90 days in, Maura Healey takes on the T but otherwise remains cautious
This week will mark the end of the first three months in office for Gov. Maura Healey, who has only put her name to one major piece of legislation but has had a busy first 90 days, her aides say.
She’s also hired a new head of the MBTA — at $470,000 salary — yet she’s kept up her national profile by jetting out of state a few times already.
“I’m proud that our administration has hit the ground running in our first three months to address the greatest challenges facing Massachusetts residents – affordability, competitiveness and equity. We’ve put a strong team in place that has already started delivering results on housing, economic development, climate, education, transportation and more. We look forward to continuing to build on this progress in the months and years ahead,” Healey told the Herald in an emailed statement this week.
Healey began the last week of her first quarter as the state’s 73rd governor by meeting with the President of Cape Verde José Maria Neves, following a weekend trip to Florida to meet with the Democratic Governors Association. On Tuesday she was in Lawrence after announcing the creation of a new Governor’s Council on Latino Empowerment.
Healey has left the state several times since swearing the oath of office, visiting Washington D.C. for the State of the Union address and a National Governors Association meeting, and vacationed in Florida in February.
The governor, inaugurated on Jan. 5 as the first woman elected to lead the state, has had a slow start to her first term in office by any measure.
Part of that is by design: during their first year of office a new executive is not required to submit a budget until March.
Part of it can be blamed on the Legislature, which has chosen to take its time in organizing this year and as a result has achieved, according to the State House News Service, “the slowest start to a new legislative session in at least two decades, based on the imperfect metric of number of laws made.”
As a consequence, just one new major piece of legislation has made it to Healey’s desk for approval, a $388.7 million supplemental budget for Fiscal Year 2023 that the governor signed last week.
That budget expansion will cover the cost of school lunches for Bay State students through the end of the year, fund an “off-ramp” for expiring COVID-era SNAP subsidies, and help cover the cost of housing an influx of migrant families into the state’s shelter system.
Several of the governor’s top campaign promises have also begun to solidify into reality.
She recently announced the hiring of Phillip Eng, a former top executive at New York’s transit authority and president of the Long Island Railroad, to lead and reform the troubled MBTA.
She has followed through with her plan of making housing a priority by proposing a split of the Department of Housing and Economic Development into a pair of separate Cabinet-level secretariats, creating an entirely new Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.
Healey’s first budget, totaling about $55 billion, came alongside a $750 million plan for long-promised reforms to the state’s tax code, including changes to both the estate tax and the short-term capital gains tax.
The Healey-Driscoll administration has also established the Cabinet-level Executive Office of Veterans’ Services to head up the commonwealth’s veterans programs, created the Director of Federal Funds and Infrastructure position to coordinate the state’s pursuit of once-in-a-generation federal grant funding and appointed the nation’s first Cabinet-level Climate Chief.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/0pmxZbz
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