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House Speaker and Senate President Talk About The State Budget

WATCH: Beacon Hill Leaders On Budget

Video of GreaterBoston from wgbhnews.com.

WGBH's Jim Braude interviewed Senate President Stan Rosenberg and House Speaker Bob DeLeo on WGBH's GreaterBoston Thursday, July 9 about their recently completed state budget.

Jim Braude: "Starting with you Mr. Speaker, give me the one or two things in the budget that the people in Massachusetts should feel best about."

Speaker DeLeo: "Our work on the MBTA. EITC--the earned income tax credit, and also we produced a fiscally responsible budget."

Jim Braude: "How about you Mr. President?"

Sen Stan: "Ditto. And if you look at the bottom line of the budget, we didn’t spend every penny that we had available so that we'd be prepared for the unexpected…"

Jim Braude: "While Gov. Baker is happy, a core Democratic constituency isn't—unions. You essentially suspended the Pacheco Law. Let's call it the privatization inhibiting law, for lack of a better expression, for three years. What do you say union people..why you went with Baler's version rather than theirs?"

Speaker DeLeo: "I felt that, I shouldn't say I felt, we felt as a House that we really had to give the governor some tools to address the issues at the table. We all remember last winter in terms of what had occurred and we all felt it was necessary that we had to be aggressive in terms of making sure that that type of disastrous winter for the users of the T would not occur again. Basically, we given him some power relative to the control board that he had looked for, and also suspension of the Pacheco Law for three years, which hopefully will give him more elasticity to run the T."

Jim Braude: "Does everyone know that, Yes, reform first, but to ultimately to really fix this mess, it's going to cost new money?"

Sen Stan: "..I believe that and I think a lot of people understand that. But we also said, we have to do the reforms, we have to get the house in order. And most of what we've been hearing from the administration is problem's with management. And so we've just given the governor the tools that he asked for in management. And by the way, there were a bunch of things passed in previous reform bills that haven't yet been implemented. I hope they'll continue to work on implementing those as well."

Speaker DeLeo: "Money has to be part of the equation but I feel that before we could take the next step in terms of financing, and btw, as the senate pres just stated, we had done some transportation bond funding and transportation reform, in which both bills there was some financing. But if we're going to truly attack what's going on at the T we really have to look in terms of whether it's management, T workers of whoever it may be, we have to deal and make some real strong reforms, which we did in our legislation."

Jim Braude: "If the governor was sitting here would he agree with you that post-reform new money is needed?"

Sen Stan: "I can’t speak for him."

Speaker DeLeo: "Uhhhh, no, I guess I can't…"

Sen Stan: "I'll tell you what we didn’t do in the control board that the governor wanted. He wanted us to give him permission to suspend some of the funding that's already going to the T, that we voted for in the legislature. And he also wanted us to untie his hands around fares and we said not going there right now. We're not going with touching the fares right now and we're not talking about rolling back any of the state funding. Fix the things that are broken on the management side and then let's have the conversation about what else is needed."

[...]

Jim Braude: "What did you not get in this budget because it is the process of negotiation, Stan Rosenberg?"

Sen Stan: "My biggest disappointment was that the Pacheco Law was basically exempt for three years for the T."

Speaker DeLeo: "I was generally pleased with the outcome. If I had to pick one item it would have been the fact relative to the freezing of the income tax in terms of how we would have funded the earned income tax credit."

Jim Braude: "..Are you friends?"

Sen Stan: "We're becoming friends. We barely knew each other."

Speaker DeLeo: "We're going out to eat later, if you want to join us."

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