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United Way of Massachusetts Bay Honors Payano and Vargas at State House Ceremony

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United Way of Massachusetts Bay Honors Payano and Vargas at State House Ceremony


(Additional photograph below.) United Way of Massachusetts Bay honored Sen. Pavel M. Payano and Rep. Andy X. Vargas, both representing Haverhill, as inaugural “Legislative Champions” last month. Payano and Vargas were presented awards for their “demonstrated strong leadership and commitment to education, food security and economic justice, including transformative policy solutions such as Baby Bonds



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Is your favorite beach closed on Saturday? Here's a full list of beach closures

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Is your favorite beach closed on Saturday? Here's a full list of beach closures


With rain sometimes comes bacteria and with bacteria comes beach closures.

As of Saturday morning, 32 beaches are listed as being closed according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health dashboard.

Closures spanned from Western Massachusetts to Eastern Massachusetts and along the coast of Cape Cod and the Islands. While Bucks Creek in Chatham was listed as closed due to excess bacteria, Red Cross at Walden Pond in Concord is closed with the reasoning being listed as “other.”

Three beaches in Salem are closed. Specifically, the back of Children’s Island and Ocean Avenue are closed because of excess bacteria, while Camp Naumkeag’s reasoning is “other.”

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Templeton also seems to have a couple of closures at Beamans Pond where both the campground and day use are closed because of too much bacteria.

Colonia Acres West and Windmill in Yarmouth are also closed because of excess bacteria, while Longnook in Truro are closed with the reasoning being “other.”

“If a beach is closed, do not swim or enter the water at that location to avoid risk of illness,” the dashboard warns.

The dashboard is updated twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and shows the results of recent water quality tests at beaches across the state. More than 1,100 public and semi-public beaches in the state are regularly monitored.

The full list of closures is below. If you can’t see the chart, click here.

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This former state employee is still fighting for his pension benefits — five years after retiring – The Boston Globe

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This former state employee is still fighting for his pension benefits — five years after retiring – The Boston Globe


This information “sent me over the edge,” Sorrentino said.

So in April, his attorney filed a complaint in federal court, claiming the delays are depriving Sorrentino of his due process rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.

Protracted delays like this are common in state retirement disputes, according to lawyers who have appeared before the appeals board. Some cases have dragged on for nearly a decade before they were decided — and can’t be challenged in court until then. Many retirees count on these benefits to get by, the lawyers say, and waiting years to receive them can be an incredible hardship.

Sorrentino estimates he’s spent more than 1,000 hours of his “golden years” trying to get the benefits he’s owed — and shed light on a broken system.

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“A long time ago it stopped being about me. It’s much bigger,” he said. “Retirement benefits by their nature are time limited. Retirement’s the last chapter of life.”

And nobody should spend it fighting to get the benefits they’ve been promised, he said.

For Sorrentino, the dispute revolves around the administration of the New England Newborn Screening Program, which he was part of for more than 18 years at what is currently called the Massachusetts State Public Health Laboratory in Jamaica Plain. The program, which he ran for more than eight years, tests for treatable conditions in about 500 newborns a day in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island. When Sorrentino started at the lab in 1980, he was paid by the Department of Public Health. But in 1990, the administration of the program was transferred to the Massachusetts Health Research Institute, which was incorporated in 1959 by the Massachusetts governor and health commissioner, among other founders, to assist the public health department.

In 1997, after the state Inspector General revealed financial improprieties involving MHRI, the newborn screening lab and other programs were transferred to UMass Chan Medical School.

Sorrentino hadn’t been allowed to make contributions to the state pension fund during his time under MHRI and withdrew what he had previously put in. But once under the umbrella of the state medical school, he started making contributions again, and later repaid all the funds in order to maximize his benefits.

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This entire time, Sorrentino said, his job remained the same: He worked in the same lab, with the same people, using the same state ID badge.

Less than a year after the change to UMass Medical, he left the Jamaica Plain lab to work for a newborn screening company in Pittsburgh, and received regular letters over the next 20 years confirming his eligibility for retirement benefits. But when he applied for his roughly $1,400-a-month pension in late 2018, the retirement board informed him that employees who leave public service must return for at least two consecutive years in order to retire with benefits, rendering him ineligible.

Sorrentino was incredulous. He simply wanted the benefits he had been investing in. “It’s not like I’m asking for something that I didn’t contribute to,” he said.

He’s been fighting the denial ever since.

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John Sorrentino was denied his pension due to a discrepancy over his tenure as a state employee.Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff

The Department of Public Health wouldn’t comment on why Sorrentino wasn’t considered a state employee for his entire tenure, despite working for the same program in the same lab the whole time, noting that he “resigned in 1990 and began working for MHRI” — a characterization Sorrentino disputes. The State Retirement Board would not provide details about why returning employees have to be on the job for two years in order to collect pensions they had previously earned.

The Contributory Retirement Appeal Board, known as CRAB, also declined to provide information about its caseload or wait times.

If CRAB rules against him, Sorrentino will get back the roughly $57,000 he contributed, including interest, according to the State Board of Retirement, but not any additional money he would have received through monthly payments for the rest of his life. Many public employees without the time or the means to fight the retirement board probably just give up and agree to these terms, Sorrentino said.

