BOSTON — The House on Thursday approved $425 million to replenish the cash-starved shelter family shelter system, while passing changes to tighten eligibility and shrink the system’s size.
Lawmakers passed the bill 126-26, nearly along party lines, after Democrats shot down Republican-led efforts that would have broadened criminal background checks for shelter residents, allowed ICE into shelters to remove undocumented immigrants, and slashed the appropriation amount while reforms are implemented.
The House did incorporate one of the Republicans’ 15 proposals: a Minority Leader Brad Jones amendment that imposes a “competitive bidding process” on any expenditure for the emergency assistance (EA) program. Similarly, last March, the one successful Republican amendment to another shelter mini-budget was a Jones measure requiring the shelter system’s food provisions be subject to competitive bidding.
Representatives on Thursday also adopted Democrat Rep. Majorie Decker’s amendment maintaining presumptive eligibility for children under 6 years old in shelter.
Decker said Thursday’s debate was one of “the most challenging days” she had experienced during her 12 years as a representative, “and I know that’s true for so many of my colleagues.” She added that she believes the House has tried to maintain the difficult balance of housing homeless families, while handling the realities of the strains the crisis has put on their communities.
People “documented as having a disability” would be granted hardship waivers to extend their shelter stays past six months under a Rep. Rob Consalvo amendment, which he said is aimed “particularly individuals who are already in a program to find supportive transitional housing.”
The Consalvo amendment was adopted unanimously, as was Rep. Michael Finn’s measure to add shelter exit data to the biweekly reports sent to the Legislature by the Healey administration.
The $425 million that the bill injects into the emergency assistance system is supposed to keep it afloat through the end of June, while also imposing a new six-month limit on how long families can stay in shelter. The bill also would impose a rigid cap on the number of families the state will serve in 2026 — no more than 4,000 at a time, a one-third cut from the caseload as of Jan. 30 (6,012 families).
The House landed on a 4,000-family shelter cap based on discussions with the Healey administration, Speaker Ron Mariano told reporters after a Democratic caucus meeting Thursday.
“Traditionally, so it is above what the historical context would allow,” Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz added. “But certainly not nearly the level that it was, you know, over the last year and a half, when it was [at] 7,500 — actually, at maximum 7,700.”
The new capacity would not take effect until the end of the 2025.
“That was in conversations with the administration in terms of what we think is manageable to get through, not just the remainder of this fiscal year, but at least the first half of the next fiscal year,” Michlewitz said when asked how the House agreed on that implementation date.
There are also measures to remove the availability of two 90-day extensions for families to stay in shelter for certain situations. EOHLC would be allowed, under the House bill, to deem families that have income exceeding 200% of the Federal Poverty Level for three consecutive months to be no longer eligible for shelter benefits.
After session, Jones said new funding commitments for the system should not be made until Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s program audit results are released.
“The supplemental spending bill approved by the House today makes modest changes to the state’s troubled emergency shelter system, some of which are only temporary, but does little to address the many underlying problems associated with the program,” Jones said. “Rather than implementing meaningful reforms that will guarantee the long-term financial stability of the program, all we are doing is continuing to pour money into a broken system, which continues to soak up limited state resources and crowd out other important spending priorities.”
Homelessness shelter providers and other critics say overhauling eligibility criteria to access the EA family shelter system is undermining the state’s right-to-shelter law.
Kelly Turley of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless told the News Service after Thursday’s session that her group was “disappointed … that the bill includes harsher length of stay limits, an arbitrary cap of 4,000 families in the shelter program, and an unraveling of critical placement pending verification protections for many families.”
A small group of protesters who opposed the bill’s reforms gathered outside the chamber holding banners and chanting as the session got underway around 11 a.m.
Mariano, asked after the Democratic caucus whether the shelter changes are meant to block migrant families, told reporters, “I don’t know as so much as it’s meant to keep migrant families out of the system.”
“It’s meant to control the expense side that we are faced with in a budget that’s under stress from a lot of different ways,” Mariano said. “You know, we lost our federal partner. We see what’s going on in Washington, and we see the changes that are being offered up. We’re very concerned about going forward and making this a manageable, successful program.”
