WCVB: Massachusetts Officials Brace for First True Test of Sumner Tunnel Shutdown

Massachusetts transportation officials continue to urge drivers to “ditch the drive” in order to avoid traffic created by the eight-week closure of Boston’s Sumner Tunnel.

Construction inside of the tunnel has been underway since last week, and the tunnel closure will continue through the beginning of September.

While congestion on roadways was relatively light at the start of the tunnel shutdown, state highway officials expect this week to provide the true test.

“I think Tuesday is going to be the big test,” Jonathan Gulliver, MassDOT Highway Administrator, said. “Monday morning traffic in particular is usually light. Monday afternoon is when things start to pick up. Our heaviest travel days of the week, right now, are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Those are both morning and afternoon commutes. Friday afternoon commute is also pretty, pretty tough.”

Sumner Tunnel closure guide: 2-month project expected to snarl Boston traffic

Even with fewer commuters on the road last week, traffic was bumper-to-bumper in the Ted Williams Tunnel as people looked for alternatives.

Boston Globe: Time, Money, Tax Breaks. What Boston Can Learn about Creating a Downtown that Never Sleeps.

Three decades ago, Jack Berman was a young stockbroker in the Financial District, arriving to work in a crush of people crowding sidewalks, filling office buildings and squeezing into coffee shops. But when the workday ended, the streets became so desolate it was hard to find a cab.

“It was an absolute ghost town after 5 p.m or 6 p.m,” recalled Berman.

That’s not the case today. Many of the office buildings that surround the New York Stock Exchange have become luxury apartments and multimillion-dollar condos, catalyzing a neighborhood that now embodies the Big Apple’s famous moniker: A city that never sleeps.

Jack Berman, at Twenty Broad Street in Manhattan. He works with his family’s real estate company Metro Loft. JENNIFER S. ALTMAN

Streets teem with workers and tourists by day, residents by night. A Whole Foods Market opened in January, and a Life Time fitness center shortly before that. Some of the city’s hottest restaurants and bars have set up shop here, too, likely to get even busier when a new performing arts center opens in the fall.

EXTERNAL: Boston Herald: Cooler Hiring in June Could Help the Fed Achieve an Elusive ‘Soft Landing’ for US Economy

Another month, another solid gain for America’s job market.

The pace of hiring by businesses and government agencies in June — 209,000 added jobs — was the smallest monthly gain in 2 1/2 years. Yet it was still a healthy increase, enough to reduce the unemployment rate from 3.7% to 3.6%, barely above a half-century low. And it amounted to further evidence of an economy that has defied persistent forecasts of a recession.

The latest sign of economic strength makes it all but certain that the Federal Reserve will resume its interest rate hikes later this month after having ended a streak of 10 rate increases that were intended to curb high inflation.

Yet there were also signals in Friday’s government report that the job market is cooling to a more sustainable pace of growth — a trend that, if it continues, could reassure the Fed that its rate hikes are reducing inflation pressures without derailing the economy.

“This is kind of a Goldilocks report,” said Julia Coronado, president of MacroPolicy Perspectives, an economic research firm. “It’s a resilient labor market — not too hot, not too cool.”

Boston Globe: New England has a Distinguished History of Tech Conferences. Here are Some Shaping New Industries.

Summer is a time to ship the kids off to camp, welcome the out-of-town guests, and finalize the vacation plans.

But it’s also a time when academics and entrepreneurs working at the edge of new fields often get together. Here in New England, a long tradition of summer conferences has helped shape industries.

In 1956, about 20 researchers convened in Hanover, N.H., for the Dartmouth Summer Project on Artificial Intelligence. The goal, according to the organizers, was to figure out how computers and software might “solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans and improve themselves.” (Two of the four key organizers were MIT professors: Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon.) Almost seven decades later, it seems we might be on the precipice of that sort of technological self-improvement and evolution — in a way that will likely trigger major shifts in society.

In 1981, physicists and computer scientists — and at least one dog — gathered at MIT’s Endicott House conference center for the Physics of Computation conference. Richard Feynman, already a Nobel laureate in physics, proposed that building a new kind of computer around quantum mechanics — which describes matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels — would be necessary to simulate natural systems such as weather or the workings of the human body.

Telegram: Five Central Massachusetts Towns to Receive State Grant for Broadband Infrastructure

More than 30 towns and school districts throughout the state, including five from Central Massachusetts, will receive part of a $4 million grant that will help improve or build broadband infrastructure.

In a press release published Thursday, Gov. Maura Healey’s administration announced that the Community Compact Municipal Fiber grant program will help support the construction or completion of municipal fiber networks.

