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Massachusetts Democrats announce deal on controversial budget bill

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Massachusetts Democrats announce deal on controversial budget bill


Top Massachusetts Democrats negotiating a multi-billion supplemental budget that closes the books on fiscal year 2023 said Thursday morning they had reached a deal after weeks of closed-door negotiations.

Beacon Hill lawmakers broke for the holidays two weeks ago without an agreement on a $2.8 billion supplemental budget that included $250 million for the state’s struggling shelter system and nearly $400 million for more than 90 union contracts. Negotiations were kicked into informal sessions, where any one lawmakers has the power to block advancing policy.

Ways and Means Chairs Rep. Aaron Michlewitz and Sen. Michael Rodrigues said they reached an agreement on the budget in a brief statement but it was not immediately clear what survived private talks and if Democrats were potentially running into a Republican blockade.

“Our respective staffs are actively working to finalize remaining details and complete the work required to file a conference committee report. We anticipate a report being filed in the coming hours to ensure that the House and Senate can act on the report promptly and send it to the governor,” the two lawmakers said in a statement sent just after 10:30 a.m.

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Just a day before, the top House Republican had blasted Democrats for not producing an agreement on the supplemental budget, which also included disaster relief funding for communities hard hit by extreme weather events this year.

House Minority Brad Jones, a North Reading Republican, called on both branches of the Legislature to reconvene in a full formal session to take up the bill, which allows the state comptroller to file an overdue financial report.

“If it is the intent of Democratic leadership to attempt to pass the $2.8 billion closeout budget in its entirety in an informal session, minus any meaningful policy reforms, we want to make it clear that we strongly oppose this option,” Jones said in a statement. “The fact that the speaker, Senate president and governor have been unable to reach consensus on the migrant issue shows that this is too contentious an issue to take up in an informal session.”

The supplemental budget was in the hands of a panel of six legislators  — led by Michlewitz and Rodrigues — who had been negotiating behind closed doors and have not talked publicly about the nature of discussions.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday after an unrelated event, Senate President Karen Spilka said she is “optimistic” a deal could be reached this week but did not dive into details. A spokesperson for House Speaker Ronald Mariano said Wednesday negotiators “continue to talk and exchange proposals.”

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There are clear differences in the House and Senate versions of the supplemental budget when it comes to money for the state’s emergency shelter system. Senators wanted to give Gov. Maura Healey more flexibility to spend $250 million in state dollars while the House proposed more requirements like mandating an overflow site for families waiting for shelter placement.

But are there areas of agreement, including the nearly $400 million for more than 90 contracts that include pay raises for tens of thousands of public employees. Republicans have pushed Democrats to split off the contract funding from the main proposal and advance it separately.

Spilka did not offer a clear indication of the path forward Wednesday.

“I’m hopeful that we can do the whole thing and get that done in the very near future,” the Ashland Democrat said.

Jones said splitting off the funding for union agreements would “allow the state to fulfill its commitment to funding these contracts, while leaving the more contentious provisions of the budget such as emergency shelter funding for newly arrived migrants in conference to be subject to further negotiations.”

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“The House Republican Caucus believes this spending bill should receive a roll call vote in a full formal session, and not be passed in a sparsely attended informal session,” he said. ”The hard-working men and women who have been waiting months for their collectively bargained pay raises continue to show up for work, and the members of the House and Senate should be prepared to do the same and reconvene in a full formal session.”

This is a developing story…



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Massachusetts High School Boys Basketball Scores (1/17/2025)

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Massachusetts High School Boys Basketball Scores (1/17/2025)


The Massachusetts high school boys basketball season is in full swing, and High School On SI has scores for every team and classification. 

Keep track of Massachusetts high school boys basketball scores below. 

Massachusetts high school boys basketball scores 

MASSACHUSETTS HIGH SCHOOL BOYS BASKETBALL STATEWIDE SCORES 

DIVISION MCSAO 

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DIVISION 5 

DIVISION 4 

DIVISION 3 

DIVISION 2 

DIVISION 1 

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2024-25 MASSACHUSETTS BOYS BASKETBALL SCHEDULES: FIND YOUR TEAM 

Follow High School On SI throughout the 2024 high school boys basketball season for Live Updates, the most up to date Schedules & Scores and complete coverage from the preseason through the state championships!

Be sure to Bookmark High School on SI for all of the latest high school boys basketball news.

High School On SI will serve as the premier destination for high school sports fans, delivering unparalleled coverage of high school athletics nationwide through in-depth stories, recruiting coverage, rankings, highlights and much more. The launch of a dedicated high school experience expands Sports Illustrated’s reach to even more local communities as fans can now truly follow athletes from “preps to the pros” on a single platform, bringing them closer to the action than ever before. For more information, visit si.com/high-school.

Download the SBLive App

To get live updates on your phone – as well as follow your favorite teams and top games – you can download the SBLive Sports app: Download iPhone App| Download Android App

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— Andy Villamarzo | villamarzo@scorebooklive.com | @highschoolonsi



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The primary care system in Massachusetts is broken and getting worse, new state report says – The Boston Globe

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The primary care system in Massachusetts is broken and getting worse, new state report says – The Boston Globe


Primary care, the foundation of the state’s health care industry, is crumbling, and Massachusetts is running out of time to fix it, according to a report published Thursday by the state’s Health Policy Commission, which sounded the alarm on many ways the front door to the health care industry is broken.

Among the problems: high and growing rates of residents reporting difficulty accessing primary care; an aging and increasingly dissatisfied physician workforce; and an anemic pipeline of new clinicians.

