State House Roundup: Top Mass. news stories of 2022

The turning of the calendar is always a time for reflection, and that's especially the case after a year that brought so much change.

Eight years of the Baker administration - for a handful of us in the press corps, the only administration we've ever covered professionally - drew to a close in 2022. All that's left is the holiday interlude week, a few days of preparation for the pomp and circumstance of Gov. Charlie Baker's farewell and Governor-elect Maura Healey's inauguration, and of course, any unfinished business in between.

It wasn't just the politics or the personnel that crossed the horizon this past year, though. The much-maligned MBTA managed to find a new low; a tax law reemerged in a big way for the first time since the Reagan administration; and the COVID-19 pandemic shifted from a bruising daily focus to a latent risk we might always need to manage.

And that doesn't even cover some of the topics that did not win enough votes from State House reporters to land on this year-end list, like the near-sweep of statewide offices by women candidates, a return to in-person public events under the Golden Dome, or the unexpected arrival on Martha's Vineyard of dozens of migrants flown there by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Many members of the press corps struggled to meet the original deadline to get in their ballots for the top news stories of 2022, but don't hold that against them. Here's the breakdown:

Healey Cruises to Corner OfficeThere was a lot of commentary about how this was a quiet gubernatorial campaign, and the Democratic primary race was effectively over months before Democrats officially picked Maura Healey as their standard-bearer. But Healey's landslide victory in November made the history books twice over, and several reporters cited these historic "firsts" as they voted Healey's win as the top story of the year. It's the first time Bay Staters chose a woman as governor (Gov. Jane Swift inherited the role after Gov. Paul Cellucci's resignation), and the first time Massachusetts voters chose an openly gay person as the state's chief executive. Look back just a couple decades, and gay rights were a major battleground on Beacon Hill. After eight years of Republican leadership, this fall was also the first time voters picked a Democrat for the corner office since 2010, and Healey will be just the second Democrat to hold the job since 1991. Gov. Charlie Baker's intention to step aside made last year's top list (was his announcement really over a year ago?), and observers in 2022 have parsed Healey's words for clues about how much she will hew to Baker's moderate mantra or inject progressive policies into the administration. Healey also broke the so-called "curse" of attorneys general who run for governor. The last former AG to win election as governor was Paul Dever in 1948, and the last sitting AG to win the governorship was John Clifford in 1852. Many have tried since - Coakley, Reilly, Harshbarger, Bellotti, Quinn. Healey's ascension also played into one of the runner-up top stories that made it onto a few reporters' ballots - what a big election cycle it was for women in general. Massachusetts voters chose women to fill five of the six constitutional offices, another first. - Sam Doran

MBTA in DisarrayRiders have spent years if not decades complaining about the MBTA, and the frustrations devolved into an outright crisis that ranks among the most pressing issues Gov.-elect Maura Healey will need to address. A string of collisions, derailments, fires, runaway trains and the death of a passenger due to a malfunctioning Red Line train prompted the Federal Transit Administration to launch only the second safety probe of its kind. Once they began looking under the hood, what federal investigators found was dire: a woefully understaffed transit agency with a bevy of unmet maintenance needs, misplaced focus on capital projects, and blind spots that allowed safety problems to fester, plus a Department of Public Utilities that had been failing to live up to its role as the T's state-level oversight agency. The investigation prompted the MBTA to shut down the entire Orange Line for a full month as summer gave way to the school year, saddling riders with unprecedented inconvenience in a sudden bid to make the kinds of repairs necessary to guide the transit system it manages toward a better future. Much like Gov. Charlie Baker did following the disastrous winter of 2015, Healey will come into office with problems at the T on the forefront, including the hefty costs of fixing the problems the FTA flagged. - Chris Lisinski