“Massachusetts residents rely on local government to deliver core services daily, and information technology plays a significant role in making that happen,” Healey said in a press release Thursday. “This grant program is one of the many ways we partner with cities and towns to better serve residents, and we are proud to be able to help them improve their municipal broadband infrastructure.”

This grant program is particularly helpful in smaller towns or more rural areas of the state as they may lack the resources or infrastructure to meet their technological needs, the release said.

Boston Globe: Deloitte Plans Move to Winthrop Center

Add another big-name company to the list of tenants that will soon fill the new Winthrop Center skyscraper in downtown Boston.

Deloitte, the New York-based professional services giant, has signed a long-term lease for 138,000 square feet of office space, the biggest lease in the tower so far — and in Boston’s wobbly office market this year.

The deal was confirmed by officials at Deloitte and Millennium Partners, the developer of Winthrop Center.

Deloitte plans to shift its Boston operations from the old Hancock building at 200 Berkeley Street in Back Bay to the new tower in fall 2024. The firm has roughly 3,100 employees currently based out of the Berkeley Street office, all of whom will begin to report to Winthrop Center next year. Deloitte will occupy nearly four full floors of the tower’s 812,000 square feet of office space.

“We wanted a space that enabled community building between our people and our community and our clients,” said Kevin McGovern, Deloitte’s New England managing partner. “Winthrop checked all those boxes, being centrally located, and being a space that we felt could meet the needs of our employees, particularly in light of the shift to hybrid work.”

WGBH: Boston Wants to Make EVs EZ

If you have a bright idea for how to set up and run a bunch of curbside electric vehicle charging stations, the city of Boston wants to hear from you.

At the end of June, Boston issued two requests seeking ideas from contractors about how to build a charging network — one for a system that would be owned and operated by the city, the other run by a private company. The city is pretty clear that they don’t know what this would look like. One of the bid documents says Boston’s looking for a partner who “will help discover a model of deploying curbside chargers that can be brought to scale citywide.” The goal is to install a minimum of 60 curbside charging stations.

Shonté Davidson is the president of a partnership of minority- and women-owned businesses called the Better Together Brain Trust that is trying to break into the EV installation field. She says Boston’s plug-in ambitions are “a great opportunity” but there are still a bunch of barriers — not the least of which is “the business model isn’t there because there isn’t enough demand” to generate revenue for whoever owns the charging stations.

But Boston is also in a hurry: The bids say the city wants the charging stations up and running within six months of signing a contract.

Boston Globe: Thousands of Residents Languish on Subsidized-Housing Wait Lists

On the surface, they do not appear to have all that much in common.

Laura Livingston works full time and lives with her baby in a homeless shelter in Upham’s Corner. Lindsey Angerame is single and disabled in Fall River. And the Rooks — Herman and Laura — get by on fixed income in Lower Mills.

But the three households share a singularly maddening experience: sitting in a long queue for subsidized housing in Massachusetts. It’s a familiar story of patience and purgatory for tens of thousands of people who languish for years on wait lists that have only gotten worse.

“I thought it was going to be a short process,” said Livingston, who has been on a wait list for more than a year. “Then I discovered quickly that it’s not. It was never going to be.”

Among the lesser-known aspects of Massachusetts’ acute housing crisis are the myriad wait lists low-income residents go on to become eligible for a subsidized home. There is not one, but rather dozens of different lists — each maintained by a local housing authority or nonprofit. There are also different types of aid people can apply for, such as vouchers for a market-rate apartment, a lottery for an affordable unit set aside in a new apartment building, or acceptance to a traditional public housing complex.

Mass Live: Christmas Tree Shops Warns of 232 Massachusetts Layoffs

Christmas Tree Shops warned state labor officials that it will lay off 232 workers in Massachusetts between now and the end of August.

The layoffs began Friday, July 7, according to a WARN – Worker Adjustment and Retraining Act notice posted Friday by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development.

The chain will close all 70 of its remaining locations, 14 of them in Massachusetts including one in Holyoke.

The company told the state of the layoffs June 30 but after the close of business.

Christmas Tree Shops, a 53-year-old chain founded on Cape Cod and now headquartered in Middleboro, lost bankruptcy funding last week and news of its impending doom broke Monday.

Health Care

Cape Cod Times: ‘Abortion Desert’ Ends with Medication Abortion Services on Cape, Islands

Health Imperatives, a nonprofit with clinics in Hyannis, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, has begun providing medication abortions at all seven southeastern Massachusetts locations.

The state Department of Public Health put out a request for proposals in November last year when Health Imperatives applied for funds to start the service, according to Julia Kehoe, Health Imperatives CEO and president. The organization received $700,000 in new state funding in order to start “integrating medication abortion.”

