The US Supreme Court ruled that a community may ban people from sleeping outside even when there is no adequate shelter or housing available. People may be fined or arrested for sleeping in a tent, on a bench, or even in their own cars.
Don’t penalize people for being poor and lacking housing
Posted inRace/Racism
DiZoglio slams state agency on minority outreach
“If we are serious about expanding opportunities for underrepresented populations, we must do better,” State Auditor Diana DiZoglio said in a statement.
Posted inPolitics
Uber, Lyft drivers praise settlement, push for union
Days after Uber and Lyft agreed to boost driver pay and offer new benefits to resolve a years-old lawsuit, campaigners moved Tuesday to place on the ballot a measure that would allow those same drivers to unionize.
Posted inEnergy
Watching the sausage get made on Beacon Hill
The proposal didn’t follow the traditional legislative route – getting filed as a bill, vetted in a hearing before a committee, and then moving on to the full Legislature. Instead, the Healey administration broached the idea earlier this year but actual language didn’t emerge publicly until a climate bill was reported out of the Senate Ways and Means Committee midway through June.
Posted inOpinion
State’s aging gas infrastructure has to go
The majority of Massachusetts residents — 54 percent — would rather invest in new clean energy infrastructure than patch up the old gas system, according to a new poll commissioned by Rewiring America and Green Energy Consumers Alliance.
Posted inHousing
The senior struggle to age in community
MASSACHUSETTS SENIORS, particularly those who are low income, are often stymied in their hunt for later-in-life homes because of a mismatch between their specific demographic needs and the dearth of […]
Posted inThe Codcast
Aging in community
This week on the Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon’s Jennifer Smith talks to Amy Schectman, President and CEO of 2Life Communities, about the challenges of providing supportive and community-based housing for low-income elders.
Posted inOpinion
Municipal light plants want a piece of offshore wind, too
In Massachusetts, there are 41 municipal utilities serving customers in a total of 50 cities and towns and accounting for just over 13 percent of electricity usage.
Posted inBallot Questions
Ballot question fundraising and spending largely hidden from public view
In contrast to state election laws governing candidates for office, which require regular reporting throughout the year on campaign donations and expenditures, ballot question committees operate under relatively lax reporting requirements.
Posted inOpinion
How ‘right to shelter’ in Mass. differs from NYC
The widely different degrees of policy-making freedom in Massachusetts and New York provide a bracing lesson about the dangerous limits on state and local policymaking placed by consented-to judicial decrees.
Posted inOpinion
Mass. failing on the marijuana equity front
I spent my life focused on improving the lives of Black residents of our state, helping people who don’t have the same opportunities as others. I’ve always believed the best way to do this is through building wealth in our communities, and so economics has always been a major part of my life.
Posted inEducation
Political Notebook: Celtics win = end-of-school loss for Boston students | The definition of a publicity stunt
The Celtics victory celebration ended up raining on the parade of the Boston school students last day of classes, which were abruptly canceled. Meanwhile, the Mass GOP has a selective view of what qualifies as a publicity stunt at the US-Mexico border.
Posted inBallot Questions
Tech-backed ballot question dead after settlement
WHAT WAS SHAPING up to be perhaps the buzziest ballot measure of the cycle, with Massachusetts residents barraged with millions of dollars of ad spending by both sides, will not […]
Posted inPolitics
Last-minute $175m Uber, Lyft settlement throws wrench in ballot fight
The same day the state’s high court gave the go-ahead to an array of ride-share-focused ballot questions, Attorney General Andrea Campbell announced a sweeping settlement with Uber and Lyft that could upend a buzzy ballot fight.
Posted inHealth Care
Medicaid enrollment drops by 383,000 from COVID high
The state’s combined Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program had nearly 2.04 million members at the end of May, according to new data. That’s about 15 percent fewer than when Massachusetts set out in spring 2023 on a gargantuan, federally mandated campaign to decide who qualifies for the subsidized insurance coverage for the first time since the pandemic.
Posted inOpinion
How a state commission could help ease the local news crisis
The local news crisis has become so acute that it’s time to consider some unconventional approaches, including a limited role for government in providing indirect support to outlets.
Posted inCourts
SJC dismisses challenges to MCAS ballot question info
The challenges, one from supporters and one from opponents of the question, took issue with the title and one-sentence statements summarizing what yes and no votes would mean. Both challenges claimed the information provided was misleading because not enough details were provided.
Posted inEducation
Study shows technology can help scale tutoring efforts
How to scale promising education innovations has long been a challenge. A new study suggests a way that high-dose tutoring, one of the most effective ways to make up learning loss, can be delivered at greater scale without any loss of effectiveness — and at lower cost and staffing.
Posted inOpinion
Three key priorities for reducing health care costs
With the number of people covered by public insurance growing – MassHealth covers about 2 million people, or 30 percent of the Massachusetts population – so too have the cross-subsidies borne by employers, employees, and taxpayers. Given our aging population and the shrinkage of our small group health insurance market, these cross subsidies by the private market will likely grow larger without intervention. Higher Medicaid reimbursement rates to providers could alleviate this cost-shift burden.
Posted inMedia
Navigating Mass. media sector’s choppy waters
Journalists have been compared to priests and ditch-diggers, but a better parallel can be found on the high seas. Like sailors and the call of the running tide, reporters and editors have the rush of chasing a scoop. But over the last two decades, the tide has been going out.