THE PIONEER BLOG

the Boston skyline overlaid with money.
Kaila Webb

Which State Employees Make More than the Boss?

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In 2017, the Massachusetts Department of Corrections had 20 employees who were paid more than the commissioner’s salary of $159,645. Among these 20, the median income was $172,491. This highly-paid group accounted for $1.2 million in overtime spending — enough to hire seven more employees at that six-figure median salary.   Pioneer Institute wanted to find out how many Commonwealth departments had employees who earned more than their department head, so we used Pioneer’s transparency platform, MassOpenBooks. In 28 state departments, ranging from the Department of Public Safety to the Appeals Court, we found a clear pattern of employees earning more than the person managing the agency: Apparently, many agency heads opted to pay vast sums of overtime rather than […]

Andrew Mikula

Massachusetts needs the 2020 Census to be accurate and adequately funded

/0 Comments/in /by Andrew Mikula

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Massachusetts’ population grew at an almost unprecedented rate in the late 1990s, gaining nearly 200,000 residents between 1999 and 2000 alone. If Massachusetts had kept up this pace of growth, it would have over 10.8 million residents in 2018, as opposed to the more modest 6.8 million we actually see today.   Where did this astounding rate of population growth come from? An economic boom? An aggressive housing creation initiative? An influx of immigrants or refugees? None of the above. To put it bluntly, the St. Louis Fed’s data is misleading at best.     The problem is that their intercensal population figures for the 1990s come from an initial Census […]

Kaila Webb

Why Did the Department of Corrections Pay a Chef $166,762 last year?

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Pioneer Institute’s MassOpenBooks transparency tool shows an employee listed in the Department of Corrections payroll as a “corrections officer/chef” with an income of $166,762 in 2017. His regular pay was $95,051, with $66,991 in overtime and $4,719 paid as “other”. His regular pay seems to have only been increased to adjust for inflation. His overtime, however, has been increasing exponentially and shifted from 4 percent of his pay in 2004 to 40 percent in 2017.   Whether he’s a chef or a corrections officer, being paid this much in overtime is remarkable. Citizens need to demand more transparency in the disbursement of state funds so we have more than just numbers anytime sums run this high. For example: how well […]

Kaila Webb

Can State Pensioners Pay for Future Medically Necessary Long-term Care?

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At some point many people find themselves needing help to care for themselves. For the elderly, nursing homes provide that help, either temporarily or on a long-term basis.   In 2014, there were 1.4 million individuals in nursing homes nation-wide, with 41,255 of them in Massachusetts. Nursing home residents accounted for 3.7 percent of citizens older than 64, and 13.3 percent of citizens older than 84 years of age. Those numbers will only increase given the Commonwealth’s aging population. While not every retiree will require long-term care, the many who do will likely find the cost to be financially out of reach.   For retired public employees, will their monthly pension checks cover the cost of a nursing home? Pioneer […]

Mary Connaughton

True Transparency Needed for SFI’s

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Pioneer has long called for the Statements of Financial Interests (SFIs) that elected officials and political candidates are required to file to be available online.  The State Ethics Commission must have been listening to us and other transparency enthusiasts that called on the Commonwealth to catch up to the times. While the forms can now be accessed online, there is still much to do to improve public access to these most important documents. Transparency is the most fundamental tool a democracy has to ensure that its stewards have the public interest at heart, rather than their own self-interest.  We have seen far too many breaches of ethics in recent years on Beacon Hill and one way to prevent them is […]

Andrew Mikula

New taxable land parcels are getting very scarce in urban Massachusetts

/0 Comments/in /by Andrew Mikula

Plymouth – the oldest town in Massachusetts – has an incredible 2,685 unoccupied plots of taxable land. Meanwhile, Cambridge – a city nearly twice as populous as Plymouth – has just 150. If you know anything about Cambridge and Plymouth, this shouldn’t be surprising. Plymouth is a sprawling coastal suburb with a small, historic downtown. Cambridge is a densely populated urban hub of innovative start-ups, world-class universities, and young professionals with close proximity to Boston.   In creating new development, knocking down trees is a lot easier than knocking down old buildings, and redeveloping old buildings to fit modern uses is especially difficult when there are many other occupied buildings nearby. These realities are clearly reflected in a nationwide pattern […]

Kaila Webb

Bill H.2890: Funding More Problems than Solutions

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Studies show that 90 percent of the elderly want to live out their days at home. With familiarity sewn into every corner, home feels warm and secure. Moving to a nursing home can be terrifying, replacing the familiar with the unfamiliar and often separating couples because of different needs for care. Many adult children lament moving their parents into a long-term care facility, but all too often in-home care becomes unattainable due to perceived cost, logistics and the amount of care required to keep their parents safe. Which is where House Bill H.2890 comes into play. The proposed legislation aims to increase funding available to licensed nursing homes in a $90 million rate add-on dedicated to MassHealth nursing homes’ employee […]

Andrew Mikula

Long-term decline in area Catholic high school enrollment is likely to continue

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Over a dozen Catholic schools affiliated with the Archdiocese of Boston are governed by independent boards of trustees. Most of these schools offer programs to students in grades 9-12 (Figure 1). However, as private schools compete to attract talented students and, increasingly, traditional and charter public schools do the same, many Catholic schools are struggling to boost enrollment. Catholic school closings in Massachusetts have received significant media attention, but even those that have stayed open are challenged to generate sufficient tuition revenue and donations. With financial pressure to pay teachers, improve the infrastructure of aging buildings, and update technology and lab equipment, many parochial schools face major long-term obstacles.   Figure 1: Boston Archdiocese-affiliated co-ed high schools and the grade […]

