Massachusetts Senate to offer its own tax relief plan

By Sam Doran

State House News Service

Published: 05-14-2023 4:42 PM

BOSTON — Ending some of the uncertainty in the tax relief journey for Massachusetts residents, Senate leaders said their chamber will move ahead and propose its own relief package. They’re just not sure about its contents or when they might pass a plan.

The Senate’s hurtling toward its annual budget debate, and if taxpayers are going to see any relief in fiscal 2024, the state budget would theoretically need to account for that. So as he discussed his committee’s newly-released budget bill Tuesday, Ways and Means Chairman Mike Rodrigues said they had sewed in a $575 million placeholder to cover the yet-to-be-named relief proposals.

That figure seems to indicate the Senate — or, rather, its chieftains — are in the same dollar range as the House.

Gov. Maura Healey’s relief proposal would implement around a billion dollars’ worth of relief off the bat. But with a blip on the revenue radar this spring ($1.4 billion off the mark in April’s revenue report), House Speaker Ron Mariano told the press last week that lawmakers “anticipated the potential downslope of the economy” when Healey’s bill landed on their desks.

Hence, the House’s move in its $1.1 billion package to stagger implementation of some of the tax reforms over a multi-year period. So, what’s the pricetag for implementing roughly half of a $1.1 billion collection of tax changes? The $575 million sounds about right.

And the Senate’s relief pricetag last summer was in the $502 million range, he said, and if this year’s debate produces a bill that “comes in a little higher or it comes in a little lower, it would be easy to adjust” from that $575 million starting point.

All of that makes it sound like the top Democrats in the East Wing would love to replicate the kind of reforms they endorsed nearly a year ago, but the fact that Senate Democrats are still not ready to pull the trigger on a plan suggests at least some level of uncertainty.

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Senate President Karen Spilka has long been saying she’s on board with “progressive” tax relief, and said Healey’s proposal “pleased” her in February.

“It will happen, soon after the budget’s done,” Rodrigues said ... “Because we only got the tax bill from the House, what, two weeks ago?”

Senate Democrats have been holding some private caucus meetings recently. That’s the venue where lawmakers debate in private before they debate in public. One senator on Friday said he lost count of how many caucus huddles had been held thus far to bat around the tax relief issue.

By the time a bill hits the floor, Chairman Rodrigues could be a pretty busy man.

After the Senate debates its budget in the week leading up to Memorial Day, top lawmakers are supposed to spend the month of June privately negotiating their many differences to come up with a final spending plan by the fiscal new year’s deadline of July 1.

If the relief bill and the budget — which needs to account for whatever relief is agreed upon — are inextricably linked, how will those June talks go?

The Senate Ways and Means budget, which rings in at $55.8 billion, would spend 20% of the state’s surtax money on regional transit, invest millions of surtax revenues in tuition-free college programs, and open up in-state tuition for certain undocumented immigrants who went to high school here.

The immigrant tuition piece is poised to be a big policy difference from the House’s spending proposal, as is the Senate’s omission of “iLottery.” The House endorsed adding online products to the state Lottery’s offerings.

Something that Healey wanted, but has now been omitted by both branches, at least at this point: Millions of surtax dollars that the governor proposed spending on readying railway stations in Pittsfield and Palmer for the advent of east-west rail.

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