Transparency concerns raised as Mass. ends shelter spending reports. Why that matters to you
Unless you're the sort who pays attention, you probably didn't notice that Gov. Maura Healey's office has quietly stopped publishing a detailed accounting of how taxpayer money is being spent on the state's emergency shelter system.
And that matters. Because the bi-weekly reports sent to legislative leaders usually included some pretty big numbers.
One such report, published earlier this year, showed taxpayer spending on the system cruising toward $1 billion. The system houses both permanent Massachusetts residents and migrant new arrivals, with the state spending a weekly average of $3,870 per family.
That number dropped to an average of $1,182 per family in a report released earlier this month, as the number of families in the system also dropped precipitously.
However, when the state law authorizing the reports expired, they were discontinued. The news was first reported by The Boston Herald .
In a Sept. 22 letter to legislative leaders , administration Budget Czar Matthew J. Gorzkowicz and Housing and Livable Communities Secretary Ed Augustus said they were pulling the plug on detailed reporting on the system.
"Reporting on activities that are no longer ongoing, such as hotel shelter or spending from past fiscal years, may be found in previous bi-weekly reports," they said
Instead of the data, the administration only notes that lawmakers approved $276 million in this year's state budget for the shelter system, the average amount spent on families in shelter each week, and the total amount of cash spent from a reserve fund, according to The Herald.
The end of the reports, in some ways, marks the end of one immigration debate on Beacon Hill and the start of another, as the Republican Trump administration prosecutes hardline enforcement policies carried out by masked immigration agents in cities and towns across Massachusetts.
During their short lifespan, the reports served as the most reliable barometer of public spending on the system, which, at its peak, housed more than 7,500 families and burned through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
That made them easy political fodder for the Democratic administration's critics on the right, who had been pressing Healey to turn off the tap of taxpayer largesse and to reform the state's decades-old Right to Shelter Law.
The administration took steps to contain costs, ending hotel shelter stays , which had been the site of some disturbing crimes , and calling for residency requirements and other fixes.
Nonetheless, Healey's critics, including two Republicans aiming for her job in 2026, pounced on the news of the reports' demise, arguing that it represents another blemish on the state's already spotty record for government transparency.
GOP hopeful Mike Kennealy, a former Baker administration official, said he'd keep releasing the information even without the statute authorizing it.
"I'd just keep doing it," Kennealy, who served as Gov. Charlie Baker's housing and economic development czar, told MassLive. "The idea that we're stopping it because the law has expired is a terrible mistake."
Brian Shortsleeve, who helmed the MBTA under Baker, pointed to the state's poor marks for transparency and accused Healey of "hiding the ball."
The right-leaning Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, the most vocal critic of the administration's shelter policies, argued in a statement: 'Transparency shouldn't depend on a sunset clause.'
"Taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent every week, every month, every year," the Boston-based group's executive director, Paul Craney, said in a statement.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Healey's housing office said the administration "inherited a shelter system that was not equipped to handle the surge in demand Massachusetts experienced these past few years."
Healey "imposed reforms, such as a capacity limit, length of stay limit, residency requirements and background checks, that have successfully reduced caseloads and costs," the spokesperson added, noting that the state expects costs in the 2026 budget year to be "hundreds of millions of dollars less" than in the 2025 budget year.
In the meantime, Republicans in the state Legislature are pressing ahead with their own transparency efforts.
Republicans in the state House successfully inserted an amendment reauthorizing the reporting requirement into the year-end budget that the majority-Democratic chamber sent to the Senate earlier this week, a spokesperson told MassLive.
Republicans in the state Senate, meanwhile, also said they'll continue to press for transparency reforms with a new legislative proposal. So even if the reports are gone, there will be some accounting of spending on the shelter system.
The bill, which focuses on state contracts valued at $100,000 or more, "[addresses] serious issues that have been raised by multiple sources over the past several months and would significantly reduce the risk of impropriety whenever an emergency drives procurements," Senate Minority Leader Bruce E. Tarr, R-1st Essex/Middlesex, said.
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