WITH THREE state-funded youth mental health programs at risk of closing, lawmakers and providers ramped up their opposition this week to Gov. Maura Healey’s proposed budget cuts that come as Massachusetts continues to grapple with a behavioral health care crisis.

Two 15-bed intensive residential treatment programs (IRTP), operated by NFI Massachusetts in Westborough, that serve teenagers with serious mental health and safety issues would close under Healey’s fiscal 2026 spending plan. That would leave just two other IRTPs in the state.

The governor’s budget would also shutter the state’s only clinically intensive residential treatment (CIRT) program, called Three Rivers in Belchertown, that has a dozen beds and treats children ages 6 to 12.

At a budget hearing Monday in Attleboro, Department of Mental Health Commissioner Brooke Doyle said those facilities are slated to close due to low patient counts, inadequate staffing and location hurdles. The cost-saving measure comes as DMH — which would receive a 7 percent overall budget increase under Healey’s proposal — looks to prioritize resources for its over-capacity psychiatric hospitals.

“These programs have been very difficult to maintain adequate and safe staffing within. They’ve been understaffed for extended periods of time, and that has contributed in large part to why we had difficulty keeping all the beds filled,” Doyle said in Attleboro. “The programs do provide a specialized service need, and the reality is, that we haven’t been able to operate them fully today. So what we’re proposing to do is to right-size the IRTP, reflecting the volume that does get utilized.”

Doyle said the state pays for those beds “in full,” regardless of whether or not they are occupied. She argued that makes it “not sustainable to continue to pay for 50 percent utilization.”

Doyle highlighted the state’s investment in community-based mental health resources, though the IRTP and CIRT programs are seen as a last resort to stabilize young patients who repeatedly end up in the hospital and pose significant safety risks to themselves and their family.

“Without these services, youth will continue to cycle through expensive and disruptive emergency and acute hospital services,” Lydia Todd, executive director of NFI Massachusetts, said at a State House budget hearing Tuesday, according to a copy of her prepared remarks. “Their families face income loss because it is impossible to maintain employment when they are regularly needed to respond to mental health crises.”

Todd added, “If this program is closed, the commonwealth will lose a recently renovated facility, a highly credentialed, experienced and skilled multi-disciplinary team of 95 staff, a Joint Commission-accredited program, and most importantly, the ability to help youth and families with the most serious needs to manage their mental health issues in their natural communities, and be less likely to end up in one of our adult systems.”

Todd told the News Service 95 out of 100 positions are filled. 

“We could be fully utilized — no problem,” she said. 

Program leaders and lawmakers contend the programs are underutilized due to a complicated DMH referral process that can leave youth languishing in hospitals for weeks or months before they secure placement. Due to high staff turnover during the COVID pandemic, some hospital mental health providers also were unaware the IRTP and CIRT programs existed, said Sen. Jake Oliveira of Ludlow. 

“It’s my hope that we can restore the funding for these critical programs because everything that we hear from constituents and everything that we read, there is a dire need for youth beds, particularly adolescent mental health beds throughout Massachusetts,” Oliveira told the News Service. “If we have programs that are underutilized, then DMH needs to do a better job with the referral process to get help to families across Massachusetts.”

Doyle admitted the referral process was “too clunky” at the hearing Monday.

“So I’ve actually made some changes to that referral process, going to preview it with stakeholders this month, with a go-live plan for May,” Doyle said.

In another major budget cut, DMH plans to slash the case management workforce in half, which would save the state $12.4 million. That move recently triggered DMH workers represented by SEIU Local 509 to take a vote of no confidence in Doyle. 

Gov. Maura Healey has already hit pause on a controversial plan to shutter a 16-bed psychiatric hospital in Cape Cod. That closure, combined with the three youth mental health programs, would have saved the state a total of $20.1 million, according to a presentation from the Executive Office of Health and Human Services.

As House Democrats prepare to release their budget next week, Rep. Aaron Saunders of Belchertown said he plans to fight to ensure the CIRT, operated by Cutchins Programs for Children & Families, receives funding.

“We need it to be there,” Saunders told the News Service. “It is a level of intervention and service that other programs are not designed to provide, and that to me really is the linchpin.”

Saunders added, “In my conversations with the administration, I’ve tried to impress upon them that there needs to be access, in some way, shape or form, to this level of service.”

Tina Champagne, CEO of Cutchins Programs for Children & Families, urged lawmakers Tuesday to “dig deeper and to save our programs.” In prepared remarks, Champagne said the state remains in the throes of a “children’s mental health crisis” and argued “this is no time for a reduction in intensive mental health services in our state.”

“The decision to cut the CIRT is not only in direct opposition to well-established evidence-based practices for children and families with some of the most persistent and challenging mental health and safety concerns, but also puts the the most vulnerable children and families in the commonwealth at even greater risk by perpetuating the cycle of ACES and traumatic experiences,” Champagne said, referring to adverse childhood experiences.

