After months of pressing Baker to sign the climatebill, Barrett said he’s now focusing on ensuring his administration implements it.

He has threatened legal action if the administration seeks to “evade legislative intent and substitute the weaker preferences of the executive branch.”

“It’s going to be a tough slog,” he said. “There’s no silver bullet here.”

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At the signing, the atmosphere was cordial. Still, peculiar. Why schedule this important ritual — putting the official touch on the most important climate legislation in Massachusetts in over a decade — on a Friday, at 2:30 in the afternoon? Why situate it in the lovely but bounded quarters of the State House Library, when several gorgeous and larger ceremonial spaces, big enough to accommodate social distancing, beckon just down the hall? Why issue no invitations at all to the advocacy organizations for climate policy, clean energy, and environmental justice, despite the pivotal roles they played?

And why, in his prepared remarks, did Gov. Baker spend so much time reprising and saluting the valuable yet more modest energy bills of years past, and so little time celebrating the content contained in the 114 sections of the legislation he had just signed?

I sense a problem, and I’m uneasy. I hope the Governor is not toying with the idea of slow-walking implementation of the bill. That would not do. Legislators like me will be watching too closely. I know many of you will, too.

Read The Barrett Report…

Sen. Michael Barrett, who led the negotiations for the Senate and said he is concerned that the Baker administration has tried to “evade legislative intent” of the new law, said Friday that everyone in state government now must start “pulling in the same direction” now that the work turns to implementation.

“The order of the day beginning tomorrow is ensuring interpretations of the law that are true to legislative intent and then overseeing implementation in a way that is true to legislative intent,” he said. “One reason I’ve been so concerned about the administration’s insistence on idiosyncratic readings of the new statute is that today’s abstract discussion segues over in tomorrow’s implementation. If the administration pushes back against the plain language of the law today, how are they going to implement it tomorrow?”

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