 I'm James Milan and welcome to Talk of the Town in our legislative update, our regular legislative update with State Senator Cindy Friedman. Cindy, as always, a pleasure. Great to see you, James. You're looking well. I hope everybody's safe and healthy in your family. Thanks, yes. Thanks for the thought. And in fact, that is the case. Every day, you know, I wake up and I say, hmm, I feel normal and fine, and that's something good. What a crazy time. What a crazy time. And then the rest of my household, same thing. So hopefully it's the same with you. Yep. I feel we're healthy and I feel very lucky. Good. Healthy, lucky, and I imagine exhausted. And we're about to find out why, or at least some about why. You know, before we even went on air here, I was asking you about, you know, whether we're going to be able to talk about anything that isn't basically directly related to COVID-19. And you know, we'll see, I guess, is where, what we concluded. Because it's hard to, again, see beyond everything that is going on now. So let's tackle things in kind of random, you know, random order of some sort. One of the things that I'd like to ask about is, obviously, we are speaking on May 20th, so the governor's announcement about a phased reopening of the economy here in Massachusetts is a couple of days, came out a couple of days ago. What can you tell us about that in terms of, you know, what your own sense of it is and what the, you know, what some of the pertinent details are? My sense, excuse me, my sense of it is that the governor, the legislature are walking a very fine line between doing, you know, what maybe every scientist or most scientists would say, which is don't go anywhere, stay at home, and acknowledging the reality that people have to get back to work. And that there's rents to be paid and food to be put on the table. And at the same time, this virus is so unknown and still spreading in very disturbing ways that it's hard to find that middle ground. I think he's trying very hard. I think we're all trying very hard. There are going to be people that are going to hate us for letting anything open and there are going to be people who are going to hate us because we're not letting everything open. It's a no-win situation and there's no answer. We don't know. This is the unknown. And so I think the notion of proceeding with caution but proceeding is probably the best course. Now having said that, there's an awful lot of questions and concerns about the opening. Yeah, I'm wondering if there's, you know, to begin with whether there's anything that just surprised you about either the sequence of things or, you know, in any other way where you were thinking, hmm, or whether kind of in general acknowledging the uncertainty that looms over everything, you feel like, okay, this all makes sense. There were a couple things that I noticed early on when I, you know, when I saw the plan. It's very, very business-focused. It's very oriented toward businesses and employers. And I think that that's important because we got to get businesses open. But I did not feel the same focus on employees and how employees are going to be protected or taken care of or acknowledging the realities for many employees, like how do you get to work? How do you get to work safely? What happens if you live in a multi-generational family? What happens if you get sick at work? Do you have to pay to stay home? Do they keep your job for, you know, for a certain amount of time? How do we know that people are being protected or that plans are being followed? And so I would have liked to see more focus on both the employer and the employee. And I'm concerned around that, especially for people who are going into work, who can't work from home, have our low-wage workers who are doing all of the incredibly vital work of the Commonwealth, like taking care of, you know, my grandmother and my mother and keeping our streets clean and, you know, hospital cleanup, all of those, you know, nurse practitioners, you know, not nurse practitioners, but, you know, CNAs and or CPs. Everybody just can. Everybody, right? And we need them. And so I'm kind of desperately in fact. Yeah, it was, I just wonder whether you might have been struck by this. I was, you know, here we are in Massachusetts. Charlie Baker, very, very popular governor has been for several years. We have this tradition of Republican governors with Democratic legislatures and things seem to work generally fine, et cetera. This seems to be one of those instances in which I agree. The plan looks very business-focused and business-centric. And that sounds Republican to me versus, you know, a concern about the workers and the conditions in which people are going to be both transporting themselves and then working. I don't usually see a dichotomy like that or recognize that for myself. I'm wondering, first of all, I guess if you agree, but also is there a role? So the governor has rolled out his plan. What is the role of the legislature now? If, for instance, you want to amend or in some way influence that plan in order to kind of reorient that balance between business and workers. The legislature has oversight responsibilities, right? So we can have an oversight hearing. We can ask a lot of questions and we can pass legislation. We can say, you know, any opening plan must include A, B, and C. I mean, that is our role that has not gone away even though he has a lot of authority over a state of emergency. We still are an equal branch of government and we have the authority to overrule this if we want it. And I'm not saying we should. I think the other area that is really up in the air and is very concerning is the whole issue around childcare. Not only childcare for young children, but childcare for elementary school children. And how do you bring people back to work without a very robust childcare system? You can't. And I think there's a lot of questions around how that's going to be addressed. And I