She added, “The degree of safety and mental health challenges that must occur for youth to be considered for a DMH referral for the CIRT is highly intensive and the youth’s safety concerns are typically quite serious. If these youth could be treated elsewhere in the community, they would have been referred to those services, and usually have already utilized these services, but they are not intensive enough to maintain safety and mental health stabilization.”

At the hearing, Oliveira told Doyle he was insulted by her remarks that signaled the Belchertown program was not viable due to its location in western Massachusetts.

“That’s insulting to any western Mass. lawmaker who might be sending people halfway across the state, hours away to get the programs to utilize them,” Oliveira said.

The commissioner told Oliveira she regretted if her testimony seemed to be “disrespectful.”

“It’s more of a matter that we have to weigh parents’ requests and parents’ priorities, as well,” Doyle said. “So, it has always been a western Mass.-located program. It’s not new. And what we’re seeing is that it is getting a bit more challenging, particularly with workforce constraints, that when we don’t have full staff operating, it requires that the department have to make decisions with parents about whether or not their their child can be safely treated in that environment, based on staff that are available at that time.”

Rep. Kelly Pease, a Westfield Republican, questioned whether the adolescent mental health programs represented the “smart place” for DMH to make cuts. Without providing sufficient care to young Bay Staters early on, the state may exacerbate the prison pipeline and end up incurring more costs in the future, Pease told Health and Human Services Secretary Kate Walsh.

Walsh insisted those programs were 50 percent occupied and emphasized EOHHS’s push to “right-size our behavioral health infrastructure.” Pease argued the low patient census was a function of DMH’s “antiquated process to get a referral.”

“I think the question for the Legislature is: Do you want to pay for standby capacity in two or three programs across the state that may or may not be used?” Walsh said at the hearing Monday. “In the meantime, you should challenge us to significantly improve our antiquated or very complicated processes to get people into these systems — some of which, I will remind us, were the result of court decisions. So we have patient referral pathways for people with, for children with behavioral health challenges that were built by lawyers, with due respect.”

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ELIGIBLE MASSHEALTH members and Health Safety Net patients will have access to prenatal vitamins and over-the-counter birth control at no cost, under two standing orders that the Healey administration announced Thursday.

The orders, which essentially enable the state to write a prescription for a large group of people, will allow about half a million patients to access the reproductive health medications.

The medications will be available at all MassHealth-enrolled pharmacies, and available for eligible MassHealth members and those who use the Health Safety Net, a fund used to pay care costs for certain low-income and uninsured individuals.

MassHealth currently covers 40 percent of all births in Massachusetts, according to the Healey administration.

“Removing barriers like this is one of the simplest ways we can work toward better health outcomes for mothers and infants in our state,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kate Walsh said.

The standing order covers a 90-day supply of over-the-counter prenatal vitamins or multivitamins containing at least 400 mcg of folic acid, a B vitamin that helps bodies create new cells. Doctors recommend that people considering getting pregnant, pregnant, or nursing, take these vitamins.

Pharmacists will be required to counsel patients on the use of prenatal vitamins, including when to start and stop taking them, and encourage follow-up with a primary care provider and obstetrician/gynecologist.

The second standing order covers oral hormonal contraceptives. It allows pharmacists to give out a 365-day supply of over-the-counter birth control pills — specifically norgestrel 0.075 mg tablets — to eligible MassHealth members and HSN patients.

It specifies that birth control is “accessible to individuals of reproductive potential and age,” according to Healey’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS).

“As part of this initiative, pharmacists will be required to counsel patients on contraindications, side effects, and the proper use of the birth control pill, emphasizing the importance of daily adherence and informing patients that the pill does not protect against sexually transmitted infections,” information from EOHHS says.

“We know that prenatal vitamins and birth control play an essential role in women’s health. No one should be prevented from getting the care they need because of cost or because they are waiting for a prescription,” Healey said in a statement. “These standing orders will make it easier and more affordable for people to make the best health care decisions for themselves, will improve health outcomes for women and babies, and will reduce health disparities.”

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THE COVID PANDEMIC reordered the private sector in myriad ways, most noticeably leading to falling foot traffic in city downtowns while boosting local economies in the suburbs. But the health crisis had a lasting impact on the public sector, leading many local cities and towns to take their public meetings online when they couldn’t meet in person. 

If local officials weren’t livestreaming democracy before the pandemic, Massachusetts officials smoothed the path to the new paradigm by creating new provisions under the state’s Open Meeting Law. The list of ways to provide the public with access includes Zoom, a phone conference line, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live, in addition to the old standby, local cable access TV.

