WEEKLY ROUNDUP - 'ICK' BIN EIN BERLINER
(Recap and analysis of the week in state government)

By Jim O'Sullivan
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE

STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, NOV. 14, 2008….. Speculation this week dwelled on the fate of two institutions that, over the last couple decades, have remade the surface of downtown Boston, shaped the new Greenway and the Rowes Wharf arch, greened Columbus Park, and made other kinds of headlines.

The first was the Mass. Turnpike Authority, which a little over a decade ago was gifted by the Legislature with responsibility for the Big Dig. The operation would be dismantled, refashioned, and moved in part over to Massport, another quasi-public agency not renowned for its devotion to transparency, under a plan Gov. Deval Patrick sketched Wednesday in a Boston.com op-ed published roughly 190 hours after the polls closed. The Pike board on Friday - around 230 hours post-election - a chunk of that plan in the form of a toll increase that could hit $100 million.

The second was House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi, who is facing ethics inquiries and an increasingly rebellious House that now features senior members outwardly discussing their pledge counts with reporters and at banquets.

DiMasi never liked the Big Dig, which disrupted his North End neighborhood and Chinatown. And he doesn't much like the buffeting he's taking both from outside the House and within, where members are in fits of open unrest and bingeing on prix fixe dinners like the one at Maxwell Silverman's in Worcester on Thursday, where DiMasi's top budget lieutenant wined and dined voters he wants to help him succeed DiMasi.

The speaker commands tremendous personal affection from his members - as do, to a lesser extent, both men who have been cobbling together the blocs to replace him: Ways and Means chair Robert DeLeo and Majority Leader John Rogers. But, even as DeLeo's forces report increasing confidence while Rogers battles allegations against his own ethics and DiMasi's lonely loyalists hold their ground, all three men have worried their supporters with the ways their names keep getting dragged into the papers.

Rep. Garrett Bradley relayed to the News Service on Friday that DeLeo told his dinner companions that his pledges from seated Democrats number in the "high 70s," with "four or five" Republicans conditionally committed separately from their caucus, and a handful of votes from newly elected members. Rogers folks call those numbers bunkum and unprovable, and pointed out that Rogers's group is more hardcore, many of them veterans of the 2004 skirmish between Rogers and DiMasi, and less dependent on their guy's ability to dole out budget goodies.

Some in the band of committed DiMasi loyalists question his strategy of clinging to the "speech and debate" principle of legislative privacy as the public opinion verdicts pile up. While DeLeo's squad continues to insist that the budget chief has no plans to try to unhorse his speaker, the gathering Thursday night in Worcester was DeLeo calling what his operatives believe is DiMasi's bluff.

"There were 70-odd members there supportive of Chairman DeLeo should the speaker's chair become vacant, and he admitted that he didn't know whether it would be a day, a week, a month or six months before it opened up," said Bradley, the Hingham Democrat who co-chairs the Election Laws Committee.

The speaker warned members as far back as January that he would seek retribution against them if the jockeying did not desist. It has, instead, mushroomed in the form of filet mignon and salmon, and if DiMasi is to make good on his finger-wagging he will have to mete out demotions come January 2009, if he is reelected as speaker. About 10 percent of the incumbents who will return to the House next year have maintained steadfast by DiMasi's side and have not pledged fealty to someone else, regardless of when their pledge might be called in.

There was also more eager speculation about the future of US Sen. John Kerry, whom one Boston Globe columnist teased for wearing "his ambition on his sleeve. And his collar. And his lapel. And a half-dozen other places about his person." The same could be said for a public servants' gallery of prospective Kerry successors, who lined up in 2004 when Kerry had a shot in the Oval Office and do so now with a relish few of them evinced in support of his actual reelection bid.

And there was general wonderment at state Sen. James Marzilli, who has kept a low profile in Massachusetts and no profile on Beacon Hill while facing sexual assault charges, but seated himself on a stage in Berlin, Germany, last month to talk about energy-efficient buildings. No tax dollars were used for the trip, Marzilli's attorney assured, but senators felt like they themselves had been.

Senate President Therese Murray, subjected to another embarrassment from a member capitalizing on the Senate's unwillingness to discipline its own, heard from at least two senators who think the Senate should move immediately to a session in which they expel both Marzilli and Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, against whom federal authorities have filed corruption charges. "Bring us in tomorrow, I'll vote for it," said Sen. Steve Brewer, vice chair of the budget committee, on Thursday. "The quicker the better. Get it done."

All of this happens as the state confronts the nasty economic climate, which has not gone away amid the deluge of scandal stories. DiMasi gamely convened an economic summit on Monday, and another one could take place next week. In most weeks in most state capitols, the fate of a $28 billion budget would be enough to keeps folks occupied. But this is Massachusetts, and it's all here.

STORY OF THE WEEK: Uncertainty, again.

SPIN OF THE WEEK: The Massachusetts Department of Public Health on Tuesday chose to cite an increase in fatal opioid overdoses last year as progress because the rise was just 2.7 percent, far smaller than the 2005 and 2006 spikes of 12.8 percent and 18.9 percent respectively. The "improvement" statement was tempered by state officials noting there were "still an unacceptable number of overdose deaths." Massachusetts: Ending opioid fatalities one increase at a time.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "We may have blown an opportunuity [sic]. The Speaker was very interested in our bid for the data wharehouse [sic]." Former Education Commissioner David Driscoll, from a 2005 email obtained by the Boston Globe depicting his role in the awarding of a controversial software contract and illustrating that, perhaps, Driscoll's commitment to close the achievement gap went only so far.

END
11/14/2008


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