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Bored with education progress

/0 Comments/in , , /by Scott W. Graves and Micaela Dawson

It was something of a blast from the past that Governor Patrick appointed Paul Reville to chair the Board of Education. Entirely expected given that Paul chaired the First Task Force that led to the Second Task Force. But the appointment does say something about the “blast from the past” quality of education debates. Paul was on the board from 1991 to 1996. A bipartisan agreement (Weld-Birmingham-Finneran) led to the replacement of Paul and others and the appointment of the top vote-getting Democrat (and previously electoral opponent to Weld) John Silber to the helm of the BOE. Positive qualities Paul brings to the BOE are that he listens, and that he has some broader academic training (M.A.), which could be […]

Wednesday Quick Hits

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Burying the lede: State House News has a brief piece on the latest filings for School Building Assistance program. Towards the end, it notes that several of the schools built under the program (when it was administered by the Dep’t of Ed) in western Mass were being used for non-school purposes since the students never materialized to fill the building. So what exactly did we subsidize? We didn’t say it: I enjoyed this quote from a local restaurant bulletin board: “Ugh. So, I’m attending the American Chemical Society meeting with 1223947928 of my closest friends. Historically, this meeting (along with all the others) was at Hynes, which left you any number of options for lunch/dinner/drinks. But the new convention center […]

MBTA Pension Brouhaha

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Today’s Globe has a brutal piece on the MBTA’s pension plan and the unbelievable payouts it generates. One of the highlights is former MBTA General Manager Michael Mulhern’s payout. He retired as GM several years ago and got the proverbial soft landing as head of the T’s pension plan. At age 48, he collects a pension of $130,000 and a salary of $225,000. The T’s plan does this because it has many of the crazy features of the other public pension systems (read more about those here) plus it has no minimum age feature, so folks can retire as soon as they get their 20 years in, even if they are in the prime of their careers. To add insult […]

Counterintuitive Thoughts on Healthcare Costs

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Back in October, we released a paper on business costs in Massachusetts. One of the surprising conclusions was that our healthcare costs were not terribly out of line with our competitor states. This was a real surprise and ran counter to a lot of the anecdotal data floating around. A fascinating entry in WBUR’s Commonhealth series sheds some light on the discrepancy. If you measure by average premium (which we did), we are not that far out of whack. If you measure by some variation of healthcare’s share of the Massachusetts’ economy, then we are massively out of line. David Torchiana, of the Mass. General Physician’s Organization argues that the second measure includes NIH expenditures and the costs associated with […]

Thoughts on housing and Middle Cities

/0 Comments/in , , /by Scott W. Graves and Micaela Dawson

Housing is critical to the viability of Middle Cities, because housing development is the ticket to bringing a younger demographic and spending power back downtown—and therefore to fiscal solvency. These cities are built for and the leadership in these cities comfortable with high-density construction, especially if funding for school costs is available. Then why is there no 40R construction in these cities? The problem lies in the state requirement that all communities, notwithstanding the specific city or town’s attainment of the state’s 10 percent affordability threshold, deed restrict 20 percent of total 40R units to households earning no more than 80 percent of area median income (AMI). Most of these cities easily exceed the state’s affordability goals. Holyoke more than […]