The allowances for remote or hybrid public meetings has led to more people participating, according to open government advocates. But the provisions are temporary, with a sunset date of March 31 that was set as part of a 2023 law signed by Gov. Maura Healey.

As the sunset date approaches, a debate now brews over how cities and towns should be directed to handle the Open Meeting Law: Should local officials be able to opt into increasing public access through hybrid or remote options, as is the case now, or should they all be required to do so?

“Everywhere I go, this is the No. 1 thing that our members, mostly town managers, and some mayors ask me about, what’s happening with open meetings,” said Adam Chapdelaine, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association.

At the end of January, Healey filed legislation, called the Municipal Empowerment Act, which includes a provision that would permit hybrid and remote meetings, but not require them.

The legislation, a slightly revamped version of what she filed last year and failed to pass the Legislature, also includes new property tax exemptions for seniors and allowing cities and towns to increase taxes on hotels and motels, as well as local meals taxes and a new surcharge on motor vehicle excise bills. The bill has the support of mayors from Boston, Somerville, Malden, Holyoke, Easthampton, New Bedford, and Fall River, among others.

But a coalition of advocates are criticizing the section that would allow cities and towns to opt into providing hybrid and remote meetings. The section weakens the state’s Open Meeting Law, because it sets up hybrid or remote access as completely discretionary, they argue, adding that passing it into law under the Municipal Empowerment Act could mean less access to people with disabilities and the elderly if local entities opt to hold meetings that are only available in person.

The groups include the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the Disability Law Center, the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, the New England First Amendment Coalition, and the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, and Common Cause Massachusetts.

“We can’t have a different level of guaranteed access based on what city and town you live in,” said Geoff Foster, the head of Common Cause Massachusetts, a government reform group that is also part of the coalition.

“Let’s say a local body has to debate a controversial measure,” he added. “If they have the option to make it harder for the public to weigh in, why wouldn’t they take it?”

Chapdelaine opposes making hybrid or remote options a requirement for cities and towns, noting that local government varies across the state. He supports keeping it as an option for cities and towns to decide.

Some municipalities in Massachusetts have select boards, others have city councils, not to mention planning boards, school committees and all sorts of panels of public officials, such as a committee on invasive weeds in a local pond in Arlington. “All cities and towns have far more public bodies than what most people understand,” Chapdelaine said. “Many communities have dozens, 60 or 70 or 80 boards and commissions.”

Many of the entities are run by volunteers, some of them numbering two or three to a panel, he added. Asking them to be able to manage the technology, or pay for the staff to provide it is “infeasible and impracticable, and misses the mark on the way local government operates,” he said.

About 62 percent of city council and select board meetings across the state were hybrid or livestreamed and about 60 percent of school committees did the same, according to a 2023 survey conducted by the coalition.

Chapdelaine acknowledged the popularity of hybrid and remote access, but noted that making it a requirement still creates practical and financial mandates, which cities and towns are leery of taking on. “A good hybrid meeting is not easy,” he said. “You have to make an investment in technology.”

Healey agrees, and her office said the Municipal Empowerment Act was based on requests from municipal officials across the state. The administration is also looking to make funding available through state grant programs to ease the cost of making public meetings hybrid.

“Hybrid public meetings have proven to be an effective way to help more people participate in local government so that they can learn about what’s happening in their communities and weigh in on important matters,” Healey spokesperson Karissa Hand said in a statement. “We recognize that not all municipalities, especially small and rural communities, have the infrastructure to successfully and consistently run hybrid public meetings, which is why we are proposing to make them optional.”

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THE SAYING about New England’s fluid weather – wait a minute, and it’ll change – could also apply these days to the pronouncements coming out of Washington.

The Trump administration’s blizzard of activity in the first few weeks of the second term included a freeze on federal grants and funds. Two federal judges blocked it, and the Trump White House rescinded its initial memo on the freeze. But in the aftermath, there is a sense of unease about what could happen next. The forecast is cloudy.

Gov. Maura Healey fielded questions on federal funding, and the potential loss of it, throughout this week from reporters. “When President Trump does something like that, it has a direct and negative impact on so many people, real people who are counting on funding,” she said. “I’ve got seniors who are counting on some assistance to pay their heating bills through a federal program. We’ve got daycare centers that rely on the ability to get funds from the federal government to keep those child care centers open.”

The state budget last year relied on $14.3 billion in federal revenue, out of a total of $65.5 billion. Her budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, which starts this July, relies on $16 billion in federal funds. That’s more than the nearly $9 billion that exists in the state’s rainy day fund.

That explains why even longtime budget experts are struggling to get their hands around the scale of the problem. “Where do you start? I think that realization of the challenge of where to start is indicative of how interrelated the state economy and state public finance is with the federal level,” said Doug Howgate, the head of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, which regularly analyzes the state budget.