Historic Tax Relief Catches Lawmakers Off GuardIt was like an unexpected sun-shower on a perfect summer day. It caught the Legislature off guard, and left them all wet. Moments from wrapping up months of work on a targeted tax relief proposal and sweeping spending bill, Democratic legislative leaders were essentially informed by Gov. Charlie Baker that they had forgotten about a 1980s voter law that was about to kick in and require nearly $3 billion in tax relief. The news buckled lawmakers. They dashed their own preelection tax relief and spending plans and, very reluctantly, acceded to the fact that the Chapter 62F rebates were legally due to taxpayers and there was nothing that they would do about it. The 62F saga unfolded in a shroud of intrigue, as evidence emerged that the Baker administration might have known for a few months that the tax relief bombshell was building and didn't share that information with Democrats. Tipping them off might have put the tax relief at risk, although Baker's team didn't say that publicly, offering only that everyone had access to the same information about exploding state tax revenues that were blasting past the tax cap. After months of hand-wringing, lawmakers shrunk their economic development bill and passed it without their own targeted tax relief despite election season prodding from both Baker and Maura Healey as she beat the tax relief drum on the way to winning the governor's race. - Michael P. Norton

After Years of Debate, Sports Betting Becomes LegalCongrats to everyone who took the over. The so-called Big Three (Gov. Baker, House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Senate President Harriette Chandler) and other key lawmakers agreed in May 2018 that sports betting was something that deserved their attention. "Everything is worth a look," then-Senate Ways and Means Chairwoman Karen Spilka said. "Whether or not we can do it we'll have to see, but we'll consider it." It wasn't apparent at the time, but that "we'll have to see" from Spilka foreshadowed what ended up being a four-year debate that pitted the House against the Senate and DeLeo's successor (House Speaker Ronald Mariano) against Chandler's successor (Spilka). Representatives overwhelmingly approved betting legalization twice, but Spilka's Senate kept it bottled up in committee as she looked for "some sort of consensus." A News Service survey in March found that at least 60% of senators supported legalizing sports wagering and the Senate passed its own bill in late April. Then things got even messier - Mariano said he didn't get the point of the Senate's "paternalistic" bill, and later a top senator accused the speaker of misleading the public about the Senate's stance. Amid House-Senate negotiations, Spilka made clear that she had other priorities, regularly pointing to the Senate's mental health care bill when asked about betting. So maybe it was no coincidence that a final sports betting compromise was announced simultaneously with word of a mental health agreement around 5 a.m. on Aug. 1. As the Senate wrapped up major lawmaking for the session that morning, the sports betting bill was the very last item enacted by the Senate and sent to the governor's desk. - Colin A. Young

MassGOP in Turmoil, Dems Sweep Statewide RacesBy the time 2022 began, the people in charge of the Republican State Committee, first and foremost its chairman Jim Lyons, had decided they preferred pro-Trump, anti-abortion candidates over the most popular governor in America, and Charlie Baker, Karyn Polito and their like-minded followers had decided to step aside and let them go ahead and see how that worked out. The rest of the year was an exercise in waiting around to see if the polls were accurate. They certainly were. National Republican money flowed to other states and seats seen as more likely to yield victory for the GOP. Independents were disinclined to elect an anti-abortion governor, and the governing philosophy that suited them was already sitting in the corner office, albeit packing up his belongings. Geoff Diehl wasn't able to raise enough money to get his anti-tax, anti-vax (mandate) message across, and he lost big. He didn't pull the rest of the ticket down with him so much as accompany them, and Democrats added to their supermajorities in the Legislature and will possess all six constitutional offices for the next four years. Whether the GOP found the experience instructive remains to be seen. - Craig Sandler

Surtax on Higher Incomes Prevails at Ballot BoxFor the first time since 2000, Massachusetts voters this fall agreed to make a change to the state's constitution, shifting the state away from the long-standing flat income tax rate structure to levy a 4% surtax on top of the state's 5% flat tax for the portion of annual household income above $1 million. Designed to raise an estimated $1.3 billion a year for transportation and education causes, the surtax was pushed largely by organized labor and legislative Democrats who want millionaires to pay their "fair share." Much of the Bay State business community was on the other side, arguing that an additional tax on higher earners will make Massachusetts less competitive at a time when it is easier than ever for people and businesses to relocate (even if just on tax forms) to a tax-free or low-tax state. It was a long road to November's 52%-48% vote to adopt the surtax. It was first introduced in 2015 and appeared on track to go before voters in 2018 until the Supreme Judicial Court threw it off the ballot. The Legislature passed the constitutional amendment again in 2019 and 2021 to put the question to voters on the 2022 statewide ballot. Moving forward, all eyes are on how the Legislature uses the surtax revenue. If the money is spent, it is supposed to go toward the broad categories of education or transportation, but it remains to be seen whether surtax money supplements or replaces the funding that the Legislature already provides for those causes. - Colin A. Young

