Weekly round-up: A modest gait
"Water, water, everywhere, and not any drop to drink"
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The budgetary year that begins about six months from now should feature some tough terrain, according to the financial cartographers who sketched out fiscal 2017 tax revenues this week.
While the Massachusetts economy bounds around like an adolescent with keys to the family car - Uber!, Amazon!, General Electric! - state revenues have a noticeable limp in their gait.
Thursday we learned 67,700 jobs have been added this year through November - meaning about one new job for every 100 people in the state. And that's on top of the 60,700 jobs added in 2014. Yet economists predict only modest growth in the tax revenue that fuels the budget in the next fiscal year.
"That's not strong growth," economist Alan Clayton-Matthews, whose estimate was lower than others, told lawmakers as fiscal 2017 revenue discussions began Wednesday.
If that weren't bad enough, fiscal 2017 is forecast to bump up against the state's debt ceiling, the treasurer wants to right-size the state's pension liability to the tune of $1.9 billion to the bad, and the two people to be singled out for gubernatorial citations this week were MBTA dispatchers who prevented a bad situation from becoming much worse.
The fiscal 2017 debt ceiling is $21.735 billion, but like a driverless train with its deadman-switch disabled, infrastructure borrowing is on track to crash through that limit. If the Legislature decides to act on that looming paper crisis it will continue this session's theme of lawmaking almost exclusively around state money matters.
Treasurer Deb Goldberg, who predicts the Lottery will be knocking on the door of $1 billion in profits - but don't break out the "Tres Commas" just yet - said she recommends scaling back on annual pension fund returns to a more "realistic" 7.5 percent.
"I'm really looking forward to the day when I can say $1 billion," Goldberg said about the Lottery.
"Believe me, we are too," replied House Ways and Means Chairman Brian Dempsey.
In the fiscal year that starts next July 1, state tax revenues are expected to grow somewhere in the range of 3.2 to 5.6 percent. A growth rate in the neighborhood of about 4 percent might not sound that bad to people. Jeb Bush has premised his campaign on the idea that he can deliver 4 percent growth to gross domestic product - and more recently on the idea that Donald Trump's campaign is powered by insults alone.
For a government that provides health care to those who cannot afford it, seeks to educate the next generation of leaders and inventors, and performs upkeep on infrastructure that can date back more than a century, 4 percent can be a fairly modest pace.
Cost-growth on the Green Line Extension, meanwhile, is running wind sprints and carbo-loading to prepare for its 4.7-mile journey through Somerville to Medford.
The ballooning cost growth - up about 50 percent give or take from a year ago - within the court-mandated seven-station extension was one of the Baker administration's key discoveries after it acquired MassDOT as part of the package in last year's election.
The MBTA Fiscal and Management Control Board warned the public and general contractors on Monday that it doesn't plan to bankroll the $1 billion in cost growth.
"I'm not going to be comfortable stealing, borrowing, taking hundreds of millions of dollars out of the investments we need to make in a system that serves a million people for a spur - and it's an important spur - and I support the project at a certain price," Gov. Charlie Baker said on WGBH radio on Thursday. He also said, "The T for me ... is probably the thing that I think needs the most amount of work, and is one of the most important things that we need to do."
If an upcoming analysis shows the cost of the Green Line project is north of $3.5 billion, which the governor suggested could be a breaking point, the T might want to call in Lee Saunders and Mark McNeill to rein in the new trolley line.
The two control room employees were feted in the governor's office Monday for their role in stopping an out-of-control Red Line train from hurtling across the Neponset River into Boston. The motorman, credited by most accounts with rigging the throttle and failing to set the brake before hopping off the inbound train in Braintree, is, in the preferred vernacular of the transit agency, no longer employed by the T.
David Vazquez's absence could leave regular riders conflicted, as his attorney told the Boston Globe the operator was so popular he had attained the nickname of Diamond Dave among straphangers.
But the Building intrigue this week had little to do with the safety features of a 1960s-era Pullman-Standard heavy rail dashboard or the macro effects of the upcoming minimum hourly wage increase.
The flirtation by Senate President Stanley Rosenberg's fiancé Bryon Hefner with an end-run around the "firewall" established about a year ago was the real headscratcher.
Hefner told Politico Massachusetts on Monday that he is "strongly" considering a run to succeed outgoing Sen. Anthony Petruccelli. The news arrived around 36 hours ahead of Rosenberg's public "Political Happy Hour" interview with the Globe's Josh Miller at Suffolk University where it was one of the topics covered.
Rosenberg told Miller the "firewall" established a year ago between his personal and Senate lives was "absolutely" still intact, and demurred on whether he would endorse his partner - who Boston Magazine reported is registered to vote in Rosenberg's hometown of Amherst, not the Metro Boston district that will be open once Petruccelli resigns. Word leaked out Wednesday that the strength of Hefner's consideration had been depleted and he would instead volunteer for one of the candidates in the crowded field emerging for the district that includes Beacon Hill.
On Friday, candidate Lydia Edwards, whom Hefner purportedly plans to volunteer for, told the News Service she appreciates the support and she has not yet heard from him.
The Senate president, who publicly came out as gay in 2009, has over the past 12 months seen various aspects of his love life turn up in the news cycle: Hefner's braggadocio about his influence in the chamber and his alleged June 2014 Twitter fusillade against former Senate President Therese Murray after she discussed potentially writing a book. Those events led last December to establishment of the "firewall," and preceded news of pending nuptials between Rosenberg and Hefner, which would be officiated by Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito.
On Boston Herald Radio on Thursday, Rosenberg dismissed the Hefner coverage, agreeing that his sexuality was what spurred the news media's interest.
"Everyone who's in politics who has a spouse or a significant other has the same situation: You go home after work; you talk about your work. You have a give and take, back and forth. It doesn't mean they're driving your decisions," Rosenberg said. He said, "It's offensive to focus so much on an individual's personal life when it has nothing to do with my performance every day on the job."
That does raise the question of whether the "firewall" was intended to keep Hefner out of Senate business or keep the press out of Rosenberg's private life.
"I have enforced a firewall between my private life and the business of the Senate, and will continue to do so," Rosenberg wrote his colleagues last year more than a month before his election as Senate president.
The end of the week brought the news that Dolores Mitchell, the longtime executive director of the Group Insurance Commission, will soon retire.
Mitchell, who regularly flouts custom by speaking plain English rather than utilizing jargon or Technocratese, on Friday disclosed that she had given up on a secret contest to outlast Queen Elizabeth II, concluding the monarch would live to 103.
"I saw a picture of her recently, and I said, 'You know. She's going to go on strong. She'll live to be 103.' And I said, 'You've got to know when to hold them and when to fold them," said Mitchell. "So for all of those reasons I decided that the time is now."
STORY OF THE WEEK: The upcoming budget picture: Water, water, everywhere, and not any drop to drink.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "Is it possible for them to make this any more complicated?" - Dolores Mitchell at a meeting of the Health Connector board in 2012.
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