know that that's something that the Senate is really focusing on right now, is what do we need to do around childcare because you just can't have work without, you can't have one without the other, can't have work without childcare. Yeah, I think you say the words and I think maybe others are going to react like I do, which is, of course, but I wasn't thinking about that beforehand. You know what I mean? You look through the plan, et cetera, and you forget, wait a minute. There's no way people are going to be leaving up to elementary school children at the very least, you know, home alone. Not going to happen. And so, yeah, I mean, obviously, if there has not been enough consideration of that yet, things can't, doesn't seem like other things could move forward without that. So those are just two of the areas that I, you know, I have focused on. I feel pretty comfortable at this moment for how healthcare is being addressed and how we're going to open it up and what the markers are for whether or not we have the capacity to treat the virus if it surges or whatever. I think there's been a lot of good thought around that. And I think the hospitals have shown that they can be very responsive. And so we just make sure, we need to make sure those markers and that capacity is still in place. Another thing that's come to our attention in the last week or so, and this related to an op-ed that I read in the Globe, concerns the alacrity, you know, the promptness it seemed, at least according to the writer, with which Governor Baker had addressed or had provided cover, in a sense, for nursing homes and hospitals, you know, kind of giving them some protections against civil liability, kind of lawsuits, et cetera, while seemingly not taking into account as much protections for, you know, nursing home residents and their families and folks like that. So just wanted to get your thoughts on that whole kind of stream of policymaking. This is an example of a really, really difficult decision. The issue was that in order to bring people, health care workers back into the system that had left they had recently retired or they were from another state or nursing homes, being able to take people who were COVID night, had been COVID-19 positive. There were a whole issues around liability. People coming back into the system don't have, you know, they don't have liability insurance, right, malpractice insurance. So how do you get them in if they want to come and they want to help, but they're worried if something happens on their watch or you're asking a cardiac surgeon to be in the ICU, you know, we want that person to be there. Listen, I want to be there, but I need some protection because I'm not protected from this. So it was really important that those protections for the health care workers be in place. Now, having said that, at the same time, we changed the crisis of care standards so that they were much more prescriptive and much less punitive against people that had preexisting conditions. So that was very helpful because when those standards in care are in place, it means you need to follow these steps. So there was a protection there. The other piece that we did that I think is really important is all of the, we put an additional $130 million into nursing homes and we set up a very stringent set of requirements that they must follow if they want to continue to get funding. Well, I think having done those two things at the same time that we put in the liability protection is helpful to addressing the issues that some people had. But again, it's not perfect. Right, but that's a tried and true formula, as you said, extending the caret of the funding of the money and extracting some compliance in the process. That makes sense. I wanna ask it now. I wanna get a little bit more into kind of the nitty-gritty of certain numbers that people are gonna be very concerned about here at Arlington and throughout the state. But before we do that, I want to acknowledge, number one, as I am trying to keep up with this stuff, I'm noticing that the numbers are changing all the time, not just the numbers of, not just related to COVID-19 and the actual safety numbers and morbidity and all that stuff, but even numbers about projected deficits, et cetera. So sticking with the economy for the moment and acknowledging that we don't wanna hold you to either a firm grasp on whatever these shifting numbers are right now or to the fact of that staying the case a week from now, I understand that your website is a good place to direct people to get the latest information in a whole host of areas. So first tell us a little bit about what they can find there and then we can dig into the numbers a bit. Sure, so my website, Cindyfreedman.org has on it at the front page has a tab for coronavirus COVID-19. We have put together a whole section broken down by a different area. So federal government, the legislature, what we've done, the latest updates from DPH, all of the relevant information as we get it, we put it up on the website. I have a phenomenal, phenomenal communications director who keeps all of this up to date. So I encourage everybody to go there and you will see great links to information and we keep it up to date constantly, daily. So that's a great place to go and I encourage everyone to check it out. I'm really, really jealous of people who keep numbers in my head. My brother can remember who was at bat in 1952 when the Yankees were playing the Phillies in some game. I know they're two different. No, and who was at bat and what his batting average was, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm so jealous of people. I am so not that person. So I have to keep going back to my notes and say, yes, it was this amount of money and one number replaces the other as I get them. So that's my disclaimer. There you go. That's a very good one. It covers plenty of ground. So let's try. Let's see, let's see. I mean, there's some big numbers that we