During a budget hearing at UMass last week, Sen. Jo Comerford, D- Northampton raised concerns about population decline in western Massachusetts and the region's long term economic outlook. She suggested that could further cement Boston as the state's economic center. State House News Service reporter Ella Adams tells us whether the Legislature is considering any strategies to grow the population in western Mass., or to ensure this region remains economically competitive.
Ella Adams, SHNS: Yeah, I think regional equity is always something that western and central Mass. lawmakers are bringing up, whether that's at hearings like this or on the House and Senate floor, budget hearings are an opportunity for lawmakers to get face time with executive office officials. And so bringing things like regional economic outlook to the table when they have this chance to chat with the people who are running and building state programs is certainly not unheard of.
As far as stabilizing the population, I personally have not heard of anything related to that. But I will say that at the hearing, there was praise for a provision specifically in the Governor's Roads and Infrastructure bill. A piece of it distributes funding based on road miles instead of population, and that is specifically aimed to help rural communities like those in western Mass.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: With a record number of ballot initiatives advancing this year, lawmakers will hold hearings this week on several proposals, including one that would change how stipends for legislators are calculated. The plan would tie extra pay for leadership roles to their base salary and set limits on who can collect more than one stipend. So would that change actually save taxpayers any money?
You know, that's a great question. And I would say that supporters, instead of talking about that, are kind of talking about how this reform proposal would condition, you know, chunks of legislative pay on actual performance metrics.
And something else that happened last week that I think is the newsiest piece of this whole thing, is the fact that the Senate voted during a pretty lightly attended session last Thursday to seek advisory opinions from the Supreme Judicial Court about both this stipends initiative petition and the petition that would subject the legislature and governor's office to the state public records law. Senators have not done this a ton. This is not a super common occasion of seeking a court opinion on ballot proposals, but senators said the request was about gathering information rather than challenging the ballot questions.
Another proposed ballot measure would reduce minimum lot sizes for single family homes. The idea here is to create more housing and use smaller plots. The tiny plot would need access to public water and sewer, and could be as small as 5000ft², which is kind of the size of one football field end zone. With that in mind, Ella, how would this ballot question addressed the housing crisis in rural western Mass.
Yeah, that's a great point. I would say that supporters say that the proposed question would reduce costs for buyers and drive the creation of smaller homes. It is true with the 5000ft² access to public sewer and water services and at least 50ft of land bordering the road that that plot of land faces, the people who can take advantage of that must be in a place or in a region where they can have access to public water and sewer services. And so in more rural areas where maybe that's not the case, I can see that this question might not be as helpful, potentially based on the way that the question is written.
