Mass. House Speaker Mariano frustruated with late action by Senate counterparts

Adding a touch of acrimony to a frantic stretch that will already be defined by difficult House-Senate negotiations, House Speaker Ron Mariano complained Monday that his counterparts across the hall put his team in "a very difficult situation" with a flurry of late action.

Mariano told reporters he's worried about the work required to parse several policy proposals the Senate teed up ahead of the July 31 end of formal business, questioning whether there's enough time left for top negotiators in both chambers to iron out final compromises.

He appeared particularly concerned about a new push from Senate Democrats to authorize overdose prevention centers, a topic the House did not address in its opioid crisis response bill. The House passed its bill June 13; the Senate plans to vote on its bill on Tuesday.

"Anytime you release a bill the day before the session ends, it's a very difficult expectation for us to hear it, especially when it has proposals, major proposals, that we haven't even had the opportunity to debate or vote on," Mariano told reporters after a bill-signing ceremony for the overdue fiscal 2025 state budget. "It sort of tells me you're not really serious about passing the bill to begin with."

"I don't know how we can appoint a conference committee on a bill we haven't seen, we probably won't see, until late tomorrow, and that gives us maybe one day to appoint a committee and have them meet and come to some resolution," he added. "It strikes me as being a major attempt to have the thing just fade off into the sunset."

The speaker's comments late Monday afternoon, as the Legislature gears up for the penultimate day allotted for formal sessions, signal a bubbling dissatisfaction that could imperil work on a host of major proposals.

Gray Milkowski, a spokesperson for Senate President Karen Spilka, called Mariano's remarks "unfortunate."

"The Senate has been working diligently since the beginning of the session to pass good policy to make our residents' lives better," he said. "We will continue to do so until the session concludes, and hope that our colleagues share the same goals for our Commonwealth."

The Senate approved six new significant bills Monday, covering PFAS in firefighting gear, domestic violence and sexual assault awareness, physical exam records, animal welfare, liquor licenses in Boston and sexual assault by fraud of medical professionals.

Senators teed up three other measures for votes on Tuesday, each of which previously cleared the House in different forms: parentage equality reforms, maternal health improvements and an opioid crisis response bill.

Asked to specify his concerns with Senate bills, Mariano pointed to the opioid measure and an addition senators made.

The Senate-redrafted version of the bill would allow cities and towns to open overdose prevention sites, also known as safe injection or supervised consumption sites, where individuals could use drugs they already acquired under the watch of medical professionals who could intervene to prevent an overdose from becoming fatal.

"We don't even know what's in there — we heard that it's going to be in there," Mariano said.

When a reporter asked for his opinion on the policy itself, Mariano appeared to grow frustrated and said, "I haven't seen it."

"I'm not Kreskin. I can't vision this stuff and respond to it," he said, referencing a performer who regularly appeared on late-night television with routines centered around identifying hidden information. "I need to see something in writing, and it's unfair to expect me to. I think the question is unfair, but certainly the situation I'm in is unfair."

(Mariano soon apologized to "you young guys who don't know who Kreskin was," and suggested a better reference might have been Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent.)

Democrats possess supermajority margins in both chambers but often struggle to agree with one another and have many unfinished negotiations in play. Nine major proposals are already tied up in or soon headed to private conference committee talks.

Legislative leaders in both chambers often agree on major bills just before the July 31 end of formal business each term. Two years ago, five major proposals emerged from conference committee negotiations on the July 31 deadline or in the early-morning hours Aug. 1. One of them, a judiciary IT bond bill, did not even land in conference for talks to begin until July 31.

The speaker said late action is more viable "when [the bills are] very similar."

"When you include new proposals that haven't been voted on and policy decisions like the bottle bill that's included in the [Telecommunications, Energy and Utilities Committee] siting bill — those are major proposals that 160 members haven't voted on that they want to stick into their bill, and that puts us into a very difficult situation," Mariano said.

He was referring to the Senate's June 25 approval of a clean energy siting reform bill, which senators voted to amend with an expansion of the state's bottle redemption law. The Senate acted first on that topic, and the House approved its own rewrite — which did not include the bottle law changes — on July 17.

Representatives also pursued their own batch of late-session ideas last week. On Thursday, the House teed up and approved nine bills, including five overhauling animal protection laws.

The Senate gave initial approval to three of those measures Monday.

Conference committee talks are all conducted privately, denying outsiders from getting a real look at how the negotiations are going.