need to deal with and that is the projections for the deficits here in the state and in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have run in the last week from what I understand everywhere from $4 billion, excuse me, to $6 billion, possibly $8 billion. Obviously, we don't know, we understand that, but there are clear implications, especially because we're supposed to be in the middle of a budget process right now and clear implications for towns and cities throughout the Commonwealth, just like Arlington. I know you guys are under a lot of pressure to come up with some numbers so that then municipalities can get with their own budgets. So what can you, give us your sense of where things are, best sense of where things are at the moment, possibly where things might be headed. Okay, so first of all, there's two numbers going on right now. We just did a borrowing bill that gave the state the authority to borrow money for this year, 2020. We are not getting any tax revenue because it's all been pushed out till July 15th. So none of those receipts have come in. So this borrowing bill allows us to borrow against those receipts. And I think that's one of the numbers that we're hearing. But the other numbers that are fluctuating are what does the deficit look like for 2021? And it started out at $4 billion, now there's really some, when you look at all the potential areas of revenue, we're now, I think the economists are saying it's around $6 billion dollar deficit. I know we just did a release to cities and towns. The governor just released money for cities and towns. I think Arlington's getting, I don't know, but Arlington will get a certain amount of that money and it can be used for coronavirus types of things, boards of health, food insecurity, just to support the cities and towns while we're going through this epidemic at this point. And that information is on the website. So really it is what's it gonna look like next year? And number one, as you said, nobody knows, a lot of this depends on what the federal government does or doesn't do. So the numbers fluctuate based on what people feel is gonna come from the feds. And this is the real unknown. It's gonna be very hard, there's gonna be, there are absolutely gonna be deficits. There will be a big deficit. Where it is in those billion dollar range, I think is people's best guess. But it's gonna be bad. Our job is gonna be to figure out where that money needs to go, what kind of cuts we make, what kinds of programs we keep whole. And my focus is gonna be on ensuring that we protect as many of our residents while we're going through this difficult time. So we need to do anything we can to make sure people have food security, make sure that they can stay in their homes while we're rebuilding our economy. Make sure healthcare is accessible so people don't get sicker. These are all not only moral and ethical issues but they're also economic, right? Because in the end, or very soon, we're going to be paying much more for people because of social instabilities or social determinants, than we would have if we took care of these issues up front. Do we have a good primary care system? Can people get to the hospital? Can kids get their vaccines? These are all really important to keeping our economy going. And at the same time, I think we've got to really focus on what barriers can we move out of the way so businesses can do their jobs. A great example of this is the issues going on around whether a restaurant can serve alcohol outside. Turns out that not only do you need local approval but you need the alcohol control commission's approval. Now that's, to me, really, really silly. We want to support our businesses. They want to put up a couple of tables outside and the town is okay with that. Let's let them do it. So I think those are the areas that we have to focus on is how do we move barriers out of the way of people doing business and how do we protect our most vulnerable. Yeah, I want to recognize that a lot of the work that you've described both in our last interview and by the way, congratulations. You are the first person for us to do a repeat interview by Zoom, wow, what a distinction. Oh my God. But you've been remembering the last time there is this theme that obviously we need our legislature to be removing barriers, basically. Whether that's increasing the number of doctors available, doctors and nurses and medical staff available by relaxing or changing some of the requirements, et cetera, and processes as you've described last time or this kind of thing, a certain amount of your job is really kind of clearing the path for the things that need to happen. I want to ask you a tough question and that is you mentioned that cuts will have to happen and you mentioned what your own priorities are. Can you give us an example of a cut to a program or programs that you could live with versus the kinds of protections you want to make sure are either continue to be strong or are further strengthened? The first place I would look at is tax loopholes. I would be looking at any area where we have provided somebody a tax break or a tax incentive and I would say, do we really need that? I would be closing some of those loopholes. Our tax system is problematic. We don't have a ability to have a graduated income tax. I know that a lot of these loopholes are there to mitigate, you know, business taxes, which frankly in Massachusetts, we don't have a very high business tax. Cause we brought it down over the course of years. So I would, but I would really look at that. I would look at tax loopholes first and see what we can close to bring in more, to bring in more revenue. I can't think of a program offhand that I would say, hey, we need to, we should cut that. I know, and that's, I mean, obviously that's anathema in a sense, you know, asking you to, to state on record in any sense. I get that, but with respect, it feels like closing tax loopholes is not, that's