This week will mark the tip of the primary three months in workplace for Gov. Maura Healey, who has solely put her identify to 1 main piece of laws however has had a busy first 90 days, her aides say.
She’s additionally employed a brand new head of the MBTA — at $470,000 wage — but she’s saved up her nationwide profile by jetting out of state just a few instances 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 instructed the Herald in an emailed assertion this week.
Healey started the final week of her first quarter because the state’s 73rd governor by assembly with the President of Cape Verde José Maria Neves, following a weekend journey to Florida to satisfy with the Democratic Governors Association. On Tuesday she was in Lawrence after saying the creation of a brand new Governor’s Council on Latino Empowerment.
Healey has left the state a number of instances since swearing the oath of workplace, visiting Washington D.C. for the State of the Union handle and a National Governors Association assembly, and vacationed in Florida in February.
The governor, inaugurated on Jan. 5 as the primary lady elected to steer the state, has had a gradual begin to her first time period in workplace by any measure.
Part of that’s by design: throughout their first yr of workplace a brand new government isn’t required to submit a finances till March.
Part of it may be blamed on the Legislature, which has chosen to take its time in organizing this yr and in consequence has achieved, in accordance with 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, only one new main piece of laws has made it to Healey’s desk for approval, a $388.7 million supplemental finances for Fiscal Year 2023 that the governor signed final week.
That finances growth will cowl the price of college lunches for Bay State college students by way of the tip of the yr, fund an “off-ramp” for expiring COVID-era SNAP subsidies, and assist cowl the price of housing an inflow of migrant households into the state’s shelter system.
Several of the governor’s high marketing campaign guarantees have additionally begun to solidify into actuality.
She just lately introduced the hiring of Phillip Eng, a former high government at New York’s transit authority and president of the Long Island Railroad, to steer and reform the troubled MBTA.
She has adopted by way of along with her plan of creating housing a precedence by proposing a cut up of the Department of Housing and Economic Development right into a pair of separate Cabinet-level secretariats, creating a wholly new Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.
Healey’s first finances, totaling about $55 billion, got here alongside a $750 million plan for long-promised reforms to the state’s tax code, together with modifications to each the property tax and the short-term capital features tax.
The Healey-Driscoll administration has additionally established the Cabinet-level Executive Office of Veterans’ Services to go up the commonwealth’s veterans packages, created the Director of Federal Funds and Infrastructure place to coordinate the state’s pursuit of once-in-a-generation federal grant funding and appointed the nation’s first Cabinet-level Climate Chief.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”