The range of impact “makes your planning challenging,” but various scenarios should be considered to quantify the possibility, he added. Some plans from 2013, when there was a shutdown of the federal government, might need to be dusted off.

One step towards that is last week’s letter from William McNamara, the state comptroller, and Matt Gorzkowicz, Healey’s budget chief, asking various agencies across the state to prepare for the effect of a federal funding pause. The letter came out just before a federal judge blocked the pause, but the work continues to ascertain a federal funding freeze’s implications.

Amid that scramble, another federal memo, this one out of the federal Department of Transportation, calls for directing funding in a way that gives “preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” The memo names the type of capital investment grant as was used to help fund the MBTA’s Green Line extension into Somerville and Medford, completed in 2022.

Massachusetts has low birth and marriage rates, and Healey said she does not see a connection between federal transportation funding and those rates. “It’s concerning to governors around the country because people rely on transportation just like they rely on child care and infrastructure,” she said.

Congress holds the constitutional power of the purse, but state officials also bear some responsibility in making sure their applications for funding are in order, according to transportation advocates like Stacy Thompson.

“The Trump administration has made it clear they’re being retaliatory towards states, they’ve made targets of states they perceive as liberal,” she said. “They are seeking to pull back funds where they can. The mechanisms by which they can do that are somewhat complex. I don’t envy any state right now trying to figure this out. You’re putting yourself at greater risk if you miss a deadline or you have a publicly contentious meeting.”

She pointed to the Allston I-90 project as an example. Even with a friendly administration in Joe Biden’s White House, Massachusetts struggled to meet deadlines necessary for the megaproject, which involves a new commuter rail station on the MBTA’s Worcester/Framingham line, new open space on the Charles River, and turning an elevated section of the Massachusetts Turnpike into an at-grade highway.

Thompson said complex projects like the one in Allston often take longer and cost more than initially planned. “This is a new level,” she said. (State transportation officials have tapped a former Biden administration official to be the executive director of a Megaprojects Delivery Office, with a portfolio that includes the Cape Cod bridges and the Allston project.)

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Healey tried to strike a hopeful note about beating back potential cuts to federal funding across the board.

“We’ve been clear this is not something that the state can just make up for out of the state general fund. We just don’t have the funds to be able to do that,” she said. “But hopefully common sense will prevail and the Trump administration will continue to fund very important things, Medicaid, access to health care, infrastructure, money to fix our roads and bridges, money for our veterans, for law enforcement, for food, for housing.”

A similar optimism was inherent in the version of the New England weather saying put forward by Mark Twain: Wait a minute, and it could get better.

What sometimes goes unmentioned is that the weather could get worse, too.

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GOV. MAURA HEALEY proposed increasing state spending to more than $62 billion next fiscal year, relying on burgeoning income tax collections from the state’s wealthiest and a slew of other budget-balancing strategies in a spending plan unveiled Wednesday.

Healey filed a fiscal year 2026 budget that would continue popular but pricey programs such as universal school meals, begin to implement a major overhaul of transportation financing, pursue new policies such as traffic violation enforcement cameras, and much more.

The plan relies on about $1 billion in one-time revenues, though administration officials plan to mitigate that by replenishing some trust funds and reserves over the course of the year. The governor’s plan would newly apply the sales tax to candy sales but otherwise does not call for new or higher broad-based taxes or any draws on the state’s “rainy day” savings account, whose balance is set to surpass $9 billion.

Under Healey’s proposal, the state would stash less money in the rainy day fund in fiscal 2026 than is required under current law, and instead redirect money that might be bound for savings to pay down a greater share of pension and retiree benefit liabilities.

Healey’s budget would fund another year of K-12 school aid increases under the Student Opportunity Act, for the first time tapping into surtax dollars to pay for part of the growth, while continuing to cover free school meals, C3 grants to early education providers and a ConnectorCare pilot expanding public insurance eligibility.

It also seeks to execute much of her transportation funding plan, including $687 million in direct support for the cash-strapped MBTA, and launch a similar approach to modernize higher education infrastructure.

The spending bill would increase unrestricted general government aid to cities and towns by 2.2 percent, which officials said is about in line with the growth in non-surtax revenues that budget-writers expect.

Including use of a larger surtax pool and hundreds of millions of dollars for the Medical Assistance Trust Fund, the bill would increase state spending about 7.4 percent over the fiscal 2025 budget that Healey signed in July. Beacon Hill regularly adds hundreds of millions of dollars more in appropriations via mid-year bills.

Much of the proposed annual growth is fueled by the surtax on higher earners. Administration and legislative budget-writers agreed to spend $620 million more from that pool in fiscal 2026 than they did in fiscal 2025, whose budget was built on a more conservative estimate of how much money the levy would generate.

