Senator Michael Rodrigues: Massachusetts currently spending $75 million per month on emergency shelter

By Sam Doran

The 1980s had the Massachusetts Miracle, but are we now in the era of the Massachusetts Malaise?

The public conversation these days generally revolves around a few accepted truths: there aren’t enough places to live here and the ones that are available are ridiculously expensive, our roads and transit lines are in lousy condition and are usually too crowded to get anywhere efficiently, an unabated influx of immigrants has created an emergency shelter funding and humanitarian crisis, and tax revenues aren’t even living up to the governor’s already-slashed expectations.

But, hey, at least the Red Sox season starts soon …

A survey from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Foundation recently put a number on the impact of “all this negativity that’s in this town,” as Rick Pitino famously said. One quarter of young professionals living in Greater Boston expect they’ll move somewhere else within five years.

Gov. Maura Healey brought that survey up this week during an interview on WBUR and said she doesn’t like hearing news like that.

“There’s so much good here. There’s so many great things about our state and what’s happening. But the reason, right now, young people are leaving Massachusetts, or may decide to leave Massachusetts, the reason seniors may opt to move somewhere else, the reason employers may decide to locate somewhere or not expand here, is because of the cost of housing,” Healey said.

She added, “It is holding us back and holding all of us back.”

House Speaker Ronald Mariano also called attention to the survey this week when he spoke about the state’s housing access and affordability problem with chamber members. The survey, he said, “confirms what we already know to be true, which is that this issue can feel demoralizing for young people in our commonwealth, as many feel that they simply don’t have the same shot at the American Dream that previous generations have enjoyed.”

You’d be hard pressed to find someone on Beacon Hill who would disagree. But it would be equally hard to find any legislative urgency around the issue.

The Joint Committee on Housing had control over the governor’s $4.1 billion housing bond and policy bill for more than four months and advanced it earlier this month without changing so much as a comma. After it’s long look, the panel decided to approve the bill exactly as the governor filed it.

That’s going to change before the House votes on it later this spring. Mariano announced Thursday that he plans to bulk up the governor’s bill — “I’m going to go big,” he said without giving an estimate of what the new bottom line would be — and will fold in additional policy riders like authorizing an expansion of the Mass. Water Resources Authority service area.

But the speaker also said the housing bill isn’t exactly top of mind for him right now. He said the housing bill would get it’s time only after the House debates its budget, which is expected to take place the last full week of April. That probably didn’t sit all that well with Healey, who tries to walk a fine line between showing that housing is an urgent priority for her and not publicly complaining about a Legislature that hasn’t been accused very often of making quick work on solutions to major problems.

“There’s probably things that I would have wanted to see more progress on, housing. It’s why we continue to talk about that as our top priority,” Healey said on WBUR this week.

The Senate focused on one of the state’s other glaring issues this week, working into the night Thursday to pass a bill limiting how long families can stay in the state’s overburdened emergency shelter system and giving the administration the authority to draw down more than $800 million from state savings to pay for the crisis response into mid-2025. That will leave roughly $234 million in the transitional escrow account that was created with previous years’ surplus dollars to act as a less-restricted Stabilization Fund.

Senate budget chief Michael Rodrigues said the state is currently spending $75 million per month — $10,000 for each of 7,500 families — on the emergency shelter system. Before the influx of migrants that began more than a year ago, he said, the state was typically spending about $27 million per month to support 4,100 families.

“With the way things currently stand, we are on the pace to spend an additional $225 million for the remainder of FY 24 and $915 million for FY 25. This current rate of spending is truly unsustainable, and it may further hamper our ability to address time-sensitive needs facing the commonwealth if we don’t act,” he said.

Healey first proposed using the escrow money to cover the soaring shelter costs in December, and it was Rodrigues who threw cold water on the idea. But with state tax revenues heading in the wrong direction and as the Senate pushes for significant investments in early education, his tune had changed by Thursday.

“Thank God we have the transitional escrow account to solve this crisis,” Rodrigues said.

The governor found herself in hot water this week for personal decisions, but no, it wasn’t related to her wearing orange on St. Patrick’s Day in South Boston. (The Washington Post in 1998 said South Boston “may be the single worst place in America to be caught wearing orange on St. Patrick’s Day,” but times, and the neighborhood, have changed.)

Instead, it was a personal trip out of Massachusetts last month that became a focus of attention because Healey’s office initially refused to say where the governor was during the four-day stretch that saw Secretary of State William Galvin assume the executive powers.

“I continue to provide details about all of my work-related travel. I’ve also said that my personal life is my personal life and I’m going to work to make sure that privacy is maintained for my family,” Healey said when pressed on the subject Monday.

But then the governor’s personal life was on full public display Tuesday when she and First Partner Joanna Lydgate appeared as guests on the Boston Globe’s “Love Letters” podcast. The pair talked about their relationship, the role that music plays in their personal lives, the toll that Healey’s day job can take on their private lives, the governor’s fondness for folding laundry, the first partner’s favorite karaoke tunes, and more.

And Healey said she doesn’t draw a line between the personal and public, at least not when it comes to the criticism she often faces.

“Sometimes I get critiqued in the press over things that are my official actions that I take, decisions that I make. Sometimes it’s critique over things that are more personal. You know, for me, I don’t distinguish between the two,” Healey told “Love Letters.” “I think, you know, for me, it just becomes probably a cumulative toll that I’m not even aware of.”

By the end of the week, Healey’s team had disclosed that the February trip was to Puerto Rico, where Lydgate brought Healey for her birthday. The governor’s office said it will share the location of the governor’s travel — sometimes weeks after the fact — as part of the monthly calendars it makes available to the media, upon request.

ODDS AND ENDS: It could be a good time to be in the construction industry. The state this week committed $700 million in state funding toward replacement of the aging Cape Cod bridges, celebrated $335 million in federal money coming in for an infrastructure megaproject in Allston, and Mariano signaled that he’s going to pursue an MWRA expansion project that could cost “well over $1 billion.” … The Mass. Gaming Commission is taking on a distinct Baker administration flavor. Baker’s former deputy chief of staff for operations, Dean Serpa, was chosen this week as the agency’s next executive director and Baker’s one-time chief of appointments, Commissioner Jordan Maynard, was elevated by Healey to serve as interim chair of the commission. At the MGC, Serpa will be reunited with Grace Robinson, who worked with Serpa as Baker’s head of operations. … Public Safety Secretary Terrence Reidy had a lot on his mind this week, telling lawmakers during a budget hearing that he’s worried about the future of public safety in Massachusetts because of the low numbers of people going to work in law enforcement and sharing his personal concerns with the idea of supervised injection facilities, something Healey’s Department of Public Health has endorsed.