State Senate takes its show on the road

Senators Brian A. Joyce and Joan B. Lovely arrived in Braintree on Feb. 25 for a bus tour. John Blanding/Globe Staff/Globe Staff

Have you heard the one about the 12 senators who got on a school bus?

No, it’s not the beginning of a joke. Nearly a dozen state senators really did get on a school bus. Last week, they rode around the South Shore. This week, they visited around Greater Boston. Next week, the South Coast.

The statewide bus tour is forcing senators to get out of their districts — and off Beacon Hill — to see what is needed around the state. And while the communities may be unfamiliar — senators from Gloucester and Salem visited Braintree and Weymouth — the issues are not. Common themes have emerged while speaking with business developers, senior advocates, and community health experts. Repeatedly, the senators have heard concerns about transportation, energy costs, affordable housing, health care.

“You have here, I think, a quarter of the state Senate hearing what you have to say,” Senator John F. Keenan, a Quincy Democrat, told a group of health care workers and executives at the end of a recent tour of the Manet Community Health Center in Quincy. “It does have an impact.”

Called Commonwealth Conversations, the six-week listening tour began in early February. The state was divided into eight regions, with local senators providing tours of key civic institutions. Each day ends with a town hall meeting, where senators simply listen to what’s on the minds of the people.

Hundreds have shown up for the free-for-all sessions, standing in front of microphones and urging senators to protect circus animals and stop puppy mills. Realtors have asked for legislation to curb copper thefts. Environmentalists have cautioned against radio-frequency radiation emitted by utility smart meters. Residents have pushed for bail reform and quicker progress on medical marijuana.

For Debra Cutler of Quincy, the presence of the senators was a source of validation.

“You feel your issue is being understood, especially issues of predatory lending, when it’s not really a political issue any more,” she said. “You feel people have lost interest.”

But one of the senators’ staff members approached her afterward and offered advice on who she should contact for help, negating that feeling of being ignored, Cutler said.

Jean Childers, who has advocated at the State House on behalf of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Plymouth for years, appreciated the senators coming to her.

“This just puts them in a different light,” she said. “Some of these people are a long way from home. I like that.”

Senate President Stanley Rosenberg called the tours, which will help senators set their legislative agenda for the upcoming session, inspiring.

“It’s just organic. Two hundred people in Holyoke, 200 in Worcester, 300 in Lawrence, and they are not there by organizers or by advocacy groups,” he said. “People are just showing up.”

Each member of the Senate agreed to attend two sessions outside his or her region. Days usually begin before dawn, with senators driving from afar to rally at a meeting place and pile onto a bus, which ferries them from stop to stop. Keenan, for example, attended the central Massachusetts tour, arriving at UMass Medical School in Worcester before 8:30 a.m.

Rosenberg, Senate Minority Leader Bruce E. Tarr, and Senator Michael J. Rodrigues, a Westport Democrat, have been on each tour — Rodrigues because the listening tour was his idea.

“Be careful what you ask for,” he joked at the end of a stop in Quincy.

Rodrigues said the idea came about at a recent Senate retreat. He figured it would be a good way for senators to figure out what’s on the minds of constituents while the new administration settled in.

“This is my sixth new governor, and I knew there would be some down time,” he said.

Unlike previous listening tours, which were focused on a particular topic, this one is open-ended. Rodrigues said its success will be judged by the policies and legislation enacted two years from now.

And so, on a cold day in February, Senators Keenan, Rodrigues, and Rosenberg boarded a yellow school bus joined by Democrats Brian A. Joyce of Milton, Joan B. Lovely of Salem, Kenneth Donnelly of Arlington, and William N. Brownsberger of Belmont, and Republican Robert Hedlund of Weymouth. Tarr and Senator Michael F. Rush, a West Roxbury Democrat, drove themselves to the various stops on the tour that day.

The second half of the day began at 1:45 p.m. as the school bus pulled away from Fuller Village, an independent senior living facility in Milton, where Joyce’s 95-year-old father and Keenan’s 88-year-old father-in-law are residents. Besides meeting the parents, the senators had lunch with senior housing advocates and home health care professionals.

The point of the trip, according to Fuller Village executive director Deborah Felton, was for the senators “to see what potential for senior housing is. There are all types of senior housing and living. We’re all just working to try and help seniors live a fuller life.”

There were no spitballs thrown on the bus, but there was a fair amount of joking and reminiscing. There was talk of quarry-jumping as teenagers, family homes taken to make way for highways, and — of course — traffic.

“The best thing about this tour is you all are getting a taste of South Shore traffic,” Hedlund told his colleagues as the bus chugged along in stop-and-go traffic on Interstate 93 South before the Braintree split. The destination: Weymouth. “It used to be called rush hour, but now it’s like this all day long.”

That spawned a passionate conversation about transportation reform, traffic patterns, MBTA ridership, and how available parking influences people’s decision to take the T or drive.

“Public transportation is a huge issue,” Donnelly said. “You can hear the conversation going on now.”