‘Dysfunctional normalization’: Massachusetts is starting its fiscal year without an annual budget — for the 13th straight time

The door opened to the Senate chambers in the Massachusetts State House while lawmakers deliberated on the final evening of their formal legislative session last July.Carlin Stiehl for The Boston Globe

As in 45 other states, July in Massachusetts brings a new fiscal year. What residents here won’t find, again: an annual plan on how to spend billions of their tax dollars.

For the 13th straight time, the state is starting a fiscal year without an annual budget in place, extending an ignominious streak of delays that have stretched days, weeks, or even months, and may be unmatched in the country.

Massachusetts has been the last state in the nation to enact a budget, despite others — such as Michigan — not starting their fiscal year until the fall. Entering this year, it was the only state that was late in completing its annual spending plan every single year since 2017, according to a Globe review of data kept by a nonpartisan research group.

In other words, no state has been late more often in recent years in achieving one of the most crucial and basic tasks of government than Massachusetts.

Legislative leaders say it takes time to negotiate a spending plan, and there’s much to show for their deliberative work, including record savings and better bond ratings. But for state agencies and others that rely on the $56 billion spending plan, yet another late budget can mean delays to their own planning, and, in some cases, fewer potholes being filled or services provided.

“It’s one of the small failures of transparency and good governance in Massachusetts among a litany of others that have not yet added up to cataclysmic problems or dramatic issues,” said Evan Horowitz, executive director of the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University. “But it speaks to underlying dysfunction.”

For more than three weeks, leaders from the House and Senate have been in closed-door talks to reconcile different versions of the budget each chamber passed. The government won’t shut down because lawmakers passed an interim spending plan to keep services funded, in this case until Aug. 1.

The placeholder budget is a skeletal piece of legislation, devoting $6.6 billion to keep government running but with none of the detail — or hundreds of pages — an annual plan demands. And what is designed to be a stopgap measure has also morphed into a commonplace one, with the Legislature passing one every year since 2011.

The Democratic-led Legislature hasn’t sent a budget to the governor’s desk before the start of the fiscal year since 2016. And the last time the state had a signed annual budget in place by July 1 was 2010.

The Legislature this year is already off to a sluggish start to law-making, which — similar to the budget delays — critics chalk up to leaders concentrating power and major decisions in the hands of only a few.

“We can’t run a state on [the work of] a few people,” said Jordan Berg Powers, a member of the group a Coalition to Reform Our Legislature. “That’s the cost of centralization.”

Sean Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for the Senate’s budget committee, said that while lawmakers “always strive” to complete a budget on time, the stopgap spending time gives legislative leaders negotiating its details “ample time to focus and come to a consensus on the Commonwealth’s priorities.”

House Speaker Ronald Mariano spoke to the media this year.Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

Plus, legislative leaders argued, the delays don’t detract from what has been prudent budgeting. The state has bulked up its emergency savings account to a record $7.2 billion, its bond rating was recently upgraded, and Massachusetts has enjoyed record budget surpluses in recent years. This year, legislative leaders are negotiating a tax relief package that, in the House’s version, could top $1 billion.

House Speaker Ronald Mariano, a Quincy Democrat, called the fiscal gains a testament to the chamber’s “legacy of responsible budgeting practices.”

“Years of fiscal prudence during periods of immense economic uncertainty have not only ensured that state programs remain supported,” he said, “but have also allowed for an opportunity to provide tax relief to residents across all income levels, further proof of the Legislature’s responsible approach.”

This year, the protracted negotiation means a bevy of important decisions remain up in the air. The House, for example, passed language to mandate universal free meals in schools — which the Senate did not embrace. The Senate, meanwhile, voted to make students without legal immigration status eligible for in-state college tuition; the House did not.

Then, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in unique spending between each chamber’s version, according to an analysis from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. For example, the Senate, but not the House, is proposing to use $100 million of money raised from a new surtax on the state’s highest earners to supplement local road and bridge repair aid. Typically, towns and cities rely on a pot of state money of $200 million, but that, too, remains tied up in separate legislative negotiations.

With summer road work already underway in towns and cities, should that extra aid not survive budget negotiations, it could limit how much communities are able to do, said Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association.

“If it’s higher than $200 million, then a little bit of a delay in the construction season would be well worth it,” Beckwith said. But, he said, if the extra money isn’t approved, “it would create not just logistical but real pressures by having a shortened season.”

Child care providers are also closely watching how the Legislature handles so-called C3 child-care grants, which providers say help cover salaries and other overhead costs. The chambers differ not only in total funding, but also in the source of funding. Such grants provide “life-saving funding” for child care centers like Square One in Springfield, said Dawn DiStefano, its chief executive.

But the budgeting delay has become so persistent, many, like DiStefano, now regularly plan on not knowing what the state is willing to fund until deep into the summer. That, she said, has bred a “very dysfunctional normalization.”

“If the state is delayed in doing its budget, that means I’m delayed in doing mine,” DiStefano said. “I would certainly not feel comfortable hiring new staff or starting a new program without a state budget in place. . . . We lose precious time. It means less service to people.”

At Square One in Springfield, 4- and 5-year-old children make shapes out of construction paper. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

That’s not to say budget negotiations haven’t dragged late, or indefinitely, elsewhere. New York has had a budget in place on the first day of its fiscal year, April 1, just once since 2017, and didn’t enact its current one until May. Rhode Island was late at least three times in that span, according to a review of data kept by the National Association of State Budget Officers, a nonpartisan research group.

In North Carolina, where the state works off a biennial spending plan, it went without a new budget for an entire two years before passing one in 2021 — in November, more than four months after the fiscal year started.

That Massachusetts has shrugged at hitting its fiscal year mark is notable, given its full-time Legislature is considered more professional than most, said Erin O’Brien, a University of Massachusetts Boston professor who co-edited the book “The Politics of Massachusetts Exceptionalism: Reputation Meets Reality.”

“There’s an irony,” she said, “that the most professional legislature can’t get it done, can’t meet a deadline.”