Veterans bill approval emerges during overnight State House session

By SAM DRYSDALE and CHRIS LISINSKI

State House News Service

Published: 08-01-2024 2:25 PM

BOSTON – Lawmakers approved a compromise veterans service bill Thursday morning after deploying a rarely used legislative technique to fix apparent errors in the accord they initially filed.

The House voted just before 5:45 a.m. to accept a sweeping bill that includes a number of policy changes and tax incentives for veterans. Senators are expected to follow suit soon and send the measure to Gov. Maura Healey.

The bill (H 4976) features more than a dozen reforms to modernize and increase access to benefits for veterans, including expanding access to behavioral health treatment, allowing new local-option property tax exemptions for service members, and aligning the state’s definition of a veteran with the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department to cover a wider range of former veterans and their family members.

Sources said the main issue holding up talks over House and Senate bills that closely resembled each other was a House addition allowing certain veterans groups to open up to five slot machines on their property. The policy did not make it into the final compromise.

Another controversial piece had to do with waiving license plate fees on specialty veteran license plates. The American Legion, which says it is the largest veterans organization in the state, opposed the measure because dollars from those fees go to the Chelsea and Holyoke Soldiers’ Homes to fund recreation and personal care items.

Negotiators kept a license plate fee waiver for disabled veterans and Medal of Liberty recipients in their final 43-page bill.

House and Senate negotiators submitted a deal on the legislation around 3:30 a.m., but then soon afterward returned to the House clerk’s office and said there was an issue with the report they submitted.

Lead House conferee Michael Moran said the problem had to do with a license plate provision of the bill.

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“I don’t know if we have to refile it or how we do it,” Moran, the House’s majority leader, said.

Lawmakers wound up addressing their concerns by filing an additional “errata” that struck six sections of the version they submitted dealing with license plates for disabled veterans – a different license plate reform than the more controversial one related to waiving fees.

Conference reports cannot be amended through traditional means, but a little-known section of joint rules (Rule 11E) allows lawmakers to change those accords after they are filed when the alterations deal only with things “inadvertently omitted from or included in the report.” All six negotiators agreed to the update, as did legal counsel for both the House and Senate.

The bill is the second to emerge from conference committee talks during a marathon overnight session lawmakers kept open Wednesday into Thursday.

Ten other proposals remain in conference committees after legislative leaders blew past their July 31 deadline for major legislating and ponder how much longer they want to keep rank-and-file lawmakers around for the final formal session of the term.

Colin A. Young contributed reporting.