Democrats move on costs with shelter crisis

BOSTON — As the state’s revenue picture continued to slip, House Democrats last week moved to crack down on skyrocketing emergency family shelter costs that are putting spending-side pressure on the budget.

As part of the latest $245 million funding injection for shelters, which are overburdened by the stream of migrants pouring into the state, the House approved a limit on how long families may stay in shelter. But how much money would the move save?

Previously an annual $250 million line item, House Ways and Means Chairman Aaron Michlewitz said he could “assume pretty substantially that it’ll be under a billion dollars” with the policy change in place. “Somewhere in between,” he said.

A length-of-stay cap would generally see families allowed in shelters for up to nine months, with certain extensions related to pregnancy or disability. Massachusetts would still be the “most generous” state with its right-to-shelter law still in place, said Michlewitz, who added that New York City measures its lengths of stay in days rather than months.

As representatives talked over the bill privately before session, reporters huddled outside the doors of the House Democratic Caucus didn’t hear the usual boisterous rounds of applause echoing into the corridor. Maybe the vibe was a tad tense in the closed-door meeting, where reps get a chance to vent any frustrations in private.

Over in the East Wing, senators were already mulling over the House’s approach, and Sen. Michael Rodrigues said he expected the bill to emerge “very shortly.” Sen. Liz Miranda said the Wednesday talks with Senate leadership went on “for hours.”

It’s an issue where it seems lawmakers are slowly reaching a general consensus: Something must be done. But it could be a while before final agreement is reached on just what that “something” is.

After hearing the unfettered voices of her colleagues in caucus, House Assistant Majority Leader Alice Peisch said

that “by and large” they all felt the bill was “responsive” to the sustainability concerns and the “need to do something.”

“We don’t want to find ourself in the position, nine, 12 months out, where we have zero dollars for this program and we have thousands of families on the street,” Peisch told reporters.

She added, “So, you know, like anything else that’s a difficult question, I’m sure you’ll find a variety of viewpoints among members, but I’m hearing by and large that members are pleased that we are taking some steps to address this issue.”

Rep. Paul Frost wanted to go farther. During debate last fall on another shelter funding bill, the Auburn Republican proposed that shelter eligibility be limited to those who had lived in Massachusetts for at least a year.

This time around, he pushed for a sixmonth residency requirement, which leaves open the question of where newly arriving families in need would be housed.

That amendment failed 29-125, with four Democrats and an independent crossing the aisle to vote with the Republicans. In the final vote tally on passing the bill, eight Democrats voted with Republicans against the bill. Some of them were from the left wing of the party while others represent moderate districts — and are perhaps thinking ahead to this fall’s election.

Rep. Dylan Fernandes, who’s running to take a purple Plymouth and Barnstable Senate district, got a nice campaign season freebie: a unanimously supported amendment to give shelter priority to military veterans.

It isn’t just the bottom-line costliness of the program that’s eating residents and policymakers these days.

A WBZ-TV I-Team report last month found “a $10 million-dollar six-month no-bid contract” for catering to the shelters, which the state handed to Spinelli Ravioli Manufacturing Co. of East Boston. (“We are not the exclusive meal vendor and do not have a guaranteed contract, or financial agreement, beyond this initial emergency period,” Spinelli told ‘BZ.)

Who’s going to stick out their neck for a no-bid process as good public policy? Hence, the one successful Republican amendment on Wednesday, offered by Minority Leader Bradley Jones Jr., which would require that “any funds expended for the purpose of providing food through the emergency housing assistance program shall be subject to a competitive bidding process.”

As if the two Ways and Means chairmen didn’t have enough on their plate during this crescendo period of the fiscal 2025 budget process. The whole emergency budget is now on the Senate’s plate, and Chairman Michael Rodrigues told the Boston Herald that “there’s a lot of interest in trying to be creative in how we deal with that situation.”

Again, agreement that the status quo isn’t working.

Eyes were on Washington at prime time Thursday night for the State of the Union, and maybe some ears were burning on Capitol Hill.

