House Ways and Means Chairman Aaron Michlewitz talks to reporters after a Democratic caucus Wednesday, March 6, 2024. Photo by Sam Doran | State House News Service

As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Aaron Michlewitz sits in the catbird seat of budget and policy development on Beacon Hill.

The Boston Democrat offered a glimpse Monday afternoon at the various balls he is trying to keep in the air simultaneously as the 2023-2024 legislative session gets into crunch time ahead of the July 31 end of formal business: emergency shelter policy, the fiscal 2025 budget, Gov. Maura Healey’s housing bond and policy bill, the governor’s economic development bill and more.

Talking with the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts during an event focused on prioritizing equitable economic development, Michelwitz said it’s been difficult to develop this spending plan because he’s not exactly sure what’s led to state tax collections running $186 million behind last year and $275 million behind the year-end estimate that has already been slashed by $1 billion.

Michlewitz and House Speaker Ronald Mariano will unveil the House’s budget plan the second week of April.

Housing Is Top Shared Priority

Among the budget measures Michlewitz previewed were help for school districts that are “still struggling to cope with a declining fiscal picture” despite the 2019 K-12 funding reform law and the continuation of universal school meals. He said that he’s also aiming to preserve the state’s recently-upgraded bond rating, since that will allow the state to borrow money for other priorities at a lower cost.

“A lot of these bills that we’re talking about – whether it’s the housing bond bill, or the economic development bond bill – they’re gonna require us to spend some capital through the bond market. And for us to do that, we have to have a strong rating to accomplish those goals that we want to out of those two bond bills,” he said. “If we don’t do that, we may hit some challenges, we may not reach our entire goals, particularly around housing.”

Housing, the chairman said, is number one “in terms of priorities that we all kind of share” among the House, Senate and Gov. Maura Healey.

“One of the reasons why we’re in a housing crisis is because we had such a large growth of population in 2010 to 2020, and didn’t have the production of housing at the same rate that we had the population growth, which has obviously created a greater demand and less supply,” he said. “And one of the reasons why we had that population growth is because of the life sciences initiatives that grew in the commonwealth through the last 15-20 years, and brought a lot of economic development to us, brought a lot of population to us, brought a lot of energy to the commonwealth.”

The chairman added, “So we know how important this is to our economy. We know how important it is to the continued growth of our economy. And we’re going to certainly prioritize it as we go forward.”

Why Transfer Tax?

Mariano signaled last week that the House may include in its housing bill the authority for cities and towns to impose transfer taxes on real estate transactions above a given dollar amount as a way of generating revenue for affordable housing initiatives. Michlewitz went into detail Monday on the House’s internal debate on the topic.

“One of the challenges with that discussion is that every community has a little different take on what would work. You look at Boston and how Boston operates, and how many properties would be over a million [dollars] or $2 million, or whatever the threshold would be, versus a smaller city or town which isn’t going to accumulate the same amount of money. Or, maybe a smaller town that’s wealthy, that’s going to accumulate a lot of money that may not be able to put all that money into into building affordable housing, because they may have some zoning issues related to how small their community is,” he said.

Michlewitz added, “These are all things that we’re going to have to weigh … you’re trying to put a lot of round pegs in the square holes in some respects. And trying to create that flexibility, I think is something that we’re working through.”