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☁️Gray day, with a chance of showers and highs in the upper 60s. Sunset is at 8:03 p.m.
Today we have a mystery on the high seas. But first: Gov. Maura Healey yesterday suggested $400 million in spending on local research, construction and other job-creating initiatives. About half of the funding would come from interest earned on the state’s stabilization fund, while the other half would be drawn from an additional tax on Massachusetts residents making more than $1 million annually.
“In the face of uncertainty from the federal government, this is about protecting one of the things that makes Massachusetts so special — our global leadership in health care and helping families across the world,” Healey said. We’ll keep you posted on this legislation’s progress.
Four Things to Know
1. Environmental Protection Agency employees in Boston and across the country who have been on paid administrative leave, since they signed a letter critical of the Trump administration’s focus on deregulation, had their leave extended for another two weeks.
“They say the investigation is still ongoing, but I can’t imagine why it’s taking them this long,” one EPA staff member told GBH News, speaking on condition that their name not be used. “And I’m frustrated. I could have been getting work done in support of the agency’s mission these past four weeks, but instead I’m being paid to sit at home and wait for them to finish this unnecessary investigation.”
2. The Massachusetts Senate yesterday passed a bill that, if also approved by the House and governor, will ban cell phones in schools starting in the fall of 2026.
“Whenever I raise the idea of limiting time spent on their phone I typically get a lot of pushback, but once we start to break it down — how they have trouble sleeping, how they’re not going to the gym as much and how they’re distracted in school … the conversation changes,” said Sen. John Velis, a Democrat from Westfield.
3. We now have our first look at the impact of legal sports betting in Massachusetts. The industry — largely driven by mobile apps — added 118 jobs and generated $90.8 million in tax revenue in 2023, according to the UMass Donahue Institute. For context, that’s roughly 0.2% of the $39 billion in revenue the state collected that fiscal year.
Also, a growing share of people who gamble at least once a month meet the criteria for problematic or pathological gambling — rising from 20% in 2022 to nearly 30% in 2024.
4. The massive budget bill President Donald Trump signed into law last month has major implications for student loans. Among them: more borrowers who previously qualified for federal loans will likely have to turn to private lenders, which typically have higher interest rates and offer fewer protections for borrowers.
“You could get interest rates as low as 3% fixed to as high as 15% fixed, so it can definitely have an impact if they can’t even get access to the loans, or get approved because they have credit issues,” said Don Kerr, director of student lending at AAA Northeast.
Are 17 turbines really running at Vineyard Wind? Here’s what we saw by boat
Our colleagues at CAI set out to answer seemingly simple questions: how many turbines are fully installed and functioning at Vineyard Wind? And how much energy are they generating?
But officials at Vineyard Wind have not been particularly forthcoming in recent months, with reporters or with local elected officials.
“Since the immediate aftermath of the blade failure, and since the last presidential election, Vineyard Wind’s leadership has essentially gone into hiding,” said Nantucket Select Board member Brooke Mohr. “We believe that they are concerned about the change in policy at the federal level and drawing scrutiny from the new administration.”
So CAI reporter Jennette Barnes took her questions to the sea, chartering a boat with reporters from the Martha’s Vineyard Times.
On the day of their trip, officials with Iberdrola, one of Vineyard Wind’s parent companies, told investors they have 17 turbines running and 23 fully installed. But in a two-hour visit to the Vineyard Wind site, reporters only saw between one and nine turbines running at any given moment. And about 40 had a tower, nacelle and three blades installed.
Vineyard Wind declined to answer questions from reporters about the site visit. And ISO New England, which operates New England’s grid, declined to say how much power the project is generating.
Some possible reasons for those discrepancies: wind turbines don’t typically run all day long, and can be taken offline for repairs or testing.
Some turbines that appear fully installed might need blade replacements or other repairs, especially if they came from the same Quebec factory as a turbine blade that fell into the ocean and washed up on Nantucket’s shores last summer. Reporters saw an installation vessel and crane, though no workers were visible on either.
Get the full story (and see photos of Vineyard Wind up close) here.
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