Areas outside the surtax-funded transportation and education worlds are due for smaller growth or, in some cases, trimming. Excluding surtax and MATF dollars from both bills, Healey’s fiscal 2026 budget proposes about 6.8 percent more spending than the budget she signed in the summer.

Healey’s team sought to portray the budget as proposing 2.6 percent more spending than all of what the state will spend in fiscal 2025, including supplemental spending, calling that rate lower than inflation.

The governor and her deputies plan to roll out their budget bill at a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

Healey also has related legislation in the works: a $1.3 billion supplemental budget that uses surplus surtax revenues collected in fiscal 2025; a borrowing bill targeting capital improvements on college and university campuses; a bond bill to fund local road and bridge work; and a new version of her Municipal Empowerment Act, which did not receive a vote in either chamber after Healey first rolled it out in the 2023-2024 term.

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THERE WAS TALK of no new taxes, fixing the MBTA, and cutting red tape, all while avoiding direct references to Donald Trump.

That was Charlie Baker in his 2017 State of the Commonwealth speech, delivered while the moderate Republican governor was still in his first term and casting wary glances at Washington.

That was also Maura Healey in her speech on Thursday night, as the moderate Democratic governor wades through her first term and braces for Trump’s return to the White House. “I assure you we will take every opportunity to work with the federal government in any way that benefits Massachusetts, and I also promise you we will not change who we are,” she said.

On the education front, Healey announced the formation of a council to come up with a statewide high school graduation standard, after voters last November nixed passage of the MCAS test as a graduation requirement. 

She also touched on the problems within the state’s emergency shelter system, strained by a wave of migrants on top of Massachusetts residents grappling with homelessness. Healey has pitched to the state legislators residency requirements as costs have ballooned. The federal government, she added, must pass a border security bill, which Trump had Republicans deep-six while he was campaigning for a second term.

“I want to be absolutely clear: We are dramatically reducing costs, and we have, and will, prioritize Massachusetts families. In 2025 we’ll get families out of hotels for good,” Healey said. “We’re going to keep working with the Legislature to reform this system. Massachusetts taxpayers should not, and cannot, continue to foot the cost.”

And like Baker’s move to reduce regulations and overhaul the MBTA, Healey pledged that her economic team will review all business and licensing regulations in the first three months of the year, and she touted the general manager she hired, Phil Eng, and his wipeout of the T’s slow zones.

Earlier this week, Healey announced an investment of $8 billion over 10 years into the state’s transportation infrastructure, including a significant infusion of cash for the T, coming from the existing millionaires tax approved by voters in 2022 and closing the agency’s budget gap before it would be forced to implement layoffs and service cuts.

But the T itself offered a reminder of how far it has to go before it’s a fully functioning transit system that can draw people out of their cars and into reliable trains and buses: As Healey delivered her speech inside the State House, the agency was reporting delays.

A Mass. bitcoin strategic reserve?

The debate over states jumping into cryptocurrency – digital currency widely known as bitcoin – could now be coming to Beacon Hill.

State Sen. Peter Durant, a Republican from Worcester County, has filed a bill that would set up a “bitcoin strategic reserve,” arguing bitcoin has gone mainstream. The state-level idea is under consideration in Texas and Pennsylvania. President-elect Donald Trump indicated last year he wants a national reserve, similar to the government’s oil reserves.

Durant’s bill would allow some of the Bay State’s $9 billion rainy day fund to be put into cryptocurrency, and places the state treasurer in charge of the Massachusetts reserve. The bill also institutes a 10 percent cap on how much the treasurer can invest. “It’s not like we’re saying divest everything and put it into bitcoin,” Durant said. “But we do believe it does make sense as a portion of the commonwealth’s portfolio.”

Durant called himself a fan of crypto, and when asked if he has any bitcoin, he chuckled and answered, “more than some, less than others.” Others, like legendary investor Warren Buffett, have called it “rat poison,” or like US Sen. Elizabeth Warren, they’ve called for regulations.

Durant acknowledged he hadn’t yet spoken about his proposal to Deb Goldberg, a Democrat and the state treasurer since 2015.

A Goldberg spokesperson said the treasurer has not yet taken a position on crypto. “When asked, our office will review and offer feedback on this particular bill,” a spokesman said in an email.

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WITH THE STATE’S family shelter system under pressure from mounting costs and violent on-site incidents, Gov. Maura Healey on Wednesday recommended statutory changes to the decades-old Right to Shelter Law, asking House and Senate leadership to fold the reforms into a supplemental budget.

In a new letter, Healey called for “strengthening” criminal background checks for shelter applicants by requiring the Executive Office of Housing to conduct CORI checks before families are placed in the emergency shelters. She had previously told the press that comprehensive background checks were conducted on all shelter residents, before her administration last week said that had not actually been done.

