The Saturday Send
Ten communities in Massachusetts went ‘fossil fuel free.’ Then utilities spent $100M on natural gas infrastructure there.
By Jordan Wolman
As these municipalities are quickly finding out, moving off gas for new buildings doesn’t preclude the utilities from needing to spend tens of millions of dollars each year upgrading the existing gas system.
Pot advocate looks to boot marijuana question from ballot
By Chris Lisinski
The campaign only qualified for the ballot by a margin of 122 signatures in the most recent, final round, leaving little room for error should regulators find that the claims carry weight.
The tricky calculus of designing a ballot with nine questions
By Chris Lisinski
While law sets clear patterns for most of the ballot, officials need to lean more on the skills used by magazine or newspaper layout editors when it comes to statewide questions.
With public health at stake, many Boston hospitals struggle to meet the city’s air pollution goals
By Anastasiia Boltkova, Hayes Botnick, Quyen Nguyen, and Ying Niu
“If the city wants to make real progress on climate goals, the building sector is where the biggest changes have to happen.”
The Mass. angle on US Supreme Court decisions
By Jennifer Smith
Massachusetts was actively engaged on many of the most important cases, with some of them running through the New England federal courts and Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office often wading in, typically with a coalition of blue state attorneys general.
What can Mass. learn from New Mexico’s universal child care experiment?
New Mexico is making waves, and generating questions from curious onlookers, by offering universal child care to all families. How is it funded? Is it truly universal? Are there enough caretakers to keep up with demand? And with our astronomically high child care costs, could Massachusetts achieve something similar? Jacob Vigil, the chief legislative officer of New Mexico Voices for Children, joins CommonWealth Beacon‘s Chris Lisinski to dive into the policy, the grassroots campaign behind the changes, and how money from the booming New Mexican oil and gas industry played a key role.
Published by MassINC