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🌤️Mostly sunny and pleasant, with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 7:38 p.m.

With National Guard troops from six Republican-led states deployed to Washington, D.C., Massachusetts legislators are working to strengthen ties between the state’s leadership and the National Guard. They’re proposing a bureaucratic fix they hope will have a significant impact: allowing the Massachusetts National Guard’s commander to report directly to the governor, bypassing lower levels in  the chain of command. 

“The Massachusetts National Guard exists to protect and assist Bay Staters in emergencies,” said the bill’s sponsor, Millbury Democrat Sen. Michael Moore. “But none of that matters if command gets caught up in bureaucracy or reports from the ground are miscommunicated through a game of telephone between the Governor and the Adjutant General.”

Four Things to Know

1. UMass Memorial Health is shutting down BUDD, a day program for people with intellectual disabilities and behavioral issues in Fitchburg, because of a lack of funding.

The program lost $86 million dollars between October and March, largely because many participants don’t have health insurance. Administrators worry that upcoming Medicaid cuts will make the problem worse, GBH’s Sam Turken reports.

2. After President Donald Trump said in a social media post that he would “lead a movement” to eliminate voting by mail, Massachusetts’ top elections official called the president’s claim of widespread mail-in voter fraud baseless. 

“Responding to his rhetoric is a waste of time,” Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin said. “He lies all the time and he exaggerates all the time, so there’s no point to it. What you do is you go to court, you show by facts, which we have here in Massachusetts. We’ve had a number of elections and they’re continuing through this year, with municipal elections where people are choosing to vote by mail. They’re very comfortable with it.”

3. For years, family members and loved ones of people who lived and died in state institutions have faced opacity and dead ends in their efforts to learn what happened to them. Now Gov. Maura Healey is asking the legislature to make any records older than 75 years public, and to allow family members of people who died in institutions to access their loved ones’ records after 50 years.

“I hope that it will receive widespread approval in the legislature and support,” said Alex Green, vice-chair of a commission that studied the issue in recent years. “I think it’s an encouraging sign that perhaps we’re moving towards the chief recommendation of the commission, which is a formal apology for the past abuses of institutionalization and how they impact disabled people today.”

4. A Little League Baseball team from Braintree, the Braintree American, won’t win it all this year — the team lost its first game of the Little League World Series but won its second, marking the state’s first series win since 2009.

“They could not have made the league, the town, the region more proud with, again, not only how they’ve performed on the baseball field, how they’ve carried themselves, how they’ve represented the league and the town, their families,” Steve Pratt, vice president of Braintree American, told GBH’s Esteban Bustillos. “It’s been amazing.”

Checking in: Healey’s plan to turn state-owned land into housing

By Katie Lannan, GBH State House Reporter

When Gov. Maura Healey took office in 2023, she directed her team to identify unused state-owned property that could be converted into housing. Two and a half years later, some sites are in the pipeline, like a community college parking lot in Bedford and old courthouses.

This idea of turning surplus public property into new homes is something state officials have talked a lot about over the past few years, helped along by a new housing law Healey signed about a year ago. That law, the Affordable Homes Act, created a streamlined process for selling off public property to be turned into housing.

Earlier this summer, Healey offered up about 450 acres of state land including old courthouses in Lowell and Fitchburg, and the former Westborough State Hospital.

Then, last week, the state issued a request for proposals for another one of those properties: an unused overflow parking lot at the Middlesex Community College campus in Bedford. It’s a five-acre plot they think could host 20 new homes. And there’s an auction coming up in September, where developers can bid on five different parcels: open fields and woods in Westborough, Northborough and Wilmington; and former group homes in Templeton and Phillipston.

Beyond that, there’s development underway at the former Boston State Hospital in Mattapan. Officials are also eyeing housing development at a state prison in Concord that closed last year, and a big, concrete brutalist building in downtown Boston — not City Hall, but the Lindemann and Hurley buildings nearby. State Department of Mental Health facilities would stay there, and they want to keep alive the complex’s historic and architectural significance.

So how much of a dent could projects like these really put into the crisis-level housing shortage in Massachusetts?

If you look at those 450 acres that Healey’s team highlighted back in June, they’re saying up to 3,500 new units could be built on that land — which is not a small number, but it looks a little different if you measure it against the scope of the problem.

A state report published earlier this year found Massachusetts will need more than 100,000 new homes over the next decade to solve the existing housing shortage.

That’s not accounting for future population growth or the changing needs of existing residents – think of a recent college grad who might be living with three roommates now, but each of those people wants to get married, have kids and move into their own home. In all, state officials project a need to produce or preserve at least 222,000 homes by 2035.

Housing development in places like college parking lots and former group homes can help, but it won’t solve the problem. It does look like there might be a particular opportunity in the greater Boston area: the Boston Foundation last year identified the potential for an extra 85,000 housing units if 5 percent of vacant publicly owned, non-conservation land is redeveloped.

-Map: Every state-owned parcel up for housing redevelopment

Dig deeper: 

-Healey makes state-owned properties available to developers to build new housing

-To build housing, Boston gives away land Black and brown families once owned

-To fix Massachusetts’ housing crisis, we need to build. Here’s why that’s hard.

-Once-abandoned mills are now home to thousands of Massachusetts residents