not going to address, you know. I think the issue more becomes more is how do we cut? Okay, making a cut to one program is not the same as making a cut to another. So if you reduce across the board cuts by 28%, let's say, that's very different. For instance, a 28% cut to local aid, for instance, is very different than a 28% cut to the Department of Public Health. Okay, first of all, local aid is really, is really weird because, for lack of a better word, you know, everybody gets a different amount of local aid. And some towns really, really depend on that aid because they have no other sources of income. And some towns get so little, they're feeling as, eh, cut it, right? Or, I mean, they don't want it to be cut, but it's like, oh, we'll be fine, right? So, and then the other hand, if you cut DPH, Department of Public Health, which we desperately need right now by 28%, you will be doing enormous damage because we've been cutting DPH by 28% and 50% and 10% for the past 20 years. Wow. So that's what I'm talking about is like, how do you make those decisions so that we need DPH? We cannot have them cut right now. They are doing a critical piece of work to keep the entire Commonwealth, you know, alive. And we need to make sure they have the procedures and protocols and infrastructure in place so that we can deal with the pandemic. That's what I'm talking about. Mm-hmm. Okay, so I wouldn't be comfortable just saying 28% across the board. For instance, I'm making that up. Okay, that's I think what we cut during the 2009, 2010. That's what I'm talking about. So it's not just, I'm gonna cut you and not cut you. It's how much we're gonna cut and what can we put in place instead? You know, if we're gonna cut you, what do we do? Right? But so that's why I can't just say, no, you cut this program but save this program. Yeah. It's more nuanced than that. So I'm not trying to get out of it. I'm just trying, because I don't, it's not in front of me. So I can't say, yeah, I'm gonna cut that. Right, fair enough. And thanks for tackling that as you usually, as you always do, kind of head on, we appreciate it. But you mentioned 2009, 2010, just now. And I am mindful, or I wanna ask you, is there anything that you and the rest of the legislature who were there in dealing with that 10, 12 years ago? Anything useful that you are going to be applying to the kinds of negotiations and tough choices and things like that that are coming up? Or is the fact that it was a completely different set of drivers and things that you needed to deal with mean that it's not as relevant or helpful in terms of, again, tackling what you've got in front of you? I don't know that I can intelligently answer that question because they don't really, I don't know all the details in the ins and outs. And I just, I wasn't really involved. Right, of course, right. So it's just hard for me to answer that. I mean, we do use it as a comparison point. The other piece of it is that was a economic downturn. This is a health, right? This is driven by health versus the economy. Although some people will argue that this was coming anyway because our economy was so fragile, but there is a real difference. And I don't know how that manifests itself. Right. I know. Right, this is, I think that my thinking or whatever, I understand your answer for sure. I was wondering, because this is a health-induced or health-focused crisis that then leads into an economic crisis is what it sure feels like to everybody. That I'm just wondering whether, you know, that there would have been lessons drawn from the, you know, the economic recovery programs that did work and didn't work, et cetera. But fair enough, as you said, that wasn't your direct experience. I'm sure somebody's looking. There are a lot of people are looking. Yeah. Better minds than mine. I have no doubt. One of the things we were asking you about in our last conversation, because we were curious, was just how you're getting business done with everybody being remote. I'm wondering with the budget negotiations, you know, or working out of the budget still in front of you and the many other things that, you know, require exigent attention on your part and the governor's four phases, are you guys gonna be getting back to work at the state house anytime soon? If not, are the current procedures and practices and ways you're doing business and getting legislation passed, are they gonna be adequate for what you need to do going forward? I think there's a number of answers to that. The first one I would point out is that the Senate has done a lot of legislation in the past couple of months. We have, excuse me, two municipal bills. We have a UI bill that we've done. We did a scope of practice bill. There's a whole number of bills that we've done. And so again, go to the website and you'll see that we've been pretty busy. It's working well enough to get things that we have to get done done. It's not the way we all like to do business. I know that the house has come up with a mechanism for having formal sessions and the Senate has a temporary way of doing that. That's how we passed the remote borrowing bill. I mean, excuse me, the borrowing bill. But we are looking at a long-term solution to being able to do formal sessions in the way that allows people to file amendments, have debates, mirror as much as we can what our usual way of doing business is. And I think we're gonna be coming out with that in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, we do all of our work in the caucuses, which we have every week. The Senate president and the minority leader work very closely together so that whenever something comes out, it's got the support of the body. But we're gonna have to change that. I mean, we're gonna have to go back to business. And so do you have any sense of when you may return to business in something that looks and feels a little bit more, you know, the normal way that things were done? And by that, I mean, looks