.

Despite his threat, the governor is not going to veto this plan. If he were truly committed to vetoing the sales tax hike, he would have waited until after it passed to make that known. The Telegram & Gazette makes that clear:

There were just over 81 votes in support after a caucus Monday morning.

It was only after the governor said he may veto the tax hike if the House failed to adopt numerous controversial reforms that House leaders interrupted their session and spent the next 10 hours converting enough Democrats to line up with the House speaker in a show of strength against the governor’s threat.

When it was clear Mr. DeLeo had more than the 107 votes for the tax hike, House leaders proceeded with the vote. But there were many holdouts. In the end 14 Central Massachusetts House members voted for the sales tax and 11 voted against it. There were just over 81 votes in support after a caucus Monday morning.

The governor had to know that the House was nowhere close to having the votes to override his veto early in the day. Had he kept his mouth shut, he could have vetoed (or issued his threat) after the measure had passed.

He also had to know that he would come out of this fight smelling like a rose. Patrick can claim that he tried to stand up for the people of the Commonwealth in opposing a broad-based tax increase and that the only reason the increase went through was because Legislature dislikes him so personally that it was unwilling to put personal politics aside in an effort to stick it to him.

An example of a rep who may have at least partly changed his vote due to frustration with the governor’s politics is Worcester’s Vincent Pedone, who we have quoted before:

Rep. Vincent A. Pedone, D-Worcester, who along with Rep. John J. Binienda, D-Worcester, panned the sales tax idea last week, came around to join the speaker’s tax hike proposal Monday night. He said the governor’s “surprise letter” on Monday created “a much different dynamic” on the vote….

He said House members also took the governor’s action as a move against them for political gain. He argued the House has acted on four of five reform packages, even though the governor claims they do not go far enough.

“Sending the letter is not leadership,” Mr. Pedone said, also criticizing a video of the governor on his Web page urging supporters to contact legislators and demand more reforms. “It’s pure pandering to the public,” Mr. Pedone said.

So Rep. Pedone and potentially 25 other members changed there vote from no to yes because the governor publicly threatened to ratify their no vote and veto the bill? It appears that some members may be so petty that they would change their vote because a governor they do not like publicly supported their position. That’s just backwards.

(And sending the letter to the members of the legislature—-and the media-—as well as circulating a video message urging citizens to call their reps to lobby for the governor’s position is both leadership and pandering. There are a lot of us who wish the governor had been doing more of this sort of leading...he seems too often to be content to roll out policy ideas and hope that people instinctively embrace them, instead of advocating and campaigning for them.)

Of course, as I said above the sales tax hike will likely become law one way or the other. When the house and senate versions of the bill go to conference, you’re likely to see a final bill that includes the senate’s stronger reform measures merged with the house sales tax plan. And the governor will sit behind the big desk as he signs the measure, and take credit for holding the legislature’s feet to the fire on the issue of reform.

Or the governor may go all the way and strike the sales tax hike from the final bill, fully knowing that his veto will be overridden, and burnishing his improbable reputation as someone who is trying to put the breaks on the Legislature’s taxes.

Next: When vote trading might be a good thing

Tags: Massachusetts Worcester Vincent Pedone State House Budget Deval Patrick

House Budget part 1: Saving you from sugar tax by taxing everything else

First in a series of thoughts on this week’s budget battle in the state house.

Well, the Massachusetts House ignored my advice and passed a sales-tax increase Monday night, bumping the rate from 5% to 6.25%. In my previous post, I suggested the idea that being “afraid that voting for a string of tax changes would look bad on [a reps] record” was “a ridiculous thought if I’ve ever heard one.” Rep. Vincent Pedone of Worcester appears to be one of those members, as evidenced by his comments in the Telegram & Gazette:

Mr. Pedone said he switched [his vote] partly because of the argument that raising one tax was better than the numerous smaller tax hikes the governor has proposed. “It was a realization that we could not get core services delivered to the people of the commonwealth without this tax increase,” Mr. Pedone said….

“I don’t want to tax candy, and alcohol, and soda, and increase tolls, and continue down the line of the ‘taxes du jour’ proposed by the governor,” Mr. Pedone said.

So instead of taxing “candy, and alcohol, and soda,” Mr. Pedone thinks we’re better off by raising the sales tax on everything else. That’s just...wow. I cannot follow that logic at all, unless Pedone does not want to be on the record as “Yea on sin taxes, yea on gas taxes, yea on meals taxes.” Instead he can say “Well, I only voted to raise taxes once.”

It will be interesting to see if this pretzel-twist logic wins the day, or if voters see through it.

Next: The Governor Wins by Losing

Tags: Massachusetts Worcester Vincent Pedone State House Budget

Time to buy the man a calculator

Just catching up on this...Last week, the Sentinel and Enterprise ran a story on the trouble facing the city of Leominster if the cuts proposed in the Legislature’s budget make it into law. My jaw just about hit the floor when I saw this quote from newly elected state Rep. Dennis Rosa:

One area Mazzarella said he is watching is the cut in Lottery aid to cities and towns.

