Community Colleges are a popular topic these days – with two research reports (here and here) being issued in the past weeks. The first came from the Boston Healthcare Careers Consortium. It was released with a host of ‘stakeholders’ taking credit. This report has its share of consensus-speak but a few items jump off the page. First, the K-12 preparation level for many students is stunningly low – in Bunker Hill Community College’s entering 2009 class, 98% of students needed a remedial placement for at least one discipline (reading, English, and math) and over a third needed placements for all three. More importantly, the paper digs into the lack of coordination across the community college system – different requirements for […]

It feels like a familiar story – an obscure public sector entity with a clueless (or worse) board of directors fails to do their job and the executive director makes off with bags of money. Except this time, the setting is the Chelsea Public Housing Authority rather than the Merrimack Valley (see here and here). Briefly, the Director of the Authority managed to pay himself $360,000 per year (far more than any other Housing Authority director in the state) while claiming that he was only making $160,000. His explanation for lying to the state and federal government: He’s a ‘rebel’. Once he figured out his days were numbered, he got the Authority’s bookkeeper to write him checks cashing out his […]

Imagine getting money from the state on a no-bid basis. Even better, a state law names you as the sole entity eligible to get the cash. If you are lucky enough to be BDC Capital, you don’t have to imagine. As recently as 2008, the program it runs, the Capital Access Program, got $5 million in the life sciences bill. BDC Capital (known as the Massachusetts Business Development Corporation) receives money from the state and other sources and supposedly uses it to support small businesses. And someone is looking out for them, an attempt to open the program to other providers in the last Economic Development bill was dropped in conference. I say ‘supposedly’ above, because no one cares to […]

Monster win for Pressley: She topped the ticket unequivocally. In the last at-large race, 354 votes separated the two ticket-toppers (Connolly and Murphy). This time around, Pressley beat her closest competitor (Arroyo) by more than 2,000 votes with closer to 50,000 fewer voters to work with. City-wide for Pressley?: Pressley ran strong citywide, with the notable exception of South Boston. I’ll take a deeper dive into those numbers later this week and draw some conclusions about the results, particularly who gained votes where.