Jones filed an amendment to implement universal background checks for applicants into the EA system. He cited a recent incident in Revere, where a Dominican native who had not been admitted into the system but was living in an EA-run shelter with his girlfriend, was arrested allegedly in possession of five kilograms of fentanyl and a loaded AR-style rifle.
After that incident burst into headlines last month, the Healey administration revealed that it had not been running comprehensive background checks on all applicants as it had previously claimed.
The governor’s and House’s versions of the bill would require Mass. Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) checks before families are placed in shelters. But Republicans said that the CORI checks were not enough. They do not capture crimes committed in other countries or states, Jones said.
“If we’re going to have a program that’s taking in thousands and thousands and thousands of folks from outside the state of Massachusetts, a simple CORI check isn’t going to be enough. We need a more universal background check to see these individuals and their families that are coming with them, if they have any violent history,” said Rep. Paul Frost of Auburn.
Rep. Michael Day of Stoneham responded that the amendment was an attempted Republican “backdoor” to “strangle our emergency shelter law altogether” and “kill it from within.”
Day said the background checks the amendment would require would also check the education backgrounds of applicants, credit scores and financial information.
“Now we want to find out the credit-worthiness of a young family applying for emergency shelter. That’s going to make the shelters and residents safer — finding out what Kohl’s thinks about their ability to get a credit card,” Day said sarcastically.
Rep. David Muradian, a Grafton Republican, was in favor of reducing the bill’s outlay for the shelter system from $425 million to $200 million. The lower amount would keep “core services” running while “giving an opportunity for the reforms contained in this bill, and hopefully future reforms, to be implemented,” he said.
“It would stand to reason that any movement to reduce the number of individuals entering our country and our commonwealth would reduce the financial burden and need,” he said before the amendment was defeated on a 26-126 vote.
Michlewitz flipped Muradian’s argument around: “That the reforms that we are implementing here today are major, they are going to take some time to implement, they are going to take some time to really see itself through. We have to give the administration some time. And what this bill does from a financial standpoint and lets us get through the remainder of the fiscal year in this conversation,” he said.
The House avoided going on the record about Republican-backed proposals to respond to the Supreme Judicial Court’s Lunn decision, a 2017 ruling that blocked Massachusetts courts and law enforcement from honoring federal immigration detainers.
One such amendment, filed by Jones, would have allowed them to honor Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers if the person in question “poses a threat to public safety.”
At the urging of Democrats, those measures were determined to be “beyond the scope,” a parliamentary ruling that foreclosed the possibility of even taking up the amendments for recorded votes.
A number of other Republican amendments were also ruled beyond the scope of the bill, including one filed by Rep. Marc Lombardo (Amendment 14) that would have required the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities to comply with ICE to detain undocumented immigrants in shelters.
After it was laid aside without a vote, Lombardo questioned the chair’s decision and took the floor.
“I’ve seen a lot in 14 years in this building. This is new. This is new. We’re ruling out of the scope an amendment which speaks to how the shelters would operate,” Lombardo said.
He went on to add, “It is not compassionate to allow residents of the commonwealth to become rape victims, to become murder victims, become victims of assault, drug trafficking, dying of fentanyl overdoses.”
The House voted 128-24 to uphold the chair’s ruling that the amendment was beyond the scope of the bill.
“The most meaningful reform would be to require state resources to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, but Beacon Hill politicians refuse to act for purely political reasons,” Paul Craney, executive director of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, said after the vote. He added, “Instead of fixing the problem, taxpayers are stuck in an endless cycle of waste.”
The Republican Caucus voted against the bill on the final 126-26 roll call at 5 p.m., as did Democrats Reps. Colleen Garry and David Robertson. These were the first roll calls of the new General Court. Seven lawmakers did not vote: Reps. Natalie Blais, Richard Haggerty, Mary Keefe, Kathleen LaNatra, John Lawn, Nicholas Boldyga, and Susannah Whipps.
Alison Kuznitz and Colin A. Young contributed reporting.
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