THE HEALEY ADMINISTRATION unveiled a plan to deal with the soaring cost of the state’s emergency shelter program by tapping surplus funds left over from previous years, but offered no longer-term plan to rein in the cost of the program beyond the cap on participants the governor announced in mid-October.
In a status report on the program, the first required under a law passed by the Legislature on December 4, the Healey administration for the first time provided a detailed look at the fiscal challenges ahead. The report said the cost of the program has nearly tripled, growing from roughly $325 million at the start of this fiscal year to $932 million as Massachusetts has tried to find shelter for a growing wave of migrants from other countries.
The governor is also projecting that the cost of the program will remain fairly steady at $915 million in the next fiscal year, which starts on July 1, thanks largely to a cap the governor authorized limiting the number of participating families at 7,500.
To deal with the much higher spending levels, Gov. Maura Healey is taking a number of stopgap measures.
Just weeks after the Legislature authorized an additional $250 million for the shelter program after a bruising fight, Healey is going back to lawmakers to ask for more. She said she intends to file another spending request in the next few weeks asking for approval to drain an account holding $700 million in surplus funds from previous years and use $224 million to fund the emergency shelter program through the end of June.
With the $476 million left over from the surplus funds account, Healey is proposing that $326 million go to the emergency shelter program in fiscal 2025 and $150 million go for new housing production. Healey will need another $584 million to cover the forecasted cost of the emergency shelter program in 2025.
“Thankfully,” the Healey administration report says, “the state has the resources available in transitional escrow to put a plan in place that will address FY24 and much of FY25 without requiring offsetting budget cuts to other programs to meet the spending requirements of the family shelter crisis.”
Doug Howgate, the president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, said the governor’s plan to use leftover surplus funds to cover the cost of the emergency shelter system makes sense if the goal is to buy time to rein in spending on the program.
“From a medium-term standpoint, are we in a position to treble the size of what was already a significant program?” Howgate asked. “That’s going to create a huge fiscal challenge in years to come. This is not sustainable.”
The plan released by the Healey administration doesn’t address any fiscal challenges beyond fiscal year 2025 and only indirectly addresses ways of reducing thecost of the emergency shelter program.
It notes that the amount of money needed for the program might decline if the federal government steps forward with funding or allows more migrants to obtain work authorizations. It also says the cost could drop if more families in the emergency shelter system start transitioning out earlier.
According to the report, the current average length of stay for families in the shelter system is more than a year. The report also discloses that 3,516 of the families in shelter, or less than half, are migrants from other countries, and that 813 of those families have work authorizations.
The report does not raise the possibility of changing the state’s emergency shelter law, which requires the state to provide shelter to qualifying families and pregnant women.