“Ever since I first ran for office and was elected in 2016, I was aghast that we have no access to abortion on Cape Cod or the Islands,” state Sen. Julian Cyr, D-Truro, said. “It’s incredibly heartening to see that now we do have access to abortion in Hyannis, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and across southeastern Massachusetts, after working at the legislature along with my colleague for years.”

Medication abortion, as provided by Health Imperatives, is where an individual can take prescribed medicine to terminate a pregnancy. Surgical abortion, which is not available on Cape Cod and the Islands, is where an individual needs to undergo surgery to terminate a pregnancy.

WGBH: State Takeover Floated as a Potential Solution for Hospital Closures

Massachusetts lawmakers are weighing a bill that would give the state the power to step in and temporarily take control of a hospital that wants to shut down essential services.

Three acute care hospitals — in North Adams, Lynn and Quincy — have closed since 2014 in Massachusetts, despite the state Department of Public Health determining their services were necessary, according to the Massachusetts Nurses Association, which backs the receivership bill.

The DPH reviews hospitals’ plans to close or discontinue services, a multi-step process that includes a public hearing for community members to weigh in. The DPH cannot stop a hospital from closing, but it can require hospital officials to submit a plan for maintaining access to critical services.

Testifying before the Public Health Committee Thursday, bill supporters said the current process falls short, particularly in cases where community members, hospital staff and local elected officials oppose a closure.

Giving the state the option of receivership “puts the needs of patients and communities first,” said Tara Corey, a nurse at a Leominster hospital where the labor and delivery unit is slated for closure this fall.

Boston Herald: Biden Takes Aim at ‘Junk’ Insurance

President Joe Biden on Friday rolled out a new set of initiatives to reduce health-care costs: a crackdown on what he called “junk” insurance plans that play consumers as ‘suckers,’ new guidance to prevent surprise medical bills and an effort to reduce medical debt tied to credit cards.

Biden is building on previous initiatives to limit health-care costs, with the Department of Health and Human Services releasing new estimates showing 18.7 million older adults and other Medicare beneficiaries will save an estimated $400 per year in prescription drug costs in 2025 because of the president placing a cap on out-of-pocket spending as part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Gearing up for his 2024 reelection campaign as inflation remains a dominant concern for voters, the Democratic president has emphasized his policies to help families manage their expenses, as well as a spate of government incentives to encourage private sector development of electric vehicles, clean energy and advanced computer chips.

Republican lawmakers have criticized Biden’s policies by saying they have spurred higher prices that hurt the well-being of families.

Budget and Taxation

Telegram: Lawmakers have Three State Spending Plans to Reconcile as Fiscal Year Starts

Proposed spending plans for Massachusetts have been public for months, yet legislators are still grappling with reconciling the three budget proposals: Gov. Maura Healey’s, released in February; the House budget, released in April; and the Senate budget, released in May.

The new fiscal year started July 1, traditionally deadline day for both local and state budgets.

To avoid empty pay envelopes, the Legislature passed, and Acting Gov. Kimberly Driscoll signed into law, an interim budget that ensures the state government will stay open for at least another month. Meanwhile, members of the conference committee, headed by Rep. Aaron Michlewitz, D-Boston, and Sen. Michael Rodrigues, D-Westport, are working toward reconciliation of the documents.

For all intents and purposes, the three plans don’t differ widely. There are different ideas proposed by the House and Senate for the use of $1 billion from the newly enacted millionaire’s tax, as well as different set-asides and earmarks for local projects and programs.

Boston Globe: Fight to Streamline Corporate Taxes Heats Up on Beacon Hill

One of the state’s biggest corporate tax breaks in years could be on its way. So why aren’t more business groups cheering it on and working to get it across the finish line?

We’re talking about “single sales factor apportionment” here. Sure sounds wonky, doesn’t it? Let’s boil it down. It’s a method for deciding how much of a multistate company’s income gets hit by a particular state’s corporate tax. Today, Massachusetts tax collectors use a three-factor system — looking at in-state sales, payroll, and property — to come up with a company’s tax bill. The single-sales switch would limit the factors to one: the amount of a company’s in-state sales.

To put it another way: Big companies with headquarters or other large operations in Massachusetts probably get some relief with single-sales, while out-of-state companies without a huge payroll or campus here might pay more than they do now.

You can probably guess why some of the state’s biggest business groups are steering clear. Some well-known companies that are based here — think State Street, Dunkin’, Tripadvisor, TJX — have pushed for the shift, along with at least two (BNY Mellon, Citizens Bank) headquartered elsewhere but with significant offices here. And some major out-of-state telecoms and banks, Bank of America among them, are not happy about it.