Beacon Hill Responds to End of Roe v. WadeThe U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority sent shock waves across the country with a June 24 ruling that spiked the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade decision conferring a national right to an abortion. Within moments, Gov. Charlie Baker issued an executive order seeking to shield abortion providers and patients in Massachusetts from legal consequences in other states, and reproductive rights advocates sprung into action both here and nationally. Lawmakers crafted a bill codifying protections similar to those Baker ordered and rolling out other measures to promote access to reproductive and gender-affirming care, such as requiring health insurers to cover abortions without any cost-sharing measures. In the process, they also updated a prior law allowing abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy in some dire situations, motivated by the harrowing stories of difficulty accessing care that women like Kate Dineen, who had to travel to Maryland to get an abortion at 33 weeks pregnant after her fetus suffered a stroke. Effects of the court's decision continued to spill out in the ensuing months - when Democrats fared better than expected in the midterm elections and held onto a U.S. Senate majority, many pundits pointed to the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling as animating voters. - Chris Lisinski

Immigrant Driver's License Bill Passes, Survives ChallengeWhen a bill becomes a law, the headline often goes to the governor who wields the pen. But one momentous (and controversial) law in 2022 originated as solely the Legislature's achievement. After years of protests and rallies, like last session's hunger strike in Nurses Hall, advocates for the so-called Work and Family Mobility Act found favor with House Speaker Ronald Mariano shortly into the speaker's second year in office. The bill they'd long pushed for would open driver's license eligibility to immigrants without legal status here, provided they produce certain identifying documents from their home country. The branches ultimately overrode a veto from Gov. Charlie Baker, and Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka hosted their own override-signing ceremony akin to the bill signings Baker usually stages. A grassroots opposition group launched a signature-gathering drive to place the law before voters in November and managed to round up enough signatures on a narrow deadline, but a majority of Bay Staters agreed with their legislators - 53.9%, to be exact - and felt that driver's licenses should be available to everyone regardless of legal residency status. Opposed by Baker and 46.1% of voters, the new law takes effect next summer. - Sam Doran

Baker Lands New Job at NCAAAfter facing questions all year about his political and possible presidential aspirations, outgoing Gov. Charlie Baker threw a curveball late in 2022, announcing that he would be assuming a different type of presidency. Baker will take over the top job at the NCAA when he wraps up his eight-year tenure as governor. An alumni of Harvard's collegiate basketball team, Baker said he did not seek out the NCAA job and was instead approached about the opening after he announced he wouldn't run for reelection in Massachusetts. Though the post might look different from life in the State House, the governor said the NCAA was not unlike the "distributed decision-making models" that he's worked in most of his professional career. "It's about being a convener and the collaborator of a very large organization that has a lot of points of view and seeking to find those places where people can come together, can agree, and can make a case generally to the public, to their student athletes, to their alumni and their fans about what the best way to ensure that we don't lose this jewel going forward," Baker said. But don't count him out on the political stage yet. Baker dropped hints over the last few months of his term that he plans to remain somewhat involved in public service in the future. And as for the Crimson basketball team, they remain well-represented in the corner office, with alumnae Maura Healey taking over for Baker in 2023 - who even once beat the incoming NCAA president in a game of HORSE.

COVID Slips Out of Daily HeadlinesIn each of the past two years, State House reporters voted the COVID-19 pandemic as the most newsworthy story of the year. So it might seem a bit odd to reflect as 2022 draws to a close that, although the virus that upended public life and led to so much suffering is still with us, the way we collectively think and talk about it has fundamentally shifted. Many of the pandemic-era changes figure to be permanent, such as more widespread embrace of working remotely at least part time among industries where that's possible. But long gone are the near-daily press briefings from Baker and his health and education deputies, bamboozling vaccine eligibility guidelines, most mask mandates, and the padlock blocking access to the State House. Now, Massachusetts has settled more into living long-term with the lingering threats that COVID-19 and other infectious diseases pose, in large part because a vast majority of the Bay State's population - even including younger children - have been vaccinated against the infectious virus. Policymakers appear likely to shy away from blanket responses and turn additional public health precautions on and off as the conditions warrant. Those levers could be needed again this winter, with the state's health care system facing a triple threat from COVID, influenza and RSV. - Chris Lisinski

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Top Mass. news stories of 2022