Better Government

The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents has implemented numerous reforms that have improved the safety of workplaces throughout the state since Governor Mitt Romney’s election in 2002. In the process, the DIA has reduced the number companies that do not adhere to the state’s worker compensation laws.

The cost of housing in Massachusetts absorbs too much of the average resident’s income and drives people and businesses out of the state. According to recent research studies, the problem is not a lack of land but an excess of regulation. I propose a concrete and politically palatable policy reform to ensure that septic and wetland regulations are used to protect the environment and public health. This reform would remove the temptation for towns to misuse these rules to discourage development.

Restrictive regulations have undermined the market’s ability to meet demand, such that homebuyers have dramatically bid up the prices of a limited supply of housing over the last 25 years.

This report surveys 14 Massachusetts cities outside the immediate Boston metropolitan market, which other studies have identified as “weak market” or “gateway” cities. While useful designations, this report employs the term “Middle Cities.”

This paper will focus on programs that subsidize the building or rehabilitation of units for owner occupancy, as opposed to the development of rental properties. Most weak market neighborhoods already feature a high proportion of renters and high rates of vacancy.

Our goal in this paper is to highlight how current thinking on transportation is needlessly and wastefully constrained by the bureaucratic structures of the past. To maximize the region’s economic potential and conserve scarce fiscal resources, transportation planning needs to be objective, transparent, and data driven.

While the pension system is not overly generous for typical employees, it is riddled with exceptions, ambiguities, and loopholes that allow some of them to abuse the system and collect unwarranted benefits, resulting in tremendous cost to the state and ultimately to taxpayers. The root of these problems is that the calculation of benefits is not based on the simple concept of contributions but the complicated interplay of four factors—years of eligible service, maximum three years of compensation, "group" or job classification, and retirement age.

The focus of this paper is the choice that local retirement boards have of managing their own investors or investing all or a portion of their assets in PRIT. Most local boards choose to retain control of their investments. In 2004, 55 out of the 104 local systems invested entirely on their own, 29 had some assets invested in PRIT or the PRIT segmentation program, and only 20 invested entirely with PRIT.

The state’s involvement with indoor skating arenas can be divided into distinct phases. Each phase offers lessons, not only about the evolution of competitive contracting, but also about the role of the private sector in the provision of public amenities.

Few dispute the idea that Greater Boston faces a serious housing crisis that threatens the continued economic growth of the region. Evidence of a housing crisis in the Boston area includes high apartment rents, high home prices, and an insufficient supply of housing units. The lack of a varied housing stock prices many workers out of the market—and drives both households and businesses out of the region, including entrepreneurs and their colleagues who are engaged in the start-up phase of business.