Municipal leaders urged lawmakers on Friday to revive Gov. Charlie Baker’s proposal to allocate billions of dollars in federal pandemic relief to downtown revitalization and other projects in the next five weeks.
The Economic Development Committee on Monday sent forward in the legislative pipeline an updated jobs and downtowns bill that strips out all of the $2.3 billion in federal pandemic relief Baker sought to spend in his version and instead calls only for about $1.2 billion in borrowing.
A passenger rail extension into western Massachusetts looms as one of the most impactful projects on the table now that Gov. Charlie Baker and federal officials have identified a “path forward” for it, but lawmakers still will not say what – if anything – they will do in the next two months to get the idea off the ground.
