Transparency and Conference Committees

Now I’m old enough to remember open, around the clock conference committees, and frankly am rather relieved that I do not carry on my back the job of listening to the public debate in the conference committee, listening to the private speculations of conference committee members who might be supporting my clients priorities in executive session, and then trying to weigh the relative importance of those public and private remarks so I could translate it all to my clients and give them an honest guess at what might emerge. Sometimes I guessed right and was a brilliant analyst and sometimes I guessed wrong and was clearly not “in the loop” .

Nobody’s in the Bunker on this Bunker Hill Day -- all the key players in the loop are in the State House trying to pick up a scrap of information from anybody who might know anything about any of the remaining “Big 3” conference committees (Ethics, Transportation and Budget).

Reporters and lobbyists monitor the usual and secret routes between the Ways and Means Committee offices, the Speakers office, the Senate Presidents office and the Governor’s office looking for W&M staff or Members shuttling back and forth as they try to nail down the final details in three different conference committee reports, each one extraordinarily complex and complicated in it’s own right and inter connected to each other besides. 

To say that transparency and accountability is not considered by any of the key players is an understatement. They don’t even want to admit they are talking privately, as this excerpt from the State House News illustrates.

“Look, in an ideal world, we’d see the bill, we’d be talking about specific language, we would contribute to that language, so we would all know where we were going and whether or not we were on a collision course,” Patrick said. “We have not gotten that level of – we haven’t gotten that yet from the transportation chair.”

Asked about his confidence that a satisfactory ethics bill would reach his desk this week, Patrick said he would have preferred not to wait until the closing hours of the fiscal year before addressing the various reform measures. 

“I had a conversation last week with the House chair of transportation which was frankly not that informative, but we’ve been clear about what we want to see in those bills,” he said. 

Wagner disputed Patrick’s characterization of the meeting, which he said was held in Patrick’s office last Thursday.

“I have two recollections about the meeting,” he said. “The first is that we had agreed that outside of that room we weren’t going to talk about the meeting. And my second recollection is that it was very informative, at least from my point of view.”

He added, “We had agreed at the request of the governor not to talk about the meeting outside the meeting.”

So all we can do now is lurk in the hallways or watch and wait. And pity the Governor who from the moment these conference reports land on his desk has only 10 days to submit his amendments and his vetoes. And then there is more lurking and waiting because the House can take all the time they want to take up reject those amendments and over ride those vetoes, or not take them up at all.