“It really stems out of the growing need to address affordability in Massachusetts,” Peters said. “MP3 is a unique way of bringing together the local payers and providers in this market to address affordability and access challenges.”

Peters first got involved in health care policy as an aide in the House of Representatives. She later went to work for the Health Policy Commission, and then for Charlie Baker’s administration, as health and human services undersecretary. She was appointed to lead CHIA, a state agency that collects and crunches industry data, in late 2022, and left CHIA earlier this year.

MP3 members include Boston Medical Center and its WellSense plan, Mass General Brigham and MGB’s eponymous health plan, UMass Memorial Health and its Medicare Advantage plan, along with Baystate Health, Health New England, and Fallon Health (slated to be acquired by MGB).

Missing for now are the state’s two biggest health insurers, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Point32Health. (Lora Pellegrini, who heads up the Massachusetts Association of Health Plans, representing Point32Health among other insurers, says she looks forward to working with Peters if she should reach out.)

Peters sees opportunities in payment reform by rewarding providers for high performance, improving data sharing, and streamlining administrative processes. The MP3’s work, Peters said, can also complement the efforts of a task force Governor Maura Healey set up in January to address health care costs.

“It’s fair to say that the status quo is not working,” Peters said. “The idea is let’s break through the traditional silos and divisions that in my view have often stood in the way of real progress. … This gives us the opportunity to start rolling up our sleeves and implementing some of these solutions now.”

John Barros is getting the band back together — under the giant roof of the Menino Convention & Exhibition Center.

Barros served as a top aide in Marty Walsh’s administration, as Walsh’s economic chief. After several years working in real estate, Barros was tapped by the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority board in January to be its interim executive director.

Now, Barros is bringing in some old friends from City Hall to help.

On Thursday, the MCCA announced three top-level appointments, all of whom once worked at City Hall for Walsh. General counsel Ashley Carvalho joins in May from the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, taking over for Kevin Scanlon, who recently left to join the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. Meanwhile, Joyce Linehan joins as the MCCA’s chief of staff, and Celina Barrios-Millner will be its chief of economic opportunity.

It’s a City Hall reunion over at 415 Summer St. in South Boston. That’s particularly true once two former Walsh advisers who joined before Barros arrived are factored in: John Towle, director of government affairs, and Broad Institute chief financial officer Emme Handy, the MCCA board chair.

Linehan might be the most well-known around Boston of the new arrivals. As Walsh’s former policy chief, she has spent much of her post-City Hall time working on special projects with the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Among Linehan’s last big initiatives with Barros at City Hall: the “All Inclusive Boston” campaign. Using federal pandemic assistance funds, city officials worked with Colette Phillips’s PR firm, the Proverb ad agency led by Daren Bascome, and the tourism bureau now known as Meet Boston, to paint a diverse picture of the city.

Linehan hopes to continue similar work with Barros, to help the city bounce back after the pandemic and improve the way it’s viewed by outsiders. As a Dorchester native, she knows that diverse aspects of her home city often get overlooked.

She arrives at a tumultuous time: Barros’s predecessor, Marcel Vernon, left in December amid a dispute with the MCCA board, and the convention center authority remains under pressure to show it’s improving the diversity of its management ranks and suppliers.

Linehan knows the Boston celebrations around the US bicentennial in 1976 helped put the city on the map as a tourism destination, and is hopeful the MCCA can play a key role in rekindling some of that magic as celebrations for the 250th roll out this year.

What a memorable way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

Entrepreneur Matt George had asked Nasdaq management to pick March 17 as the day for the autonomous aviation startup he leads, Merlin, to fly into the public markets. As a result, Merlin employees trekked to Manhattan to ring the exchange’s opening bell that morning, as a crowd of St. Patrick’s revelers gathered for the annual parade outside.

“Because of our Boston roots, we tried to make sure we were listing on St. Patrick’s Day,” George said afterwards. “Nasdaq gets to decide when we list, and we lobbied them hard for St. Patrick’s Day.”

And with that, Merlin became the first tech company of the year from the Boston area to go public. Several biotechs have held initial public offerings during this slow time, and a local telehealth startup called Uberdoc went public on a Canadian exchange on Wednesday.

Merlin didn’t go public via the traditional IPO route, nor did Uberdoc. They both merged into publicly traded shell firms, known as special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. In Merlin’s case, it teamed up with a SPAC created by New York investment firm Inflection Point, and Inflection Point chief executive Mike Blitzer joined Merlin’s board.

