Will the Patrick administration hold hostage the proposed merger of NStar Corp. and Northeast Utilities until NStar agrees to buy the rest of Cape Wind’s power output? Regulators have already […]
Hostage negotiations
Posted inEnvironment, State House News Service
Ending Middleton’s environmental nightmare
Receivers have been known to parachute into Bay State municipalities to clean up their finances, but never to clean up their landfills. That all changed when attorney Michael Leon was […]
Posted inPolitics
Ireland appeals to keep probation
The state’s top judge today strongly urged the governor, speaker and Senate president to keep the Probation Department under the judiciary, threatening that putting the embattled agency under the executive […]
Posted inCriminal Justice, Politics, The Download
The Download: Term limits
Massachusetts voters narrowly approved a term limits law in 1994, but two years later it was overturned by the Supreme Judicial Court because of the way it was crafted. Governing […]
Posted inPolitics, The Download
Give probation chief 2-year appointment
By Bruce Mohl Saying an effective leadership team is needed at the scandal-plagued Probation Department, a judicial task force is urging the Supreme Judicial Court to give the acting commissioner […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Congressional math
massachusetts legislators got the bad news in late December. And by late February or early March, they should have detailed Census figures confirming what they’ve long expected: The state’s congressional […]
Posted inHealth Care
Health plans are tiering up
a new law is prodding health insurers to design plans that would force their customers to pay more out of pocket if they go to a more expensive hospital or […]
Posted inEconomy
Swearing off earmarks
earmarks. you might as well insert a profanity into the federal budget with all the disdain that has been dumped on the term. For decades, incumbent congressmen touted their ability […]
Posted inPolitics
Everybody knew
commonwealth first began investigating patronage at Probation in 2008. We tried to pry records from the Probation Department under the state’s Public Records Law, but the agency, as part of […]
Posted inPolitics
Robin Hood mayors
Activists in City Hall: The Progressive Response to the Reagan Era in Boston and Chicago By Pierre Clavel New York, Cornell University Press, 225 pages reviewed by don gillisboston’s ray […]
Posted inEconomy, Education, Opinion
Job action
january 2011 marks the tenth anniversary of MassINC’s New Skills for a New Economy report. The report’s main finding that 1.1 million workers in Massachusetts—a third of the state’s workforce […]
Posted inCriminal Justice, Opinion, Politics
A call to reason
since the mid-1990s, legislatures around the country have pursued a continuing and escalating course of action, from registration and community notification laws to civil commitment procedures, targeting individuals who have […]
Posted inEducation
Grade expectations
TO JUDGE BY its demographics, Brockton High School looks like lots of urban high schools that have failure written all over them. The sprawling complex is the largest public school […]
Posted inUncategorized
Winter 2011 Correspondence
Women outpace men in academicsJack Sullivan’s “False Start” (Fall ’10) stated that “women athletes at state schools….still run far behind men in nearly every measure of equal treatment.” Focused as […]
Posted inEducation
Study says students are good judges of teacher quality
if your child raves about having a great teacher—or rails about a bad one—believe it. That’s the finding from a new report that gives some research backing to an idea […]
Posted inPolitics
Probation scandal spurs calls for public records reform
the patronage scandal at the state’s Probation Department is prompting calls for all sorts of hiring reforms, but there is also a growing chorus of voices pushing for changes in […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Piloting through shortfalls
massachusetts communities lead the nation in reaping revenues from tax-exempt properties, but the payments represent pennies on the dollar compared to what municipalities would bring in if the land were […]
Posted inHealth Care
Name that malady
First, The Beatles, now flagellate hyperpigmentation. There’s no limit for the apps someone can download for their iPhone or iPod. The New England Journal of Medicine now has a smartphone […]
Posted inPolitics
Money for nothing
kathryn harper and her husband, Winston, were beside themselves one weekend in early November. The 63-year-old Salem grandmother had just scratched a $5 Massachusetts State Lottery ticket and discovered she […]
Posted inEducation, State House News Service
The little college that could
WILKELSON GEDEON HAD his heart set on majoring in engineering at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. But the Arlington native, a self-declared procrastinator, missed the application deadline. After […]
Posted inEnvironment, Politics
The meter is running
the south shore town of Kingston is discovering that going green is not only good for the environment but good for the municipality’s bottom line. Kingston is plunging into the […]
Posted inEconomy
Money talks—and delivers
until his arrest last year, few Bostonians had heard of Martin Raffol. Many more people, however, had probably heard of his boss, Arthur Winn—one of the state’s most prolific affordable […]