Senator Murray Has High Hopes For 2012 (The Enterprise Newspapers)

Senator Murray Has High Hopes for 2012

According to Senate President Therese M. Murray (D - Plymouth), the great misconception about the Legislature’s work in 2011 is that everything was put on the back burner in favor of the casino debate.

“It was mostly the media that made it like this was the only thing that was in front of us,” she said. Sen. Murray, who confirmed recently that she will seek a 10th term, provided a list of 20 pieces of major legislation that passed both the House and Senate last year, many of which implemented serious reform measures she said would have a direct and appreciable impact on all Massachusetts residents.

Very often the Legislature’s first year in a given session is the slower of the two, as lawmakers lay the groundwork for many pieces of legislation that do not see a vote until the second year. Sen. Murray characterized 2011 as a change from the usual routine.

As a result, the Legislature “had a banner year, a very productive year,” Sen. Murray said. “We moved a lot of big reforms, changes to the way the state and municipalities do business. We were able to pass a balanced budget again, on time, and we were able to turn out at the end of the fiscal year, and at the end of the calendar year, in better fiscal shape than almost every other state in the country.”

Standard & Poor’s upgraded Massachusetts’s bond rating from AA to AA+ in September. Taken in combination with Moody’s and Fitch’s respective Aa1 and AA+ bond ratings, the state currently has “the best bond rating it’s ever had,” Sen. Murray said.

The state was also able to restore in October $350 million to its “rainy day” reserve fund, bringing its balance up to $1.4 billion, the third largest state reserve fund balance in the United States. Massachusetts is tied for having the 17th lowest unemployment rate at 7 percent, down from the most recent high of 8.8 percent from October 2009 through February 2010.

Among the bills Sen. Murray pointed to as successes included those that overhauled municipal health insurance, by giving cities and towns the ability to go outside of collective bargaining to reduce co-payments and deductibles and, by extension, the cost of health care, as long as the final cost was no greater than the cost of a comparable plan offered through the Group Insurance Commission (GIC), which provides health insurance to state employees, including members of the Legislature.

Every session the Legislature fine-tunes the state’s landmark healthcare reform act, and Sen. Murray said the coming year will see lawmakers tackle payment reform, “our third visit to health care costs…that’s the big, big undertaking.” She did not go into specific details about this next phase, but said she and her staff are working on an omnibus bill “every single day, every single week” that will “hopefully be released in the next few months.” Sen. Murray did say that the effort  would include an expansion of a 2010 law that allows small businesses to pool their resources through a nonprofit organization, such as a chamber of commerce, to leverage group health insurance rates. The Massachusetts Division of Insurance has signed off on the measure, clearing the way for collectives to form this year.

Sen. Murray said the state will practice a “performance management” approach to budgeting. The concept, introduced in the FY12 budget, is a system in which clear goals are set “for every agency and for every line-item” in the budget, outcomes are measured against those goals, strategies are devised for improving outcomes, and if a department or program fails to measure up, it is overhauled or eliminated.

“If each agency has to meet performance management requirements, then they’re going to improve their efficiency, it’s going to be much more transparent, we’ll have accountability, and if things are not working, why would you continue to fund it?” she said.

Additionally, the state would every five years do a “zero-based” budget, which essentially crafts a budget from the ground up, rather than using last year’s budget as a foundation.

“This will be a whole change in the way the state puts its budget together,” she said. “This is a huge reform.”

One reform effort that appears doomed to failure is a wind turbine siting proposal that Sen. Murray initially championed, but later she retracted her support for the bill.

Under the proposal, the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources would have been charged with identifying “wind resource areas” throughout Massachusetts—areas with strong potential for wind energy generation facilities—and creating an expedited permitting process for those areas.

The bill called for the creation of a local wind energy permitting board in any municipality identifi ed as a wind resource area. This three to five member board would have been responsible for reviewing turbine applications in their town.

Sen. Murray said flaws with the appeals process were a factor in her change of mind on the bill. The law would have provided any “substantially and specifically aggrieved” party an opportunity to appeal a local approval to an advisory group operating under the auspices of the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board, while a project applicant would have taken his appeal of a rejection to the local land or superior court.

Sen. Murray said many constituents did not care for the lack of a local appeals process to precede state-level intervention, or the fact that residents would go to a state-appointed board while developers would get to take their case to the courts.

She also said that in talking with constituents, she became convinced that including residential areas in wind resource areas—therefore making them developable sites for wind turbines—was unacceptable.

“That was the thing that changed my opinion on it. We should not be siting these in residential areas. They’re too big and too noisy,” she said. “They should be in industrial areas, commercial areas.” She added, “Wind has to be part of the energy mix” for Massachusetts. “We need it, but there has to be siting regulations.”

The Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy recommended sending the bill into study—an actual study, however; normally “sending a bill to study” is a procedural move that effectively kills a bill without ever submitting it to a vote before the full House or Senate.

Whatever comes out of that study could play a role in the state’s ongoing efforts to strengthen its “innovation economy,” industries such as health care, technology, life sciences and renewable energy, the latter of which is poised for a next step that could hold great potential for Massachusetts.

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