Before heading home to sleep, bleary-eyed House Speaker Ron Mariano and Majority Leader Mike Moran emerged from breakfast at a Beacon Hill restaurant Thursday morning, expressing their willingness to tackle closely watched provisions in the scrapped economic development bill during informal sessions.
Mariano indicated that policies paving the way for a professional soccer stadium in Everett and raising the age of juvenile criminal jurisdiction, which made it into the Senate economic development bill but not the House version, are still in play.
"Absolutely, there's a path for everything that doesn't have a roll call," Mariano told the State House News Service, as he and Moran exited the restaurant, Mooo…., and walked toward the State House.
House and Senate negotiators failed to strike a deal on the bond bill — which had featured hundreds of millions of dollars in borrowing for life sciences, climate tech and AI, among other investments — during formal sessions that wrapped earlier Thursday morning.
Mariano, asked about his priority bills to tackle in August, told the State House News Service, "my health care bills, obviously." The Quincy Democrat earlier Thursday said he had taken the hospital oversight bill and prescription drug bill out of stymied House-Senate negotiations "for the better good."
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Asked about his priorities for August, Moran said he agreed with Mariano's comments but added a word of caution.
Politics
"But understand that all these things can be stopped by one person," Moran said. "So some of them are complex policy stuff and any one person can stand up and object, which is why we were trying to get as much as we could done before the deadline last night and this morning."
The House lead negotiator on the Boston alcohol license bill, Moran signaled an agreement could come soon. The Senate on Monday passed a bill that would give the city 260 new alcoholic beverage licenses targeted mostly at specific Boston neighborhoods, while the House bill passed in May would grant 205 additional licenses.
"We met, we had some good conversations," Moran said, adding that Senate lead negotiator Sen. Will Brownsberger has expressed "we can get that done."
"I hope we can," Moran continued. "We're very close, if not done with that."
Moran, who's also on the maternal health conference committee, said the panel has yet to meet after members were appointed Wednesday. Conferees are still trying to schedule their first gathering, he said.
"We tried numerous times to convene the conference committee over the last 24 hours since it was formed, and we were unsuccessful," Moran said.
