Sports betting may get caught in squeeze play again
Sports betting does not feature on Senate President Karen Spilka’s list of priorities for the fall lawmaking rush, and a string of highprofile incidents on the MBTA did not appear to move the Senate leader’s needle on transportation funding.
In a Thursday interview where she outlined the Senate’s fall agenda, Spilka said she is “not certain that there’s a need for even more money” to address transportation issues and indicated the chance of Senate action to allow gambling on sports will depend on available “bandwidth.”
Spilka told State House News Service there are five topics the Senate hopes to tackle in the next six weeks before formal legislative business pauses again, this time until the new year: spending state government’s cache of American Rescue Plan Act funding, a budget to close the books on fiscal year 2021, election reforms, mental and behavioral health parity, and redrawing political district lines.
Asked if sports betting legislation would feature this fall, Spilka said the Senate Ways and Means Committee “is looking at it.”
“We have to do redistricting, we have to close out the books and do a supp budget, we need to do a more permanent VOTES act, our temporary (provisions) end in December,” she said. “Some of it will depend upon bandwidth and how it stands.”
The House approved sports betting legalization in July, the second time representatives have taken such a vote, but the Senate for years has passed on opportunities to endorse or outright reject the idea, even as almost every other New England state implemented its own system.
On the transportation front, the Ashland Democrat indicated she does not see an urgent need for action.
Supporters of MBTA improvements have seized on recent events to push for action, noting the past three months have featured a Red Line derailment, an escalator malfunction that left people injured at Back Bay Station, a deadly fall from a closed MBTA stairwell, and a Green Line crash.
Spilka pointed to the multi-year transportation borrowing bill Gov. Charlie Baker signed in January, which will steer billions of dollars toward modernization and expansion projects at the T.
She said she “can understand the public feeling that more needs to be done,” but argued the focus should be on getting already-approved bond dollars out the door.