The top budget writer in the Massachusetts Senate said Wednesday he was “not surprised” when he learned Gov. Maura Healey’s administration predicted it would spend nearly $1 billion on the emergency shelter system in fiscal year 2025.

Senate Ways and Means Chair Michael Rodrigues, who is tasked with shaping many of the major financial bills in the chamber, said there were discussions “a few months ago” that made clear the system housing homeless families with children and pregnant people would need more money.

But the massive spend in fiscal year 2025, and a projected budget gap of $224 million this fiscal year, come as state tax revenues in the first months of fiscal year 2024 have come in below expectation.

Rodrigues said he understands there are financial challenges ahead for Massachusetts but the state is in “good fiscal shape.”

“We’ve been very responsible through the years that we’ve received an amazing amount of revenue increases, a lot of it as a result of hundreds of billions of federal dollars that have flowed into the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” he said while ticking off various funds lawmakers have built up, including the roughly $8 billion rainy day account.

Two reports in the past two weeks have outlined the financial challenges of the emergency assistance shelter system, which is housing both local homeless families and newly arrived migrants who were lawfully allowed into the United States by the federal government.

In the first report to the Legislature’s two budget-writing committees, Administration and Finance Secretary Matthew Gorzkowicz and Housing Secretary Ed Augustus proposed using leftover surplus revenues from the COVID-19 pandemic to cover the shelter system’s budget deficit this fiscal year and pay down some costs in the next.

It is a proposal that has drawn hesitant remarks from legislative Republicans, who cast doubt on a plan to drain a $700 million transitional escrow account on the shelter system.

Rodrigues, a Westport Democrat, said the Senate will consider the idea from the administration — which Healey said will be officially filed as legislation sometime early this year — but stopped short of offering an opinion on it.

“We protect our reserve funds, whether it’s transitional escrow or the state fund,” Rodrigues said. “We work very hard, we’ve been very responsible in building up these reserve funds and we’re going to think long and hard about how we expend any of those reserve funds.”