It's July 1. That means we're just days away from barbecues and fireworks. It also means Massachusetts state government is starting its new fiscal year. But once again, there's no deal on the budget.
It's now 14 years that Massachusetts lawmakers have not agreed on a full-year budget before the start of the state's fiscal year. But that doesn't mean state office buildings are shut down.
Chris Lisinski from the State House News Service s us to explain what's happening.
Chris Lisinski, State House News Service: Policymakers last week sent through an interim budget with about a month of funding to keep state government operational through roughly the end of July, the first full month of fiscal 2025. This is a pretty regular practice in all of these 14 years in a row. When lawmakers have missed the deadline to get an annual budget in place by the start of the fiscal year, they've used these temporary spending plans to avoid any real, concrete effects, like a government shutdown that you might see at the national level.
It's also a way to buy negotiators more time, so they feel less pressure to agree to on that annual budget, which we should note is pretty typically the biggest bill that lawmakers do every year and is packed to the brim not just with spending, but with a bunch of really significant policy riders as well.
Sam Hudzik, NEPM: And that short-term budget, it's supposed to last through the end of the month, but the governor wants the Legislature to get her a full year budget by the week before that. Why is this?
So the governor gets 10 days to review any bill that is sent to her desk. That's how it always is for every governor, every bill. Something as massive as what will probably be a $58 billion annual budget, you can imagine, it takes a lot of time to go through that, check all the line items, check all the outside policy sections. And it would be pretty expected for Gov. Maura Healey to take that full 10 days or something close to it to complete her review.
And that review includes deciding what things she wants to veto.
Exactly. It's not always the case with every bill, but with spending bills like the annual budget, the governor can veto only specific sections of it without dooming the entire bill as a whole. We see that every year. There are individual line items that a governor will try and reduce spending on, and some policy sections that a governor will either strike or send back with proposed amendments.
And Chris, last week we saw this host of huge U.S. Supreme Court decisions announced, and we saw something similar on the state level from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. One big decision was about some ballot questions concerning the employment status of Uber and Lyft drivers that were aimed at reaching voters this fall. But within hours of that ruling, a big announcement from the state attorney general essentially made the SJC's decision moot. What happened there?
That's right. Nearly four years after then-Attorney General, now-Governor Healey, agreed to a settlement with now-Attorney General Andrea Campbell. They're going to pay a combined $175 million to the state, most of which will become restitution payments for drivers and roll out a whole suite of new wages and benefits and protections for those drivers.
With that in place, one of the of the settlement was that Uber and Lyft can no longer pursue a ballot question. The other companies who are working alongside them decided that they would rather just hang up the fight than try and continue on their own without the very sizable financial Uber and Lyft would have brought.
And there's one other ballot question about these rideshare drivers. It's backed by labor groups. But is that ballot question moving forward after this settlement?
As far as we can tell, it still is moving forward. This would let drivers unions on platforms like Uber and Lyft. It's not entirely clear if that is rendered moot in any legal sense by the settlement with the attorney general and these companies. So we're still waiting to unpack the full implications of that. But at least in the immediate aftermath, we have not seen any major shift in the outlook there.