“I worry when I look at some of this data that the state of primary care has crossed a line from which recovery will be very difficult, unless we take action soon,” the commission’s executive director, David Seltz, said in an interview.

The report sets the stage for the work of a new state-appointed primary care task force, created by a health care law signed earlier this month. The law outlines that the new 25-member group will consider issuing recommendations related to increasing recruitment and retention of the primary care workforce and establishing a target for how much insurers should spend on primary care.

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Such goals would put Massachusetts more in line with other states, including California, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington, which have set benchmarks for primary care spending. Seltz called such efforts an important way to rebalance the incentives of the market.

“This is an opportunity to shift the dialogue, to one of: ‘What can we do immediately to relieve this deep challenge?’” Seltz said.

While the findings set the stage for reform, they are perhaps not a surprise. Previous reports on primary care have been blaring the warning signal for years. Increasingly high portions of residents have said they had difficulty accessing health care. Analysis on health care spending has shown dwindling amounts of health care dollars going to primary care.

But the report lays out in stark terms just how dire the prognosis on primary care is.

Among the findings:

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  • Patients’ ability to access primary care is bad and getting worse. New patients must wait an average of 40 days in Boston, twice as long as the average of 15 other cities studied. Access to primary care worsened across the state in recent years, with such issues especially pronounced in lower-income communities.
  • A lack of primary care access means more reliance on emergency departments, which are more costly places to get care. In 2023, a whopping two-thirds of those who sought care in hospitals’ emergency departments said they were there because they couldn’t get an appointment in a doctor’s office or clinic.
  • Massachusetts has a lot of doctors — the highest total physicians per capita in the country. However the vast majority of those physicians are specialists. Compared to other states, Massachusetts has the fifth lowest share of primary care physicians.
  • The primary care workforce is aging, with an estimated half of primary care physicians over the age of 55.
  • The pipeline for new primary care doctors is dwindling, with only one in seven new Massachusetts physicians in 2021 going into primary care — among the lowest share in the country.

A primary driver of the current challenge is related to the low reimbursement rates primary care receives relative to other specialties and hospital services, the report states, a factor that disincentivizes both new graduates from entering the field and the health care industry from investing in it.

Beyond the low pay, primary care can be an exhausting job, requiring myriad billing and administrative tasks, increased documentation requirements, and visits too short to accommodate the core point of primary care — caring for the patient.

Dr. Alecia McGregor, a commissioner and an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, noted the state is seeing evidence of that very burnout and corporatization of medicine, with both those complaints cited as key reasons primary care doctors at Mass General Brigham recently filed to unionize.

The state is currently making up for primary care physician shortages by leaning more on nurse practitioners and physician assistants, together known as “advanced practice providers.” However the share of even those providers working in primary care is dropping, in part because of the low pay.

“Relying on advanced practice providers to serve as (primary care providers) instead of physicians may not resolve challenges related to the availability of providers if we can’t improve job sustainability in the field of primary care,” said Sasha Albert, associate director of research and cost trends at the Health Policy Commission, during a presentation at Thursday’s commission meeting.

Beyond setting the stage for a new task force, Commissioner Tim Foley said the “scary” report emphasized the importance of the commission remaining focused on drivers of the recruitment and retention challenges.

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“It just highlights again our need to continue to focus on the workforce issues,” said Foley, who is also the head of union 1199SEIU, which represents health care workers. “We had the hearing on the impact of the workforce, and it hasn’t gotten any better. It’s probably gotten worse.”


Jessica Bartlett can be reached at jessica.bartlett@globe.com. Follow her @ByJessBartlett.





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About Half of Massachusetts Cities Have Four-Year Mayoral Terms

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About Half of Massachusetts Cities Have Four-Year Mayoral Terms


Fall River Mayor Paul Coogan is up for re-election this fall. If it seems the Spindle City is in a perpetual state of campaigning, it is.

Like all Massachusetts cities with elected mayors, Fall River has a municipal election every two years. New Bedford does as well.

However, while Fall River elects a mayor every other year, mayoral elections are held every four years in New Bedford.

City councilors, school committee members, and other elected municipal officials in both cities face re-election every two years, thus the perception that they are always campaigning.

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Of the 351 communities in Massachusetts, 47 have elected mayors. Twenty-four (51 percent) of them have four-year mayoral terms. Twenty-three (49 percent) have two-year terms.

For most of its history, New Bedford had two-year mayoral terms. In 2017, voters narrowly approved a ballot question extending New Bedford’s mayoral term to four years.

There was a time when New Bedford held mayoral elections annually.

About Half Of Massachusetts Cities Have Four-Year Mayoral Terms

City of New Bedford Video

Mayor Jon Mitchell, first elected Mayor of New Bedford in 2011, was the first to win the new four-year term in 2019. In 2023, Mitchell won a second four-year term. Mitchell has not indicated if he plans to seek a third four-year term when his current term is up in 2027.

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Mitchell told WBSM as far back as 2013 that he favored a four-year term, calling the two-year term “archaic.”

In 2017, Mitchell told WBSM, “Running the City of New Bedford is not like running a lemonade stand.” Mitchell said a two-year term forces more short-term decisions than long-term ones.

The Massachusetts Municipal Association’s website lists all current Massachusetts mayors, the length of their term, and when their term expires.

New Bedford Mayors

New Bedford has had 49 different mayors, along with two acting mayors and one interim mayor.

Gallery Credit: Tim Weisberg

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WBSM’s Top SouthCoast Stories 1/1 to 1/10

These are the top stories in New Bedford and across the SouthCoast from January 1 to January 10, 2025. Click the photo or title to read the complete story.

Gallery Credit: Tim Weisberg





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