Senate and House conferees completed action on an ethics reform bill late Wednesday, clearing the way for Gov. Patrick to sign the $27.4 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.
Patrick rightly took a tough stance on the issue of reforms before revenues, and the Legislature has now responded with a sincere effort to right some of the wrongs that have plagued the transportation bureaucracy, the administration of the state pension system and, now, enforcement of ethics requirements for appointed and elected officials. The latter bill, which was shepherded through the conference process by Senate Majority Leader Fred Berry, D-Peabody, was endorsed by a bevy of good-government types at a hastily arranged Statehouse news conference yesterday afternoon.
There will be those who will say the reforms in all areas could have gone further, of course, and we'd still like to see legislators abolish the costly Evacuation Day and Bunker Hill Day holidays, to which only state and Suffolk County employees are entitled.
However, there was also a serious effort to cut spending and this is the first budget in recent memory that's actually lower in real dollars than the one that preceded it (FY 09's was $28.2 billion).
The new budget reflects a precipitous decline in state revenues from all sources over the past year, and as a result also includes a record $1.14 billion in new taxes, including a 25 percent increase in the sales tax.
Some of that revenue will be used to make improvements to the transportation infrastructure that might otherwise have been funded by a hike in the gas tax and/or toll increases (particularly painful for those commuting from the North Shore). But the MBTA says it will still need to increase fares and reduce services to meet expenses.
Hopefully those tax hikes won't end up costing the commonwealth more money than they generate as a result of retail sales lost to border-state stores (some have described our sales-tax hike as the best economic stimulus New Hampshire could have received) or slow the pace of the nascent economic recovery here in the Bay State.
Give Beacon Hill its due. They cut and reformed so it hurts. But let this be only the start of such efforts, not the final act.
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