“It has become crystal clear that the federal government will provide no relief for states like ours who are facing this emergency all over the country. Washington seems to care more about playing politics on this issue than, rather, offering solutions for us to implement,” Michlewitz said a day earlier.

“It is important to understand the situation that we are here today because the federal government has failed to do their job, not residents or elected officials of Massachusetts,” Rep. Carlos Gonzalez said on Beacon Hill.

“And the reality is, is that the federal government has left us all high and dry. And we are left to try to do the right thing by everybody who comes here seeking opportunity,” Rep. Michael Finn chimed in.

In the halls of Congress, President Joe Biden did talk about immigration policy, and his efforts to negotiate a bipartisan bill that would “save lives and bring order to the border” — and “give me and any new president new emergency authority to temporarily shut down the border when the number of migrants at the border is overwhelming.” Besides the border security focus, no mention of monetary aid to the states dealing with the brunt of the migrant surge.

Speaking of speeches, GBH News ran an analysis of Gov. Maura Healey’s first full year of orations, and concluded that jobs and workforce issues were her “most mentioned” topic, featuring in 46 out of 67 “major policy speeches.”

Second place went to matters of “equity.”

The presidential primaries on Super Tuesday translated into a Sleepy Tuesday, generally, with comparatively high turnout for such events. But with around 25% of registered voters exercising their right, is that really considered high turnout?

For Republicans, it was the “second highest in Massachusetts history” (more than 567,000 ballots), and for Democrats, the “highest in recent history in which an incumbent president was on the ballot” (more than 632,000 ballots), Secretary William Galvin’s office said.

Around a third of Republicans voted early or by mail, and the ratio of Dems who used options other than in-person voting on Election Day is approaching two-thirds (62.5%). Of the total votes cast, nearly half were cast before Election Day.

Republican State Committee races spiced up the day, in what turned into a sort of proxy war between radio talker Howie Carr and former Rep. Geoff Diehl.

Howie went all out with a “Howie’s Picks” slate of candidates designed to keep the tiller of the MassGOP apparatus in the hands of current chair Amy Carnevale, while Diehl — an ally of ousted chair Jim Lyons, another former rep — hammered Howie as being part of the “establishment,” a word that might possibly have never before been used to describe Howard Lawrence Carr.

Diehl and his wife, KathyJo, may have won their own battle in their local district, but Carr reported their allies didn’t all fare so well. The pro-Carnevale side of the tent secured between 43 and 47 seats, he wrote in his Herald column Thursday.

As for the state’s presidential primaries, a majority of Bay Staters declined to “pick Nikki” (Haley), and a movement to select “No Preference” over Biden as a show of support for a Gaza ceasefire pulled in around 59,000 votes.

The week began with election news from the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that a state could not act on its own to enforce the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment, which Colorado tried to do in removing former President Donald Trump from the ballot.

If Colorado and others were allowed to do so, the court ruled, it could mean a “patchwork” of state enforcement, and “(n)othing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.”

Avoiding a patchwork of differing standards was also the argument voiced by Education Secretary Pat Tutwiler as he shared the Healey administration’s opposition to the effort to erase MCAS as a graduation requirement.

“That question, if it passes, would deliver us to a place of no standard — essentially, 351 different standards for high school graduation. I don’t believe that is the direction to go,” the secretary said on Jon Keller’s TV show two weeks ago.

A day later, supporters of the potential ballot question rallied on Beacon Hill, including Mass. Teachers Association President Max Page, who said he found Tutwiler’s comments “disappointing.”

The Department of Revenue said last week that February revenues fell just $11 million short of a revised benchmark, not a huge miss in the larger fiscal picture but enough of a whiff to keep up the record-length streak of below-expectations monthly tax collections.

It’s now the longest run of disappointing revenue numbers in more than 20 years.

School groups are sounding an alarm bell over a “fiscal cliff ” they see creeping up, despite increases to state public education aid. A leader of the Mass. Association of School Superintendents, Mary Bourque, told state budget writers about “widespread reports” of “a cliff effect in the decline of budget revenue, largely due to inflation rates calculated over the past three years, which will result in significant reductions in programs and services for our students this year.”