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With billions of dollars in federal pandemic aid burning a hole in its pocket, the state legislature is looking for ways to invest in the future of Massachusetts.

A Senate committee charged with charting a path forward for the state has released a 22-page menu of policy options to do just that, highlighting a range of ideas from expanding access to high-speed internet and reimagining child and senior care to a public bank charged with closing the racial wealth gap and a massive government investment in housing construction.

Committee on Reimagining Massachusetts: Post Pandemic Resiliency chair Sen. Adam Hinds (D-Pittsfield) and Senate President Karen Spilka jointly released the report with five colleagues at a press conference yesterday. Hinds said the committee planned to continue to explore areas such as health care, climate change, environmental justice, voting systems and K-12 education.

“We’re not going back exactly to the old normal,” Spilka said.

The report was released the same day the legislature held its final hearing focused on how to spend close to $5 billion in American Rescue Plan Act funds. Hind’s committee identified ways to spend billions of dollars on both short- and long-term priorities, suggesting some of it could come from the state’s budget surplus or its pot of ARPA money.

“These policy proposals and these policy recommendations will initiate and go through the debate process that is the heart and soul of our legislative process, but we are on the verge, as all of you know, of making many decisions on how to spend federal recovery funds so I am glad and thankful that this committee has done the work to identify the vulnerabilities, as well as the opportunities, that we face in this moment,” Spilka said.

Several of the committee’s ideas echoed suggestions Gov. Charlie Baker made for about $2.8 billion of the state’s total ARPA haul, chief among them a $400 million to $500 million boost to unspecified “existing state programs that support the construction of rental housing and homes for sale,” the report said, with the intent of “existing state programs that support the construction of rental housing and homes for sale.” Rental assistance “for all who need it” should also be considered, the report says, plus $250 million more to help first-time homebuyers and a statewide elimination of single-family zoning or, short of that, more aid to towns and cities that loosen zoning rules to provide “a real inducement” for that activity.

To help young businesses, particularly those run by people of color in underbanked neighborhoods, the state could dedicate between $500 million and $1 billion to capitalize a publicly-owned bank that could make loans to applicants who often get passed over by traditional banks as too risky. As an alternative, the state could also boost funding for existing programs like the Massachusetts Growth Capital Corp., which already performs a related function.

When it comes to transportation, the report suggests providing discounts similar to those already given to seniors to people who qualify for MassHealth or other income supports, making bus service free to boost transit ridership or giving the MBTA $100 million per year to make the system free for all households below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. The report also says the Boston area’s commuter rail network should be transformed, but stopped short of endorsing transit advocates’ vision for all-day, frequent and electrified system saying “some further study” was needed. The report also suggested asking municipalities to contribute more to their region’s transit agency and using congestion funding in Boston to raise money for transit and subsidies for electrification of trucks, buses and other commercial vehicles.

State House News Service staff writer Matt Murphy contributed to this story.