Here we go again, with Beacon Hill scrambling to pass a bevy of complex bills at the last minute like a bunch of drunken college students frantically cramming a semester’s work into a week.
Let’s just hope the so-called jobs bill, the only effort right now to provide a boost, albeit a modest one, to the Massachusetts economy, doesn’t get lost in the always predictable 11th-hour rush.
The jobs bill should be a slam dunk to pass muster at the State House. It’s packed with helpful, but not exactly hotly controversial items, including innovative financing to spur new job-creating development projects and permit extensions for builders still struggling to get their plans into action.
The merits of the bill are not the issue, but rather a legislative logjam that has the House and Senate also debating a major health care reform bill and the details of a tribal casino as the legislative session heads into its last week.
Some expect that the jobs bill may not get passed until the last day of the session next Tuesday, if it actually makes the deadline.
“We will have to hold our breath to the last minute,” said David Begelfer, chief exexecutive of NAIOP Massachusetts, which represents developers across the state.
Defenders of the State House status quo will surely come up with all sorts of excuses for legislative backlog, prime among them the highly complex proposal to rein in health care costs.
But frankly, there is always some big bill that can be blamed – last year and the year before that it was casinos.
Maybe it is inevitable that the debate over the health care bill would drag into the final week.
The same is true for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe’s compact for its planned $500 million casino, which Gov. Deval Patrick just signed and sent over to the Legislature.
‘Chaotic Rush’
Yet the jobs bill also finds itself competing for the attention of lawmakers with other, more mundane items, including a transportation bond bill and a supplement state spending bill.
Given the perilous state of the economy, it’s just wrong that a modest proposal that could provide a small lift to job creation here in the Bay State is left hanging as the end of the legislative session looms on July 31.
Maybe the State House gang is too busy playing power politics to notice, but consumer spending is slowing, job growth lags, and the debt crisis in Europe seems increasingly like an unexploded bomb ticking away in the heart of the global economy.
The bill’s highlights include authorization for up to $400 million in infrastructure work for projects across the state. The work would be financed through tax-exempt state bonds, supported in turn by tax payments made by the developers.
The bill also gives developers across the state another two-year extension on their local and state permits.
“This is no silver bullet, but there are a lot of things that can only help,” Begelfer said.
Okay, the Legislature is not a factory – we probably wouldn’t want it to run like a factory, turning out a steady stream of nettlesome legislation. Rather, it’s local democracy in action, with all the lobbying, back scratching and greasy backroom-deal making that involves.
But is it too much to demand a more orderly way of doing business, one that doesn’t rely on a chaotic rush during the last week or two of a session that began months before?
It unfairly puts worthy bills in jeopardy, while creating the opportunity of last-minute amendments and tweaks to help a powerful benefactor or appease an irksome critic.
With several major pieces of legislation pending during the session’s last days, and hundreds of less favored proposals begging for attention, more than a few lawmakers will be voting on proposals they don’t completely understand.
So, wake up Beacon Hill, smell the coffee and pass that jobs bill!