Mazzarella said the cuts should be equitable across the state based on the loss in revenue to the state Lottery.

State Rep. Dennis Rosa, D-Leominster, also said he's watching the Lottery money.

"I'm trying to figure out how much of a percentage we got cut compared with other communities," he said.

Huh? This is the budget put out by the legislative body of which you are a member and you don’t know how Leominster’s budget cuts compare to other communities?

Well, I do. Because I looked up the proposed 2010 budget, the final 2009 budget, and took out a scratch pad and a calculator and did the math. It literally took me all of 15 minutes to figure out that all of the communities that I care about received the same percentage cut to their budget.

First, here are the figures from FY2009 budget, the proposed FY2010, and the cuts. All numbers taken from the links on the Legislature’s web site, which must have been difficult for the rep or his staff to locate:

                FY09 (Actual)   FY10 (Prop)     Deficit        Change
Leominster      $7,111,354      $4,821,700      $2,289,654      -32%
Sterling        $  856,049      $  579,472      $  276,577      -32%
Clinton         $2,754,261      $1,938,212      $  816,049      -32%
Lancaster       $1,030,300      $  697,426      $  332,874      -32%

There you are. All of the communities in the No Drumlins region received 32% funding cuts. Rep. Rosa, you can thank me later for doing the tough work.

Tags: Massachusetts Leominster Dennis Rosa State House Budget

BREAKING: Naughton secures funds for the Wekepeke

The Consolidated Budget Amendment for Environment and Transportation was just posted to the House of Representatives' budget site. It includes the following line item:

...provided further, that not less than $250,000 shall be expended for the purpose of aquatic management for the Wekepeke Reservoir in the town of Sterling...

While it is less than the $1 million that Naughton originally requested, to get any money out of the budget in this year's financial climate is a significant accomplishment.

Note that the line does not specifically reference dam repair as the original proposal did. In fact the money was allocated in the Department of Conservation and Recreation line item instead of the Office of Dam Safety line item. The effect of that change is unclear.

The amendment has not officially passed yet, as debate will begin this afternoon, but approval in the House is just a formality. The appropriation will still need to be passed by the Senate and the Governor, but it is on its way.


Tags: Massachusetts Clinton Sterling Budget Wekepeke Harold Naughton

Earmarks, lots and lots of earmarks

1,512 to be exact. That is how many amendments to the fiscal year 2009 budget were filed by members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Nearly all of them are proposed increases to the budget for local projects.

Of the two legislators representing the town of Sterling, only Democrat Harold Naughton filed amendments; he filed 15 (see amendments 710-724). Republican Lewis Evangelidis did not file any amendments to the FY09 budget (or at least he isn't the primary sponsor of any amendments. A Google search only pulled up one amendment to which he is a co-sponsor. I wonder if anyone in the local press will ask him why he decided to stand on the sidelines this year).

Two of Naughton's earmarks would have a direct effect in Sterling. The biggest of the two could go a long way in settling the Wekepeke question. Amendment 716:

Mr. Naughton of Clinton moves to amend the bill in Section 2, item 2810-0700, by adding at the end thereof the following: “provided further that not less than $1,000,000 be provided for the repair of dams located at the Wekepeke Reservoir in the town of Sterling.”

Now, Naughton filed essentially the same amendment last year and it was not included in the final budget. I wonder if it has any chance at all of being included this year's budget, considering the deteriorating economic climate. But if it were to make the final budget it would remove a significant part of Clinton's incentive to develop the Wekepeke. Current estimates suggest that it will cost Clinton between $1 million and $1.5 million to meet their legal obligation to shore up the dams. If most or all of that money came from the state, Clinton wouldn't need to sell the water from the Wekepeke in order to fund repairs.

The other earmark would provide a grant for a community park in Sterling. Amendment 724:

Mr. Naughton of Clinton moves that bill be amended in item 2000 – 0100 by adding at the end thereof the following "Provided further that not less than $50,000 shall be expended for the expansion of Muddy Pond Park in the town of Sterling for the purpose of open space..."

Work on the project has already begun, but organizers are still raising money in an effort to secure the $250,000 estimated. A state grant of $50,000 would go a long way to helping Sterling realize it's goal.

If you feel strongly that either of these two amendments (or any of the other 1,150 amendments) should be included in the final budget, contact your state representative or the members of the Ways and Means Committee. Both Naughton and Evangelidis are members of the Ways and Means, so if you live in Sterling registering your opinion with your rep will also get your voice heard in the Ways and Means.

Tags: Massachusetts Clinton Sterling Budget Wekepeke Harold Naughton Lewis Evangelidis

Don't spend it all in one place

According to today's Sentinel and Enterprise, the state legislature has nearly broken the bank for the state's pre-schoolers:

The new education spending this week came in the form of an additional $6.25 in early education and child care...

What are they going to do with the six bucks? Buy happy meals for two lucky four year olds? Legislative priorities indeed!

Tags: Massachusetts Budget Sentinel and Enterprise