ItemLive: Local Politicians Say Missed Budget Deadline No Big Deal

Beacon Hill blew right past its July 1 deadline to finalize the Commonwealth’s fiscal year 2024 budget.

According to state Sen. Joan Lovely, whose district includes Peabody, the importance of the budget is not something to be overlooked.

“It’s probably the biggest thing that we do,” she said.

Despite its importance, the Commonwealth has missed the July 1 fiscal year budget deadline for 13 straight years.

Even as leaders have made a routine out of starting the fiscal year without a finalized budget, local leaders say there is no cause for concern entering FY24.

House Minority Leader Bradley Jones, whose district includes Lynnfield, said that although the delay is scary on paper, the state prepares for hang-ups in the budgeting process by keeping some funds available as needed based on the previous year’s amounts.

“What has historically happened for a long, long time is we do what’s called an interim budget,” Jones said.

Lovely said interim budgets represent one-twelfth of the prior year’s budget, which allows for around a month of state funding.

“We can keep the state running seamlessly,” Lovely said. “It gives the conferees a little more time to iron out whatever differences they’re ironing out.”

Energy and Environment

WCVB: Cambridge Enacts Ambitious Building Emissions-Reduction Standards

Cambridge’s City Council passed a landmark measure last month that mandates ambitious reductions of greenhouse-gas emissions in the city’s medium and large non-residential buildings, marking a strong step toward combating climate change.

Under the legislation, which was approved 8-0, commercial buildings between 25,000 and 100,00 square feet must reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Buildings larger than 100,000 square feet — mainly labs and commercial headquarters — must do so by 2035.

The measure will affect some 1,100 buildings.

One of only a handful of building emissions laws nationwide, the legislation targets a sector that’s long stymied Cambridge’s progress on climate goals. The lion’s share of the city’s emissions — close to 80 percent — come from building operations and construction, according to data cited in the city’s 2021 update to the Net Zero Action Plan.

The new mandates will cut Cambridge’s “BEUDO emissions” in half by 2030, and by about 70 percent by 2035, according to the city. “BEUDO emissions” refers to emissions from non-residential buildings larger than 25,000 square feet and residential buildings with 50 or more units, a category that generates about 60 percent of Cambridge’s total emissions, according to City Manager Yi-An Huang.

“It’s really quite groundbreaking,” said Councilor Quinton Zondervan, who helped lead the push in concert with Councilor Patricia Nolan, Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, and activist groups like the Sunrise Movement, 350.org, and Mothers Out Front. “I’ve been working on this for a very long time, and this is really the first serious, significant climate action that the city has taken.”

Telegram: Warren, McGovern Announce $2.7 Million to Clean Up, Redevelop Brownfields in Worcester

Almost $14 million in federal funding was awarded Friday by the Environmental Protection Agency for the purpose of cleaning and redeveloping industrial polluted sites in Worcester and other Massachusetts towns.

Public officials, including U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Rep. James McGovern, both D-Mass., came together on Friday afternoon in a ceremony held outside the Saint-Gobain Abrasives factory complex at 1 New Bond St. Representatives from 16 communities and organizations, including the City of Worcester, were formally presented with grants from the EPA’s Brownfields Program through the Multipurpose, Assessment, Revolving Loan Fund, and Cleanup Grant programs.

Out of the $13.7 million, which was the largest awarded sum in the history of the program, Worcester received $2.7 million in non-competitive supplemental funding. These funds are awarded to communities that have already demonstrated success in cleaning and redeveloping brownfield sites and are meant to aid continued efforts.

Brownfield sites are defined as property where development or reuse may be complicated by the presence of hazardous substances, pollutants or contaminants, usually linked to previous industrial activity on the property. The EPA’s Brownfields Program, which began in 1995, provides communities with the necessary funding to assess and clean up contaminated areas and to encourage redevelopment and reuse.

EXTERNAL: Commonwealth Magazine: Massachusetts Solar Potential Called Enormous

The Healey Administration unveiled a new mapping tool on Thursday that suggests the state has the potential to generate an enormous amount of solar power.

In a press release, the governor’s administration said the mapping tool indicates that “Massachusetts has more than enough solar potential to support its decarbonization requirements – about 15 to 18 times  what is likely needed. The top-rated parcels add up to double the amount of solar called for in the “2050 Decarbonization Roadmap.”

In more concrete terms, the mapping tool indicates the state’s solar potential is a whopping 506 gigawatts, with 56 gigawatts considered highly rated for development. Those numbers are way above the 34 gigawatts required under the state’s climate plan. Ninety percent of the potential solar would come from ground-mounted installations covering 1.6 million acres, according to the analysis.

