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In fiscal year 2023, Salem was the only Gateway City to receive minimum aid from the Chapter 70 state aid program for K-12 schools, Pangallo said.
“Most Gateway Cities received an average of 13 percent increase in their Chapter 70 allocation,” he said. “We received about a half a percent increase. There was a flaw in the system, and we've never caught up. And so we're still paying for that shortfall, and more and more Gateway Cities are going to fall into those gaps. So I think there's a lot of work to be done around education.”
Beacon Hill leadership kicked off the year touting the last session’s achievements with a slightly defensive posture. Both Senate President Karen Spilka and House Speaker Ron Mariano took aim in New Years Day speeches at what Spilka described as a political press corps focused on “more personalities than policy.” In Mariano’s view, that means the “perception of our work is often at odds with what we know to be the truth about what we’ve accomplished.”
Campbell, Collins, and Pangallo seemed to have no trouble holding two ideas in their heads at once: a Legislature can ultimately pass strong legislation and still be mired in opaque and inefficient processes.
“I think the climate bill coming through was a great way to end the year, but it was painful getting there,” Campbell said. He noted there was “some impasse” in arriving at a final compromise climate bill – with legislators worried until late in the session that there was little hope for resolution – that included permitting reforms, but in Campbell’s view had a light touch when it came to system decarbonization.
Collins spoke warmly of the Western Massachusetts state delegation, and said there were “exciting” health care developments in the last term – though they didn’t fully address the myriad of issues facing primary care coverage. "There was a lot of effort, but we still are really, really struggling as a service shortage area in Western Massachusetts,” she said.
Laws aimed at affordability and livability heartened Pangallo, who succeeded now-Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll as mayor of the North Shore city.
The sweeping Affordable Homes Act – a bond bill authorizing investments in public housing and affordable housing generally, with a focus on making housing more environmentally sustainable, and instating new additional dwelling unit zoning – is “huge” for Salem and the state, Pangallo said. But there is still more he’d like to see done.
The Legislature didn’t have an appetite this year for changes that would give cities and towns more ability to raise revenues independently, Pangallo noted.
“It can be a real frustration, particularly around the resource generation,” he said, referring to a bill left by the wayside this session that would have allowed local municipalities to raise their local meal and lodging taxes. “We’re maxed out in terms of our meals excise and our lodging excise, but our costs are going up. We're not immune from inflation and from all the rising costs of health care and capital costs and personnel costs. And so we're really constrained in our ability to have the resources to meet those costs, to have the community that we think we should.”
Each legislative cycle features an array of likely-doomed local home rule petitions, in which cities and towns ask the state for sign-off on policies ranging from increasing the number of liquor licenses to letting a city change the number of seats on a public board.
“I don't like to be pessimistic about anything, but we kind of presume that if it's going to the legislative process, it's probably not gonna happen, but we're gonna hope that it does,” Pangallo said of the home rule process. “And so, you know, we’re planning for the worst and hoping for the best.”
For more with Mayor Dominick Pangallo, Brad Campbell, and Jessica Collins – on what the governor can do without the Legislature, long-shot asks for their lawmakers, and how they hope Massachusetts responds to a second Trump term – listen to The Codcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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