All family members looking to stay in a state shelter would also have to prove their lawful U.S. residency under the governor’s recommendation, unless a child in the family already has lawful residence. Currently, only one member of the family unit must show citizenship or lawful presence.

The governor is also seeking to require families to show proof of eligibility up front before they are given a shelter spot, and removing the option of someone showing their eligibility through “self attestation.”

A massive number of families have arrived in recent years looking to access the state shelter system, competing with Bay State families already seeking shelter access. Around 48,000 people have lived in the state-run sites over the past three years, Healey said last week.

“The Administration proposes requiring in the line item that all members of the household must be residents of Massachusetts, and that anyone receiving EA show an intent to remain in Massachusetts, which may be shown either through independent documentary verification of an intent to remain in Massachusetts, or through three months of physical presence in the state,” Healey wrote in her letter to House Speaker Ronald Mariano, Senate President Karen Spilka, and the two branches’ Ways and Means chairs.

Healey last week filed her mini-budget with another $425 million for the costly shelter system (H 51) and some major policy changes, including a proposed six-month limit on how long families can stay in shelters. The bill is pending before the House Ways and Means Committee.

It was three days after she filed the bill that her administration told the Globe it had not been conducting comprehensive background checks on all shelter residents as the governor had previously stated.  Healey since then has spoken about altering the Right to Shelter Law so it “actually aligns with its original intent.”

She told reporters last Friday that she was going to work with the Legislature on amending the law, which she said was written “to protect and take care of poor women and children” and did not contemplate “a broken immigration system and waves and waves of people arriving in Massachusetts.”

The reforms were not presented as legislation, but rather as bullet-point ideas in a four-page letter.

House Republican Leader Bradley Jones Jr. said the “hasty” followup from Healey “seems a lot more like damage control, full retreat.”

The North Reading Republican said he interpreted the letter as saying, “‘We’re taking on water badly, we gotta do something, and we’ll send a letter to the Legislature saying please save us from ourselves.'”

“Which the Legislature’s happy to do,” he added.

Republican lawmakers this week called for more system transparency and accountability, and GOP lawmakers wrote a letter to Auditor Diana DiZoglio on Tuesday asking her to audit the EA shelter program. DiZoglio indicated her office is already engaged in an audit of the Executive Office of Housing.

“During this incredibly challenging time, in which the shelter system has operated at full capacity, we have heard concerns raised by residents who want to ensure their taxpayer dollars are being spent in a transparent, appropriate, efficient and impactful manner,” DiZoglio wrote in a letter shared by Republicans on Wednesday. 

Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr said Healey’s new proposals “fall short of where we need to be,” but “signal her conceptual agreement to what we have been pursuing for so long.”

House budget chief Aaron Michlewitz told the Herald this week that he wanted more information on the spate of shelter-site crimes before advancing the governor’s bill, which will make its next stop on the House floor.

Mariano on Wednesday pointed to previous House efforts to rein in program costs and said the House is open to additional changes.

“As the House continues to work on the supplemental budget proposal that was filed by Gov. Healey earlier this month, we will remain focused on instituting further reforms centered around fiscal responsibility and safety, policies that will be informed by conversations with House members, through continued collaboration with the Healey-Driscoll Administration, and by actions taken at the federal level,” Mariano said.

Sente budget chief Michael Rodrigues, said last week that he thought a proposed residency requirement “raises constitutional issues,” but did not foreclose considering it.

“I have evaluated the Right to Shelter Law and regulations as well as the operational burdens on the system,” Healey said in her letter to legislative Democrats. “Based on that review, and in the face of continued inaction by Congress and no assistance from the federal government, I believe these changes are appropriate and needed to ensure the long-term sustainability of the state shelter system in a way that aligns with the original intent of the law.”

The Republican Party said GOP lawmakers have been calling for reforms for two years, and said changes are only advancing now due to “the release of damaging information that has been known to the administration for some time.”

“These reforms are shocking — not because they’re being implemented, but because they should have been put in place at the onset of this crisis. It is incomprehensible that we’ve been housing adults with children, and those adults weren’t even required to complete a CORI check,” MassGOP spokesperson Logan Trupiano said.

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A SPECIAL COMMISSION tasked with offering solutions to the state’s overwhelmed emergency housing assistance program voted on Tuesday to approve a report with a series of recommendations, but no clear roadmap, to help ease the burden on both the state budget and families that need assistance.

The recommendations, approved during a virtual hearing in a 12-0 vote with two abstentions, are centered around three core principles: that family homelessness should be rare, brief and nonrecurring; the EA shelter system should not be one-size fits all; and the shelter system should be operationally and fiscally sustainable.

