Updates from state government

• As of Tuesday night, DPH reported a total of 541,908 cases of COVID-19. The state reported 1,114 new confirmed cases. The state has now confirmed a total of 15,564 deaths from the virus.
• The House on Tuesday prepared its version (H 68) of proposed rules to govern the Legislature over the next two years. The Joint Rules cover House-Senate relations and set up the joint committee structure that hears testimony on the thousands of bills already proposed on Beacon Hill this term. Around 6,400 bills were seasonably filed by lawmakers ahead of last Friday’s deadline, around 4,000 in the House and around 2,400 in the Senate.
• The leaders of both branches have assigned members to the committees that will initially consider those petitions, and under temporary rules most of those committees are in place. Four committees, however, are in flux: three new panels dealing with COVID-19, racial equality, and the Internet, along with a revived Joint Bonding Committee. Those committees do not officially exist until both chambers have agreed on a final version of the Joint Rules, which is sometimes worked out through a conference process. The House scheduled its consideration of the rules package for Wednesday at 1 p.m., with amendments due by 5 p.m. Tuesday.
• Members of the new Joint Committee on COVID-19 and Emergency Preparedness plan to hear from Governor Baker about the state’s vaccination plans at an oversight hearing Thursday, although in the absence of final rules or a special order, the committee would not yet technically exist.
• Governor Baker said the state was working to make user-friendly improvements to the vaccination appointment website, but repeatedly pointed to Centers for Disease Control statistics that he said put Massachusetts among the top 10 states in the country for doses administered per capita. The governor said Massachusetts also ranks number one for first doses administered per capita among peer states with at least 5 million people, and said Bloomberg’s tracker puts the state second in the country for its rate of vaccination among Black residents.
• Governor Baker has agreed to testify Thursday at a legislative oversight committee hearing on his administration’s vaccine rollout. He is expected to get peppered with questions about everything from equity in vaccine distribution to the failure of the state’s website last week to handle the online traffic as vaccination appointments became available to people 65 and older. Governor Baker said his administration was working on “user interface improvements” to the website that would be rolled out over the next few weeks, and was also working with vendors to ensure the system could handle the traffic volume that will come in future phases of the rollout.
• The governor, however, would not say whether any changes might be ready before Thursday when tens of thousands of new appointments become available each week. He also did not say whether the improvements would include preregistration, centralized booking or a function that would prevent users from losing their appointment during the time it takes them to enter their personal information. Rather than technology, Governor Baker said the biggest impediment to more people getting vaccinated or being able to book an appointment is supply.
• The state’s education commissioner wants elementary school students back in the classroom full-time in April, as part of a plan to phase out remote learning that officials announced Tuesday as Massachusetts approaches the one-year anniversary of the initial March 2020 school closures intended to mitigate spread of COVID-19. The announcements met quick pushback from the state’s largest teachers union, which has been calling for earlier vaccine access for educators, and from school committees, which said decisions involved in reopenings are best handled at the local level.
• Most schools, around 80 percent of districts, have reintroduced at least some in-person learning over the past year, relying on protocols like mask-wearing and distancing. The remaining districts that are teaching entirely remotely serve about 400,000 students, he said. Commissioner Jeff Riley told members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that he will ask them next month for the authority to determine when hybrid and remote school models no longer count for learning hours.
• Riley said he would pursue a phased approach with the goal of getting as many kids as possible back into classrooms by the end of this school year, focusing first on elementary school students and then on older grades. He said he would work closely with state health officials and medical experts, and that parents would still have the option to choose remote learning for their child through the end of the year. There would also be a waiver process for districts that might need to move more incrementally, Riley said, giving the example of a fully remote district that could seek to transition to a hybrid model because an immediate shift to a totally in-person format would be a “hard lift.”
• More than a year after he pleaded not guilty to a bevy of federal fraud charges, former Rep. David Nangle reached an agreement with federal prosecutors on Monday to change his plea to guilty. Nangle will plead guilty to 10 counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, four counts of making false statements to a bank, and four counts of filing false tax returns, according to the change of plea paperwork outgoing U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling’s office filed Monday.
• As part of the agreement, prosecutors will not charge Nangle with obstruction of justice or extortion related to an alleged “stream of benefits” Nangle received from an unnamed associate who owns a Billerica company. Parties in the case did not reach any consensus on sentencing recommendations with Nangle’s change of plea.
• The court battle over the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s land appears to be at the end of its road after the Biden administration last week abandoned the Trump administration’s legal campaign to strip the tribe of control of 321 acres of reservation land in Mashpee and Taunton. The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe’s land in trust status has been under contention for years. The tribe was federally-recognized in 2007 and the Obama administration took the land into trust for the tribe in early 2016.
• The Trump administration worked to undo that designation and then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt ordered the tribe’s land be taken out of trust status last March. But a federal judge in June granted the tribe’s motion for summary judgment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia case – Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe v. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, saying the Trump administration’s 2018 declaration that the tribe does not qualify as “Indian” under the federal Indian Reorganization Act was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law.”
• The judge remanded the matter to the Department of the Interior for the agency to reconsider and the Biden administration’s Department of the Interior on Friday officially withdrew the government’s appeal. The fate of the tribe’s land in trust, and the plan for a $1 billion resort casino in Taunton that the tribe was pursuing, could have a significant impact on the state’s commercial casino industry.
• One concern, as expressed by local officials and others, is that commercial casino operators might not be willing to invest the minimum $500 million in a project that could have to compete with a nearby tribal casino. If the Gaming Commission opts to go ahead with licensing a commercial casino in Region C and the tribe is allowed to open its own casino under federal law, Massachusetts would receive no tax revenue from the tribal casino.
• U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be a virtual guest at Tufts University on Thursday. The Tisch College Distinguished Speaker Series event will be broadcast live by Tufts University at 5:30 p.m. and moderated by Alan Solomont, dean of Tisch College and former U.S. ambassador to Spain and Andorra.

Special thanks to MassAccess for providing this update to us.

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