“It’s exciting for the team,” George said. “I think it should be hopefully exciting for Boston.”

The Charles River Regional Chamber has gradually grown its ranks over the years, rising to the top five biggest chambers of commerce in the state from 20th just over a decade ago.

It could be poised to rise in the ranks yet again, now that the Brookline Chamber of Commerce’s board members have decided to dissolve their organization, with the bigger chamber next door adopting its members and at least two of its traditions.

Charles River president Greg Reibman had reached out to Chris Mutty, the Brookline chamber’s executive director, with an open invitation to join, if the time became right, several times over the years. Apparently, in December, that time had arrived.

“It was always something I thought would be good for the businesses in Brookline,” Reibman said. “This is not a takeover. … It’s a deliberate choice to help their members land somewhere strong.”

Mutty blamed rising costs and the increasing demands of effective advocacy and programming as reasons for the move, and noted that Reibman’s chamber is financially stable with a strong regional presence. Mutty will join Reibman’s team for the transition, based in Needham, bringing it up to eight people.

The Brookline chamber has about 150 members, the vast majority of them small businesses. Their memberships will roll over into Charles River memberships, expiring at the time their previous memberships would have ended. Reibman agreed to keep running Brookline’s annual First Light holiday shopping promotion along Harvard Street, and to continue its annual Chobee Hoy award, in honor of the real estate broker and civic leader who died in 2024.

The Charles River chamber, which adopted its current name in 2021, got its start in Newton and has grown to encompass Needham, Wellesley, and Watertown. Brookline happens to be the first community that’s not along its namesake river. But Reibman has an explanation for that.

“The Muddy River [in Brookline] is a tributary to the Charles River,” Reibman said, “so we’ve got that one covered.”

Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.

Both are appealing. Who doesn’t favor more affordable rents or lower taxes?

But both are bad ideas even though they attempt to address real economic challenges posed by the state’s high cost of living. Like most simple answers to complex problems, they would only make matters worse.

The rent initiative, backed by labor unions, would discourage new construction, which is essential to keeping a lid on lease rates. It would also decrease property values, putting a strain on municipal budgets.

The tax cut, pushed by business groups, would take a large bite out of state revenues, forcing difficult decisions about which services to eliminate.

Here’s a quick primer.

What it would do: Filed by Homes For All Massachusetts, a coalition of housing groups, the initiative would peg allowable annual rent hikes to the rate of inflation (as measured by the Consumer Price Index), with a cap of 5 percent.

Landlords would be barred from raising rents after a tenant leaves. Owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units would be exempt, as would new buildings during their first 10 years. Cities and towns couldn’t opt out.

The initiative would “protect tenants from big corporate investors who unreasonably increase rents, while allowing local landlords to earn a reasonable profit and enabling new construction to address housing shortages,” said Carolyn Chou, executive director of Homes for All Massachusetts.

Several big labor unions have endorsed the measure, including the SEIU Massachusetts State Council and the Massachusetts Teachers Association.

Why it won’t work: Backers designed the proposal to sidestep the obvious flaw of rent control: that it chills new construction. Hence the 10-year exemption for new buildings.

But most apartment projects in Massachusetts take years to finance, permit, and build. Developers calculate their payoff over several decades, and a rent cap waiting at the end of year 10 changes the math.

The deeper problem is high rents in Massachusetts are a supply problem. There are not enough apartments and rental homes.

Not only do rent caps discourage new construction, they may encourage landlords to convert rental units to condos or reduce their investment in existing properties.

Moreover, evidence shows rent control can have unintended consequences.

A working paper examining St. Paul, Minn.’s 2021 rent control ordinance, which was less severe than the Massachusetts proposal, found that property values fell 6 to 7 percent. The losses were driven largely by lower expected future rents being priced into valuations.

That kind of decline ripples through municipal budgets. Cities facing shrinking tax bases typically respond by raising rates, cutting services, or both.

“It would be catastrophic for the economy,” said Tamara Small, CEO of NAIOP Massachusetts, a commercial real estate trade group.

What it would do: Reduce the state levy on personal income to 4 percent from 5 percent, phased in over three years.

The initiative would put money into people’s hands and make sure the government is not growing faster than residents’ ability to fund growth, according to Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a business-supported think tank that filed the measure.

