Mariano at home in the House and the business crowd

20 years ago, MA mandated residents to buy health insurance or pay a tax penalty. Unaffordable healthcare inflation followed along with new mandates, rising premiums, fewer choices & increased provider payments without real transparency or efficiency standards. Taxpayer costs soared; working family income growth suffered. Small businesses & their workforces have consistently faced annual double digit premium increases. Healthcare cost reforms are long overdue.

House Speaker Ron Mariano had barely begun his Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce speech when he jumped off script.

“It’s also great to be joined by a number of my colleagues in the House, each of whom have played a vital role in the work of the House of Representatives this session,” he said, adding that they’ve been around long enough to know there would be a “vacancy soon” in his office.

The friendly crowd, mostly business people and consultants with Mariano’s leadership team sprinkled at the tables inside the Fairmont Copley Hotel, was in on the joke and roared with laughter. It was another Mariano missile, a wink-and-nod reference to one of the questions that bounces around Beacon Hill: When is Mariano, who took the reins in 2020, stepping down?

The mostly likely answer is whenever he feels like it. That’s partly due to how the Quincy Democrat, first elected to the Legislature in 1991, runs the House. The institution isn’t as top-down as it used to be under previous speakers.

Mariano, who turns 80 later this year, delegates more to his committee chairs. It’s apparent in the post-caucus scrums, when reporters press him for details on legislation or interactions with the governor or the attorney general, and he nods to his leadership team, including Aaron Michlewitz, the Ways and Means chairman widely viewed as the speaker-in-waiting, for the answers.

There is some House grumbling, overheard at a recent funeral for a colleague, that the reins could be held a little more closely. But other close observers say that’s a function of a generational divide among House members, and the older crowd perhaps preferring a tighter grip.

Mariano’s speech at the Boston Chamber event included another missile, this one with a warhead aimed at the proponents of a ballot question to lower the state’s income tax.

Addressing any inside the gilded ballroom, Mariano argued the tax savings for households would be “modest” while lawmakers would have to institute “sweeping budget cuts “ to education and health care accounts. “And we’d still be competing with states that have no income tax at all,” he said, while also pitching the proponents on sitting down and negotiating with Beacon Hill leaders rather than heading to the ballot.

“This thing about ‘let's do a ballot question, and it's going to fix everything,’ it's just such nonsense, and it's insulting to me, as someone who follows public policy, that they think that they can solve problems that way,” Mariano told reporters afterwards. “And so I don't know if you notice a little bit of anger on that, because I'm a little bit tired of this.” (Not exactly an olive branch.)

If there were proponents in the room, they didn’t rush to publicly respond to the speaker while he was in front of them. When the chamber’s CEO, Jim Rooney, joined Mariano on the stage, they eased into the chairs for question time, with the rapport you see among old friends.

The business community isn’t united behind the ballot question: Suffolk’s John Fish and Eastern Bank’s Bob Rivers have raised concerns as the Mass. High Tech Council’s Chris Anderson and the Pioneer Institute’s Jim Stergios press ahead with it.

After most had left the ballroom, Mariano remained. He sat by the stage and held court as attendees, including former House counsel Bill Kennedy, came up to chat, and aides lingered a few feet away, ready to call an Uber. The speaker didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave.

My SHNS colleague Ella Adams has more from Mariano’s speech and the response from the income tax cut campaign here. Hat tip to one of my former editors at CommonWealth, Michael Jonas, for coining the term “Mariano missile.” My favorite remains the speaker’s response to my question about Ralph de la Torre and the Steward Health Care debacle. Send me yours if you have one: [email protected].

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BOSTON OFFICE: The office market in the Boston area had a flat vacancy rate in the first quarter of 2026, while lab vacancies hit 34%. Analysts say the office market appears to have bottomed out after diving amid the pandemic. – Boston Business Journal

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