Jim Stergios

Troubling takeaways from the SJC ruling on charter schools

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These would be the best of times for Boston public charter schools were education policy decisions driven by evidence.  Boston’s charters are nationwide models and uniquely successful at closing pernicious achievement gaps.  But in education politics, where “momentum” is too often the benchmark, charter skeptics are crowing about the loss of a ballot initiative to expand school choice for disadvantaged students, unionization of three charters, and a recent SJC decision affirming a lower court’s dismissal of a challenge to the state cap on charter schools. A close look at the SJC’s decision should keep even the most ardent charter haters from crowing. Twenty-five years ago, in a case known as McDuffy, the state’s highest court declared that the Massachusetts Constitution requires […]

Andrew Mikula

Many Massachusetts towns choosing to forego marijuana tax revenue

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Local officials, health advocates, and neighborhood group leaders in Massachusetts have long been wary of July 1st, 2018, the day marijuana enterprises will begin selling their products statewide. Drug deals will take place over retail countertops, not in back alleys. Home cultivators will be subject to safety inspections, not arrests.   That is true, of course, unless your local government has anything to say about it. As reported by The Boston Globe in March, 130 out of 351 Massachusetts cities and towns have imposed moratoriums on marijuana establishments, essentially banning them until local governments can find a more effective way to regulate the industry (Figure 1). At least 59 more municipalities have banned marijuana enterprises indefinitely. Despite passing question #4 […]

Mary Connaughton

Love It When the T Listens!

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It seems MBTA officials were listening to this March segment of Bloomberg Radio’s Bay State Business. During the program, I was discussing simple ways to increase MBTA revenue without imposing an across-the-board fare hike. Raising fares may make sense in some scenarios, but where there is excess capacity, increasing ridership is a far more effective solution to reduce operating deficits.  You don’t jack up the prices of a product that isn’t selling. The example I presented was weekend commuter rail fares.  My family of four, which includes two teenage boys, would pay a total of $78 for the round trip between Boston and Framingham on a Saturday.  That’s $9.50 each way for all four of us plus $4 for parking.  […]

Andrew Mikula

The role of old industrial districts in residential suburbs

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The City of Waltham was once an aging mill town. Its flagship industrial corporation, the Waltham Watch Company, closed in 1957. The 1970s and 80s saw a decline in the industrial sector for the region as a whole.   Then, the tech companies came. Waltham has recently become a regional hub for biopharmaceuticals and therapeutic science alongside Cambridge. The western edge of the city is home to a momentous number of industrial firms that hug several bends in Interstate 95, towering over the Cambridge Reservoir.   All the same, Waltham’s proximity to Boston gives its revitalization a different flavor than that of, say, Worcester or Lowell. As regional urban centers, Worcester and Lowell demand more diverse, service-based economies. Waltham retains […]

Andrew Mikula

Education spending influences demographic trends at even the smallest scale

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The Metropolitan Area Planning Council has a habit of solving identity crises for Massachusetts towns. Operating chiefly in Greater Boston, the MAPC uses 5 broad “community types” (and 9 subtypes) to classify municipalities statewide based on criteria such as housing density, proximity to Boston, historical character, and capacity to develop further.   All of this information is readily visible on Pioneer Institute’s MassAnalysis database, which provides an interactive map of the MAPC community subtypes under the Metrics tab (Figure 1).         Figure 1:   The type “inner core,” further divided into “metropolitan core communities” and “streetcar suburbs” is the only MAPC community type that is geographically contiguous. That is, inner core communities are always adjacent to at least one […]

Will Kauppila

Income and Education Levels in Gateway Cities Well Below State Average as Debate over Chapter 70 Aid Formula Heats Up

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Data from Pioneer’s online transparency toolset, MassAnalysis.com, shows that the Gateway Cities have some of the lowest per-capita incomes in the Commonwealth, according to the most recent data from 2017. Education and income levels are intrinsically tied, and not surprisingly, high school graduation rates in the Gateway Cities lag well behind the rest of the state. As shown in the table below, Barnstable, Quincy, Peabody, Attleboro, and Methuen are the only Gateway Cities that do not rank in the bottom third of the 351 municipalities in Massachusetts in per capita income for 2017. Lawrence had the fifth lowest in the state, while Springfield and New Bedford had the eighth and tenth lowest, respectively. The average per capita income in the […]

Will Kauppila

2,098 Mass. VA Employees Made $100,000 or More in 2017

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According to the online transparency tool OpentheBooks, there were 7,816 Department of Veterans Affairs employees in Massachusetts in 2017. Remarkably, 2,098 of these, made six-figure incomes. Fifty-one administrators and doctors made more than $300,000 and 364 made more than $200,000. Salaries may be sky high, but there have been many complaints about the quality of care at two VA hospitals in particular. As the Boston Globe, Lowell Sun, and ABC News have reported, VA Hospitals in Bedford and Northampton have been embattled by recent allegations of unexpected patient deaths, serious employee misconduct, whistleblower intimidation, and unsafe conditions. In 2017, 35 employees made over $200,000 and 369 made over $100,000 at the Edith Nourse Rodgers Veterans Memorial Hospital in Bedford, while […]