As the Legislative Conference Committee on Transportation nears the end of its work Governor Patrick and top leadership have intensified the verbal warfare over the final package. The Governor in recent days has complained about being shut out of the legislative process by the Conference Committee, which has barred his staff from participation. From the State House News Service:

“Look, in an ideal world, we’d see the bill, we’d be talking about specific language, we would contribute to that language, so we would all know where we were going and whether or not we were on a collision course,” Patrick said. “We have not gotten that level of – we haven’t gotten that yet from the transportation chair.”

Which Transportation Chair is that Governor, Baddour or Wagner? Well the Governor took a shot at the House Chair in describing conversations about the conference report.

“I had a conversation last week with the House chair of transportation which was frankly not that informative, but we’ve been clear about what we want to see in those bills,” he said.

Well at least Wagner is talking to him, even if he is not saying much. But Wagner delivered a pretty strong counter to the Governor’s pointed critique.

“I have two recollections about the meeting,” he said. “The first is that we had agreed that outside of that room we weren’t going to talk about the meeting. And my second recollection is that it was very informative, at least from my point of view.”

He added, “We had agreed at the request of the governor not to talk about the meeting outside the meeting.”

If Wagner is correct then the Governor asked that the meeting not be discussed, and then went out and discussed the meeting. That will not lead to more input from the Governor on the conference committee bill. We may be heading into a situation where the main players dislike each other so much that a veto of the Transportation bill will be the result. The Speaker expected a bill this past Tuesday, and that has been pushed back to Thursday. A critical policy area intertwined with some real nasty politics. Look out below!