Romney looks to boost school aid, scholarships

Declaring the state of the Commonwealth to be "much stronger" than it was during last year's budget crisis, Governor Mitt Romney last night proposed state university scholarships for top MCAS performers and full-day kindergarten, parenting classes, and other aid for struggling school districts.

In an annual State of the State address notable for its specifics, Romney told legislators and other state leaders gathered in the House chamber that staying on "the road of reform" will generate much of the money for his education initiatives, which would cost about $56 million in fiscal 2005 and nearly $100 million when they are fully implemented in four years. He argues that rising state revenues will help him to add money to education and aid to cities and towns after cuts last year.

The governor also pledged to overhaul the state's troubled school building assistance program. There are currently more than 300 projects on the state's waiting list and Romney promised to "jump start" more than 100 of them through "construction reform and a refinancing program."

"Make no mistake, these are still difficult times. We still face deficits. We still face hard choices," said Romney, who walked a red carpet from his State House office to the century-old chamber for the address. "But, if we stay on the road of reform, placing the interests of people first, we can do some good things this year, some very good things."

Romney's speech was markedly different from those of the last three years, when state officials have been focused on cutting programs, not expanding them.

Romney called his education initiative the "Legacy of Learning" program. Overall, he said, the roughly $24 billion budget blueprint he will unveil in two weeks would increase K-12 school spending by $100 million, or about 2.6 percent, and boost higher education spending by $70 million, or about 9 percent. Neither increase would bring spending back to fiscal 2003 levels.

Romney, who was interrupted numerous times by applause, also repeated his pledge not to raise taxes and promised "a modest increase in local aid" to cities and towns.

Senator Robert A. Antonioni, the Leominster Democrat who chairs the Education Committee, called Romney's education proposals "ambitious" but said, "the big question with all this stuff is how you're going to pay for all this."

"He has some expensive things here," Antonioni said. "Where you come up with the money is going to be the $60,000 question -- or the $1 billion question."

The administration and Democratic lawmakers differ on how large a budget gap the state will face in fiscal 2005, mostly because they hold different views of how much it will cost to maintain current programs and services. Romney says the state will have a $1 billion gap, while Representative John H. Rogers, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, predicts a gap of $1.5 billion.

Last night, Romney pointed once again to "reforms" as a way to generate major savings. Among other changes, the governor said he would like to merge the Turnpike Authority with the Highway Department, which he says would give the state a one-time windfall of $190 million and then $20 million annually; scrap "burdensome construction and bidding rules" for state and local building projects; and allow private employers to compete for state work. The governor has pushed all three ideas before.

"When we eliminate waste in government, we can do more for people," Romney said.

Several of Romney's initiatives stalled last year in the Democrat-dominated Legislature. Since taking office, Romney helped push University of Massachusetts president William Bulger from office, persuaded lawmakers to overhaul the Metropolitan District Commission, and has taken on state employees unions. Romney's broadside against waste last night elicited a standing ovation, but Democratic leaders remain skeptical that the changes he is proposing will produce the savings he promises. Many of them are wary of the merger of the two highway departments.

"We've got a billion-dollar problem. I would hope he has more imagination than that," said Representative Peter J. Larkin, the Pittsfield Democrat who is a key lieutenant of House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran. "We are not afraid of reform, but they have to be real, they have to be substantive."

Romney said his budget would increase health and human services spending by $500 million, but advocates said most, if not all, of that amount would be devoured by rising health-care costs in the Medicaid program, and wouldn't result in new services or programs -- or even restore the cuts of the past three years in agencies such as the Department of Public Health and the Department of Youth Services.

"It's like the governor claiming he increased payroll at his company by giving one person a $100,000 raise and cutting everybody else's paycheck," said Stephen Collins, who heads the Massachusetts Human Services Coalition. "The governor is being disingenuous at best."

Some outside the chamber greeted the governor's education proposals, which were cheered by lawmakers, with a more measured tone.

Jeff DeFlavio, the student member of the state Board of Education, praised Romney's scholarship proposal and predicted it would attract many takers. Still, he wondered whether students in affluent suburbs, who tend to score higher on the MCAS tests, would benefit instead of students in poorer cities who tend to score lower on the exams. Romney's proposal is to pay the tuition of students whose MCAS scores rank in the top 25 percent statewide, not in each school.

"Where are the kids living who need a full ride to higher education? It's going to be in Springfield rather than Belmont," said DeFlavio, a senior at Belmont High School. "It's really important to have those numbers before we can say whether it's a really great idea or not." It sounds like it has a lot of potential."

Shawn Feddeman, Romney's spokeswoman, acknowledged that students in wealthier districts were likely to qualify disproportionately for the scholarships. Nevertheless, she said, the program would be "an incentive to do better on MCAS and attract some of the best and brightest to our state universities."

In addition to education, which dominated last night's address, Romney also pledged to deal with the state's high auto insurance premiums and to "tackle our housing crisis," reiterating his campaign promise to double the number of annual housing starts to 32,000 by the end of his first term.

"Our housing is expensive for one primary reason: We don't build enough of it," Romney said. "I look forward to working with the Democratic and Republican leadership and the members of the Legislature to create new laws that remove the barriers to building more housing."

Romney concluded his remarks with a tribute to the 16 Massachusetts military men who have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since Sept. 11, 2001, mentioning all of them by name.

"These heroes we remember, we extol, we salute," he said.

Globe correspondent Matthew Rodriguez and Anand Vaishnav of the Globe staff contributed to this report.