Gov. Maura Healey declared a state of emergency in August due to the rising number of migrant families, saying the EA system had reached capacity. Officials had to raise the annual cap to 7,500 families to accommodate demand and add $251 million to the system’s budget, which topped $1 billion in fiscal 2024. Despite the increases, nearly half of the families receiving assistance have been placed in hotel rooms – most of which don’t have kitchens or laundry rooms.

The major difference from a draft report reviewed last week was the addition of a tenth recommendation that the Legislature should further consult experts and stakeholders in the field to continue the work of the commission.

The Healey-Driscoll administration had already shortened the length of stay to nine months with two 90-day extensions. 

The 14 members included Driscoll, Secretary of Housing and Livable Communities Ed Augustus, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kate Walsh, and Secretary of Administration and Finance Matt Gorzkowicz.

One new appendix to the report, offered by Sen. Ryan Fattman, a Republican from Sutton, and Republican Rep. Paul Frost of Auburn, suggested codifying priority for families that have certain medical needs; are at risk of domestic violence; are homeless because of no-fault eviction; have at least one family member who is a veteran; have received a Department of Children and Families (DCF) Health and Safety Assessment that identified a risk of harm; or who are leaving a DCF Young Parent Living Program due to age limits.

Two other recommendations suggest that the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities set a six-month residency requirement for all EA shelter system applications, and that the EA length-of-stay be shortened to six months, instead of nine.

With its current caseload, the EA system is expected to spend another $1 billion in fiscal year 2025.

Hannah Edelheit is a student at Boston University working at CommonWealth Beacon as part of the Boston University Statehouse Program.

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WHEN THE FOG in San Francisco lifted and the mayoral election tally rolled in, the outcome caught the attention of some people 3,000 miles away in Boston.

Daniel Lurie, the heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, took out incumbent London Breed, the first Black woman to hold the job, as voters signaled their unhappiness with the state of things in the city and ignored critics who said he was buying the job.

Lurie, a philanthropist with nonprofit sector experience, spent $9 million of his own money and focused on public safety. His mother kicked in another $1 million for the campaign, which ousted an incumbent mayor of the city for the first time in nearly 30 years.

Change the names, swap out jeans for cardboard and football, and in some quarters, there are questions about whether what happened on the streets of San Francisco could play out next year in Boston. Josh Kraft, who heads up the philanthropic arm of his family’s paper products-and-New-England-Patriots empire, has spent more than a year weighing whether to challenge Mayor Michelle Wu, who is gearing up to run for a second term in a city that hasn’t ousted an incumbent in 75 years. 

Kraft has opened up his checkbook at fundraisers for other local elected officials, sat for a 4,000-word profile in Boston magazine, bent the ear of political experts, and hired a consulting firm, Keyser Public Strategies. (Eileen O’Connor, one of the firm’s partners, chairs the board of MassINC, the parent organization that publishes CommonWealth Beacon.)

But while the chattering class inside and outside Boston City Hall loves to speculate and stir up trouble, some big caveats apply when answering whether one city’s tale is a preview of another’s election cycle, which could feature additional mayoral contenders, like South Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn.

If there is a spirited race for mayor next year, Boston will be in uncharted political waters, since Wu’s recent predecessors, Tom Menino and Marty Walsh, faced either fairly weak challengers or none at all in Menino’s case one year.

What’s more, super PACs – outside groups that can raise and spend cash with few restrictions – weren’t around 30 years ago when Menino’s reign began, and weren’t a factor in 2017, when Walsh cruised to reelection. Look for that to possibly change in 2025, particularly if the Kraft family decides to empty a cardboard box of cash into a super PAC, or the unions and environmental advocates wade in with theirs.

Then there is the Donald Trump factor: His return to the White House in January makes it “much harder for a rich white guy to run against the city’s first elected female mayor of color,” the Boston Globe’s Adrian Walker noted this week. Josh Kraft’s father, Robert, was a Trump friend until a few years ago, and the family has donated to both Republicans and Democrats over the years. Lurie, for his part, has a long history of working in Democratic Party politics.

But back to the two cities. Overall, Boston remains one of the country’s safest, with a much lower crime rate than San Francisco, which is also the more expensive place to live – one of the few places in the US that holds that distinction over Boston. 

San Francisco also allows ranked choice voting, meaning voters were able to rank up to 10 candidates. (Lurie’s strategy included lobbying voters to choose him second if he wasn’t their first choice.) While some activists want Boston to shift to that style, it’s unlikely to happen by November 2025.

And when it comes to the mood of the electorate, Boston voters have yet to indicate widespread unhappiness. In San Francisco, a progressive district attorney and several school board members were recalled in 2022, and some unions soured on Breed. Boston saw two progressive incumbent councilors lose their respective preliminaries in 2023, the first to do so in 40 years, but they were replaced by progressive candidates who were prominently backed by a union-supported super PAC and Wu herself.