While Healey’s press release hailed the state’s tremendous solar potential, one solar developer who served on the technical advisory committee that helped develop the mapping tool urged caution in evaluating the numbers.

Newburyport News: Advocates Renew Push to Expand Bottle Bill

A proposal to update the state’s 5-cent “bottle bill” has resurfaced on Beacon Hill, where environmental groups and consumer advocates are pushing again to expand the decades-old law.

A proposal pending before the Legislature’s Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy would, if approved, increase the deposit on cans and bottles from 5 to 10 cents and include other plastic and glass containers for wine, hard cider, water and sports drinks, among other products.

“Leaving the bottle deposit law ‘as is’ would be like using white-out on your computer,” said Janet Domenitz, executive director of the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, part of a coalition pushing for the changes. “This important recycling tool is more than 40 years old. To make it effective in today’s world, we need to put a deposit on water bottles and more.”

The bill’s sponsors argue the bottle bill could help the state meet its climate change goals by diverting more plastic and glass from landfills if it were expanded to cover more consumer products.

“We are missing the opportunity to increase our recycling only because the law predates the manufacturing of plastic containers like bottled water and sports drinks,” said Rep. Marjorie Decker, D-Cambridge. Allowing these to continue to go to landfills and incinerators is a lose-lose for everyone.”

Boston Globe: Revere Beach Scores 96-Percent on Water Quality Report Card

Save the Harbor/Save the Bay released its annual Metropolitan Beaches Water Quality Report Card this week just in time for this year’s Fourth of July celebrations.

This year’s report card covers the Metropolitan Region’s public beaches in Lynn, Nahant, Revere, Winthrop, East Boston, South Boston, Dorchester, Quincy and Hull owned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and managed by the Department of Conservation & Recreation. It is based on data from the 2022 beach season.

In 2022, overall water quality safety rating for Boston Harbor region beaches was 93-percent, up from the previous year’s score of 86-percent, largely because it was a particularly dry year, with less than half the rainfall of 2021.

Rainfall has a significant impact on the water quality on many beaches. In 2022, the total rainfall was much less than in 2021 (23.95 inches compared to 50.38 inches), resulting in an improvement in the all-beach average safety score.

These seasonal changes are the reason why Save the Harbor/Save the Bay prefers to reference the multi-year average to assess water quality at a beach, instead of single year safety ratings.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Boston Globe: As Conservative Activism Targets Sex Ed, New Guidelines are on the Horizon

When Alex Nugent was a freshman taking sex education at Concord-Carlisle High School, her teacher gave the class an assignment that made Nugent pause: She and her classmates were asked to write a journal entry in which they put themselves “in the shoes of an LGBT youth,” she said, and how they’d feel if they were called derogatory slurs at school.

Nugent, now 17 and a rising senior, joked with her friend, “I’m just gonna say, ‘I put on my shoes and I just go to school and it’s a normal day for me,’ because that’s how things are.”

The assignment was well intentioned, but awkward, said Nugent, who identifies as queer and uses she/they pronouns. And it encapsulated the challenge with sex education in Massachusetts, one of 21 states that do not have a requirement that public schools teach sex ed, leaving curriculum decisions to local school districts.

The result is that many districts rely on “old and cobbled together” curricula, based on standards the state set almost 25 years ago, said Megara Bell, director of Partners in Sex Education, which helps schools devise comprehensive sex education programs.

“Schools are either using old frameworks, which are horribly outdated, or they’re using no frameworks, which is chaotic, or they are most likely just not wanting to update their programing — just leaving it as,” Bell said.

Now, after five years of working on new standards, the state is bringing some clarity on sex ed to the classroom.

Education

Boston Globe: 2024 Ballot Questions Could Include Major Changes to State Education

Massachusetts voters in 2024 could be asked to settle two major education debates, but retailers may pass on bringing tax cuts to next year’s ballot, State House News Service has learned.

The state’s largest teacher’s union is considering ballot questions that would eliminate the graduation requirement associated with statewide standardized testing and create a “debt free college scholarship program,” both proposals that legislative leaders have hesitated to embrace.

Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, told the News Service the group is compiling polling data ahead of the Aug. 2 deadline to file paperwork for 2024 ballot questions. The union commissioned a poll by Echo Cove Research in June that shows support for the two potential measures.

Of the 800 registered voters asked, 81% said they would vote “yes” on a ballot measure “ensuring that every person who lives in Massachusetts who has graduated from a state high school and wishes to pursue higher education has access to an adequately funded, debt-free education at any public college or university.”