that way to you and feels that way to you on the inside, also looks that way to us on the outside. I think it's gonna be a while. You know, as the governor said, as everyone keeps saying, if you're over 60, don't leave your house, right? There's a number of people in the legislature that are over 60. So right there you've got this, the kind of rub of how we do that. I think people are really anxious to get back to work. I think people are really anxious to get back to business the way it was. But we have to be really careful. And I think we have to model good behavior. And I want people to know that we have not been conducting business as usual, but we have never been busier. Like so many people, we are, I mean, so many of my colleagues and I go from 7.30 in the morning to late at night. One of the downsides of Zoom is that you're always available. That's right. Good for us. That's so good for you. I'm in Bill Ricca. I can't get back to the state house for that meeting. So there's been a lot of work that's been going on. And I have to say that one of the upsides of this is that there's been a lot of bipartisan work that's gone on between the governor and the legislature and between Senate Democrats and Republicans. And that has been really heartening. Yeah, you talk about, you were just saying in terms of returning to work, you got to model good behavior. Well, there's a great example, right? Would that some of that would see upwards or out from here, that that would be very, very nice indeed. And that brings me to one of the last topics I've got for you, which is you already described the situation, I think quite accurately, as a series of, well, my interpretation was a series of kind of municipal bodies or governance units, starting with local towns and cities who are dependent on the decisions, budget decisions made by the state. The state in turn is dependent on making those decisions on what happens at the federal level. So how, so my question is we've got the CARES Act already working its way through and that money, as you said, is making its way slowly to where it was intended to go. Then we have some pending possible legislation, a HEROES Act that has been introduced by the House Democrats, by the US House. How important, how vital is whatever is still to come from the federal government to your calculations, as you work out the budget for the state? Are we waiting really on decisions to be made still in order before you guys can actually come up with a 2021 budget? We are waiting. There was no question about it, but we can't wait for very long. I think what you'll see is that there'll be a, probably a short-term budget that will come out in the end of July. And then in the fall, there'll be a longer budget, once, you know, a more complete budget for 2021 in the fall, as we understand or at some point realize that something is or isn't going to happen. So I think that's how it will be addressed. And the interim budget or the budget, you know, the first one that comes out, smaller as it may be, small as it may be, that's gonna be, how is that, how will you decide what the contents of that budget are? Is it have to do with the essential quality of the programs that you're gonna be funding the HEROES? When we do, sometimes you hear about a 112th budget, which is a month by month. We do that when we're still negotiating. It happens sometimes. But usually the way that it works is that it's based on last year's budget for that month. So you're basically level funding things. You're keeping it at the level of last year. So you see how we can't do that for very long. Right. Because we're gonna have such a deficit. But that's why it's short-term and that's probably what will happen. And then we'll have to make it up with the longer term, you know, with the more complete budget. But that's how it works. And I haven't gotten any indication that it will be done differently. So in other words, I don't think we'll start to cut in August. Okay. Well, we have taken up just about enough of your 7.30 in the morning to whatever 10.30 schedule today. But let me ask, you know, I wanna invite you as I did last time I spoke to you. Extraordinary circumstances, we continue to work our way through kind of somewhat blindly, somewhat in tandem in cooperation and collaboration with each other, et cetera. Final words, you know, for Arlington, for your constituency, you know, around where we are and where we're headed. Everybody follow the guidelines for keeping safe, social distancing, wear a mask. It matters, it matters, it matters. I hope everybody votes on June 6th in Arlington. I know we all got cards from the town clerks saying you can vote by mail. So get your vote in. If nothing, if we haven't learned anything, we've learned that leadership really, really matters in these times and that's leadership at every level. So make your voice heard. And keep taking deep breaths and I, people have been for the most part, absolutely wonderful and thoughtful and kind. And I just, I beg you to keep patient, keep optimistic, ask for help when you need it. And we are here to help. So it's Cindyfreedman.org and you can call my office anytime. We pick up our messages constantly during the day, six, one, seven, seven, two, two, one, four, three, two. And I'm very glad that I live in Arlington and the state of Massachusetts. So thank you, James. Well, thank you, wise words. And guess what? Those are numbers you're clearly in command of. Your telephone number, no problem. Good to think of. You're doing it on a high note. No, it's been, again, we really do appreciate it. We know that you are exceedingly busy and doing your part both individually and collectively. To help us all get through this and we'll do our part. So one of the many, many, many people who are doing their part. So thank you too. Yes, indeed. I have been speaking to our state senator, Cindyfreedman and this is Talk of the Town. I'm James Milan. Thanks for joining us.