Massachusetts House Approves $58 Billion Budget: Boosting Schools and Transportation
The majority Democratic state House, with the support of nearly all of the chamber’s Republicans, voted decisively in favor of a $58 billion budget for 2024-25 that increases taxpayer funding for schools and the MBTA.
The fiscal blueprint was approved 154-3 by the house, transferring the dispute over spending priorities to the Senate. House Democrats were unanimous in their support for the package, while the 25-member House Republican caucus was divided, with four members voting against the budget.
The vote followed three days of relatively quiet, behind-the-scenes talks in which representatives worked out the minutiae of more than a half dozen mega-amendments that added approximately $100 million to the bill.
The Republican leadership in the House supported the budget, but GOP Reps. Nicholas Boldyga, 3rd Hampden; David DeCoste, 5th Plymouth; Marc Lombardo, 22nd Middlesex; and Alyson Sullivan-Almeida broke ranks to vote against it.
The Democrats’ plan includes $1.3 billion in expenditures for transportation and education programs funded by the state’s “Millionaire’s Tax,” a 4% surtax charged on state citizens earning $1 million or more each year. In a statement, House Democratic leaders praised the spending plan, which was $62 million less than Democratic Gov. Maura Healey’s January budget proposal.
The budget “takes a fiscally responsible approach to making meaningful investments in areas of significant need,” according to Virginia House Speaker Ronald J. Mariano (D-3rd Norfolk). The spending plan agreed on Friday “allocates key funding to better support Massachusetts students and families, increase access to affordable health care, and provide for a safer and more reliable public transportation system,” Mariano said.
House Ways & Means Committee Chairperson Aaron Michlewitz, D-3rd Suffolk, had a similar attitude, stating that it “builds off the successes of the last few years by prioritizing our residents.”
Despite declining state tax collections and the mounting expense of the state’s emergency shelter system, lawmakers padded the budget with amendments.
On Thursday, Democrats in the House and Senate delivered Healey a compromise funding bill for the shelter system that sets additional time constraints for both unhoused Massachusetts citizens and new migrant arrivals.
In a statement, the conservative Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, which has urged lawmakers to cut spending, criticized the House budget for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1. The document “successfully mugs the taxpayers of their hard-earned money, and keeps them on the hook to fund new priorities,” the group’s spokesperson, Paul D. Craney, said, adding that the House budget “has nothing to show in the way of spending restraint or fiscal responsibility.”