Healey’s two tacks

Since the presidential election, Gov. Maura Healey has taken two paths, and two different tones, in responding to the results.

In her post-election press conference the day after, hours after Donald Trump’s victory became apparent, Healey said, “Whether you voted for the president-elect or not, we see you.” Hours later, she was on MSNBC, saying governors and attorneys general will “hold the line once again” on the rule of law and democracy.

On Thursday, speaking to reporters after testifying on a health care-related event at Suffolk University, Healey took aim at Trump’s nominee to run the US Department of Justice, Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who has faced ethics investigations on Capitol Hill, including sexual misconduct allegations. “As somebody who was a former law enforcement official and attorney general, I find [the pick] totally unserious and appalling. Donald Trump should withdraw that immediately,” she said of the Gaetz nomination.

The more conciliatory tone was apparent in an earlier answer to a health care question, when as she said, almost in an aside, “I don’t like this term ‘red states.” The political term has been in circulation for more than 20 years. 

Asked to elaborate, Healey seemed to take a page from Barack Obama’s notes, when the future president came to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston to deliver a career-defining speech that urged Americans to move beyond the partisan divide. “The whole divide between red states, blue states – we’re one country, you know? We’re the United States of America,” she said.

Healey added: “I’m focused on delivering for folks here, the needs of people here. Lowering costs, increasing housing are the top things I’m focused on. And as we go forward of course we’re going to work to protect people’s rights and freedoms here….we just need to find a way to work together in this country.”

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AS ATTORNEY GENERAL, Maura Healey launched her office at Donald Trump when he narrowly won the White House eight years ago, vaulting to the front lines and quickly joining with her Democratic counterparts elsewhere to oppose his ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries.

Healey struck a different tone in a different job on Wednesday, after Trump’s return to the White House was assured by a resounding Electoral College victory in which he also won the popular vote. Now the governor, Healey returned to the State House after spending much of Election Day campaigning in next-door New Hampshire for fellow Democrats, staying in the Granite State late into yesterday evening.

Healey said the overall results are still getting analyzed, but “I think last night you saw from the exit polls some of the focus and attention on the economy.”

While New Hampshire narrowly gave its four electoral votes to Kamala Harris, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate that Healey backed, Joyce Craig, lost to Republican Kelly Ayotte, whose key message was “Don’t Mass Up NH.” In Massachusetts, most municipalities shifted to the right, similar to the overall country. Cities like Lawrence, Chelsea, Everett, New Bedford and Fall River, in particular, swung toward Trump.

“My message today to everybody in Massachusetts is that we see you. We see you. Whether you voted for the president-elect or not, we see you,” she told reporters gathered in the lobby of the governor’s office. “Whether you’re feeling a lot of feelings today, and maybe scared or feeling horrible, know that we see you.”

Voters “were making a statement in part about how they were feeling in terms of their own personal welfare,” she added.

Massachusetts has benefited from a Democratic White House, as more than $8 billion in federal funds have flowed to infrastructure projects like the Cape Cod bridges. Healey also touted positive economic trends, while acknowledging the hit to wallets from post-pandemic inflation. “It’s taking time for people to see that in their own checkbooks,” she said. “That’s part of the communication challenge.”

Asked if she should have spent more time in Massachusetts, given that Craig lost, and Bay State voters backed Question 2, a measure opposed by Healey that severs passage of the MCAS test from high school graduation, Healey defended her focus, saying it’s “always a close election in my home state of New Hampshire,” where she grew up and her parents still live.

As for the MCAS ballot question, though she held a press briefing last month at Roxbury nonprofit to urge a “no” vote on the measure, Healey seemed to downplay any suggestion that she could have done more to influence the outcome, saying, “I recognize I’m just one vote.”

The anti-Trump banner Healey carried as AG between 2017 and 2020 will now be picked up by her successor, Andrea Campbell, who won the seat in 2022. In a separate press conference, Campbell told reporters her office is prepared for various scenarios as the Trump administration moves back into the White House. “Obviously, this office has been here before,” she said, referring to Trump’s first term.

Back at the State House, Healey said “we are not taking our foot off the pedal at all” on climate technology, as she pushes for an offshore wind industry investment fund, coupled with tax credits, in an economic development bill top lawmakers have pledged to get to her desk before the end of session. 

And as abortion rights could face new restrictions at the federal level, she said, “we’ll make sure women and those who need care are protected here in Massachusetts.”

Referencing some of Trump’s more incendiary stands and the hard-right Project 2025 playbook that he disavowed, but which many in his orbit were involved with crafting, Healey said we’ll have to wait to see whether he follows all his attention-grabbing words with actions. “I think I’ve spoken quite a bit about Donald Trump and my feelings about him,” Healey said. “We have to see whether he makes good on what he promised and ran on.”

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