But considering the thousands of dollars in investments and interest his contributions have likely generated for the state over the past several decades, Sorrentino said, this outcome would be highly unfair. And if he were to die before the case is resolved, his survivors wouldn’t benefit from those gains.

“The pensioners are left out in the cold,” said Richard Glovsky, Sorrentino’s attorney.

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The state’s employee retirement agencies move so slowly in part because they are vastly underresourced, said Leigh Panettiere, a Woburn-based attorney who represents public employees seeking disability retirement funds. During the appeal process, retirees’ contributions continue to generate interest and investment income for the overall pension plan — which in 2021 was only 69 percent funded, one of the lowest levels in the country, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts.

“There is no incentive to speed up the process,” said Panettiere, who currently has four CRAB cases that have been pending for more than four years.

But retirees get their full benefit amount, including retroactive payments, if the board decides in their favor. And given the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of members across the 104 public retirement systems in Massachusetts and less than 1,000 cases estimated to be in dispute — including many brought by retirees already receiving a pension — the impact of the money the pension funds stands to gain during the appeals process is insignificant, said Bill Keefe, executive director of the Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission. The status of the state employees’ pension system is improving, he added, and on track to be fully funded by 2036.

One of Panettiere’s clients, a police officer, has been waiting for more than seven years for his case to be resolved. The officer had a heart attack on the job at the age of 50 that left him disabled, but due to a dispute over whether the incident was work related, he was granted a smaller pension than what he applied for. His current income is about half what it used to be, Panettiere said, forcing him to turn to family members to help pay his mortgage.

“In addition to feeling like a failure because he cannot work anymore, he is even more depressed by not being able to financially care for his family,” Panettiere said.

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Another client, a public employee who suffered a head injury at work and has been trying to collect his pension since 2017, has cancer.

“He may die before his appeal is over,” she said.


Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston.





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Inspector general who called Cannabis Control Commission ‘rudderless agency' to testify

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Inspector general who called Cannabis Control Commission ‘rudderless agency' to testify


Massachusetts Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro will testify before state lawmakers Tuesday to discuss the problems he said his office found at the Cannabis Control Commission.

Last month, in a letter to legislative leaders, Shapiro called for a receiver to be appointed to manage daily operations at the CCC, which he called a “rudderless agency.”

Shaprio detailed his concerns on NBC10 Boston’s @Issue.

“The day-to-day operations need to be controlled, and there needs to be clarity as to who’s the operation,” Shapiro told Cory Smith.

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NBC News Legal Analyst Danny Cevallos joined @Issue to talk about the Supreme Court’s immunity decision where the High Court found that presidents have presumptive immunity for official acts. Observers believe the justices handed former President Trump a big win that’s likely to delay his pending criminal trials until after the election and potentially derail them entirely.

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The commission’s chair, Shannon O’Brien, was suspended last year after allegations she made insensitive racial remarks and mistreated an employee. O’Brien has denied any wrongdoing.

The acting chair, Ava Callender Concepcion, has led the agency since last September.

Last month, the CCC voted to strip its acting executive director of her oversight role. The commission’s original executive director, Shawn Collins, resigned in December.

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Shapiro told @Issue that the leadership changes are problematic for all who work at the CCC.

“If I’m an employee that works there, it’s very unclear to me to whom I report. And with this lack of clarity, in my opinion, it’s the dream of any sixth-grader that doesn’t like what’s going on at home. And they ask another parent or another adult in their life,” Shapiro said.

State Sen. Michael Moore, a Democrat in the Worcester area, has called for more state oversight of the CCC for nearly two years. He told @Issue that he wants an overhaul of the commission.

“I think in every aspect of the commission, we’ve got issues. From operational control of it, to the day to day. Treatment of staff, treatment of retailers or the people who are investing in this industry,” Moore said. “I think we need an overhaul of the agency, the operations.”

In his letter to lawmakers, Shapiro wrote that there’s a need for a receiver to oversee the CCC because “for the past two years, CCC’s staff, including its commissioners, have spent considerable time and money seeking to clarify roles and responsibilities … it does not appear the CCC, on its own, is any closer to resolving these issues.”

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Ava Concepcion, the acting chair of the Cannabis Control Commission, talked about the Biden Administration’s recent reclassification of marijuana, the CCC’s social equity problem and the controversy surrounding the commission’s suspended chairwoman, Shannon O’Brien.

Concepcion, the commission’s acting chair, responded, saying the CCC has been working toward addressing concerns the report raised.

“The Cannabis Control Commission is already in the process of addressing the Inspector General’s chief concern relative to producing a charter that would help us clarify governance questions in statute,” she said in a statement. “In my view, the agency’s $160,000 investment into the creation of that charter – a standard tool used by other state agencies – over multiple fiscal years, compared to our nearly $20 million FY24 budget and the $2.48 million we returned in unspent funds at the end of FY23, is anything but waste, fraud, and abuse. As my fellow Commissioners and I have discussed publicly, we intend to have a public conversation about the outcomes of that work very soon.”





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