“This is about making Massachusetts a place where people want to stay,” he said. Pioneer estimates the tax cut would lead to the creation of as many as 48,000 jobs and spur economic growth that would offset the loss of tax revenue within a few years.

According to backers, which also include the Massachusetts High Tech Council and the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, the net annual revenue impact during the three-year phase-in period would be about $680 million. Following full implementation, state revenue growth would increase as an economic boost from lower taxes kicked in.

Why it won’t work: Tax cuts can modestly boost growth as consumers and small businesses spend the extra money. According to a report by the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University, the median household tax bill would shrink about $1,250 each year.

But the economic boost won’t fully recoup lost revenue. Claims that cuts “pay for themselves” are not supported by the weight of economic evidence.

According to the Tufts report, the tax cut would result in a much bigger hit to state revenues than estimated by the initiative’s supporters: $5.1 billion a year when fully in place, or about 10 percent of total state tax receipts. The state Department of Revenue issued a similar estimate.

“A cut of this size would more than offset the revenue gains from the millionaires tax and imperil efforts to balance the state budget and sustain core government programs moving forward,” the Tufts report said.

Massachusetts has a real cost-of-living problem, and voters aren’t wrong to demand action. But these ballot proposals offer short-term gratification without fixing the underlying problems.

Larry Edelman can be reached at larry.edelman@globe.com.

A potent frontal system will deliver rain and snow across New England Sunday evening and last through at least Monday morning. With a warm front moving east from the system, Boston will stick to rain through Sunday night, while widespread accumulating snow is expected across Northern New England, prompting winter weather alerts for that region. Folks up north will be forced to break out the shovels and snowblowers for hopefully one last time.

But by the time we start heading out the door on Monday, the rain-snow line will have sunk farther south and bring some snowfall into most of Massachusetts, including Greater Boston, along the Mass Pike, and west through the Berkshires. The South Shore and coast should stick to a light wintry mix or rain.

All in all, it looks like Boston could pick up about an inch of snow, mainly during the predawn hours of Monday. If Boston ends up with an inch, it would be the latest date in the season since 2007. Folks across northern Worcester and Berkshire counties may see 1 or 2 inches, while the jackpot totals for this storm are held to extreme Northern New England. Roads will be wet early Monday, so take it slow during the morning commute.

Scattered snow showers will linger over most of New England on Monday after the bulk of the precipitation moves offshore by late morning, keeping the day pretty unsettled under mostly cloudy skies.

Monday will remain blustery with the storm strengthening as it pulls away from New England. Wind gusts will hover around 20 mph throughout most of the day, not enough for power outage concerns, but enough to feel the wind push through your jacket.

With cold air settling in behind the passing system, Monday’s highs will be held to the 30s across most of New England. But when you pair the breeze with the cold air, most of the day will feel subfreezing, with wind chills in the 20s from sunrise to sunset.

The sun sets at 7 p.m., Monday as our days get longer.

Greater Boston: Rain Sunday evening. Wintry mix and snow showers in the morning. Lingering flurry possible during the day—highs to the low and mid-30s. Breezy.

Central/Western Mass.: Rain Sunday evening. Snow showers in the morning. A coating to an inch is possible. Isolated snow totals to 2 inches in northern Berkshire County. Highs to the mid and upper 30s region-wide. Flurry chance lingers.

Southeastern Mass.: Light rain Sunday evening. Scattered showers on Monday morning. Highs reach the mid to upper 30s. Breezy.

Cape and Islands: Light steady rain Sunday evening. Scattered showers on Monday morning. Highs to the upper 30s with a breeze.

Rhode Island: Rain showers on Sunday night. Scattered showers on Monday morning. Mostly cloudy with a breeze as highs reach the mid-30s.

New Hampshire: Snow Sunday night. Scattered snow showers throughout Monday. Highs to the mid and upper 30s.

Vermont/Maine: Snow on Sunday, scattered snow showers throughout Monday. Highs to the mid and upper 30s.

Connecticut: Steady rain Sunday night, sticking to rain showers Monday morning. Highs to the upper 30s and low 40s.

Sign up here for our daily Globe Weather Forecast that will arrive straight into your inbox bright and early each weekday morning.

Ken Mahan can be reached at ken.mahan@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @kenmahantheweatherman.