Administration: Temporary shelters meet requirement

Officials moved quickly to open overflow sites

Less than a week after the state abruptly opened a temporary shelter for migrant and homeless families in Cambridge, the Healey administration said it has met the Legislature’s new requirement to open an overflow site by the end of the year.

But the House’s top Democrat, who pressed for the overflow site directive, didn’t explicitly agree with that assessment Friday morning.

A spokesperson for Governor Maura Healey told the News Service that the administration feels that it’s fulfilled the condition she agreed to in a supplemental budget to operationalize by Dec. 31 a “state funded overflow emergency shelter site or sites for eligible families who have been waitlisted for placement at an emergency shelter” due to the system reaching capacity.

The new law doesn’t explicitly define the parameters of an overflow site, such as how many families must be accommodated or how long they may remain at temporary sites.

Asked if he agreed that the overflow site requirement had been met, House Speaker Ron Mariano responded with a statement to the News Service.

“We are hopeful that families on the waitlist are being provided with a safe place to sleep as required by our legislation,” Mariano said. “We will continue to monitor the steps taken to address the shelter crisis, including the required reports, to help ensure that there are operational overflow sites through the end of the fiscal year.”

Some 391 families are on the waitlist, Healey spokesperson Karissa Hand said. Emergency Assistance Director Scott Rice pegged the figure at more than 400 families during a virtual Cambridge community meeting Thursday evening.

The waitlist was at 242 families on Dec. 13. Rice said the average family size is three people.

Throughout the 90-minute virtual forum, Cambridge city and state leaders explained how they selected the Middlesex South Registry of Deeds building and began welcoming families last Friday with little public notice or engagement. About threequarters of families stuck on the waitlist have been directed to temporary shelter and overnight arrangements, Rice said.

Officials have been scrambling to open temporary overflow sites since the shelter system hit Healey’s 7,500-family capacity limit in November amid a surge of new arrivals, and each day brings about 10 additional families to Massachusetts, Rice said. About five to 10 families are also leaving the shelter system daily, he said.

When Secretary of State William Galvin offered up the east Cambridge property, Rice said his team decided in less than a day to start fixing up the former courthouse.

“We’ve been very fortunate this week — it hasn’t been below freezing very much, but that is a crisis that I’m worried about,” Rice said. “But when I find, and we find as a group and incident command, a location that is worthy of taking a look, we move . . . as rapidly as we can. Do we do it perfectly? Do we have the most perfect community engagement plan? No, we don’t.”

Rice thanked Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui and City Manager Yi-An Huang for their support and “friendly attitude” in navigating the unpredictable demands of the migrant crisis. Cambridge has “gone above and beyond on trying to solve problems,” Rice said.

The meeting came months after lawmakers criticized the Healey administration’s lack of communication, including with municipalities, as more hotels in their communities began serving as emergency shelters and more migrant children began attending local schools.

In response to Healey’s shelter cap, lawmakers wrote the new law with the overflow requirement in order for the administration to unlock $250 million in additional funding for the emergency shelter system. Healey agreed to the requirement when she signed the supplemental budget that included it on Dec. 4.

The administration must also submit biweekly shelter updates to the House and Senate Ways and Means committees. The first submitted report was dated Dec. 18, and Hand said the administration will submit another report next week.

Rice said the Cambridge Registry of Deeds building is one of five overflow sites, which officials have also referred to as safety-net shelters.

The other state-funded overflow shelters are at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy and a clinical risk assessment site in Revere, alongside other sites funded through a grant partnership that the administration launched with United Way of Massachusetts Bay, Hand said.