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☀️Sun’s out, with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 6:40 p.m.
We’ll start with some good news about garbage: on Friday, leaders of the Teamsters Local 25 union announcedthat sanitation workers with Republic Services, who haul away the contents of dumpsters and garbage bins across dozens of Boston-area communities, are officially back to work today after reaching a deal to end a strike that’s been going since July.
Republic Services had hired non-union workers to replace their regular crews in the last two and a half months, but some communities still saw frustrating delays in their trash pickups.
“Residents, by the end of summer, were fed up,” said Malden At-Large City Councilor Karen Colón Hayes. “That’s why I was overjoyed when I saw it [the strike] had come to an end.”
Four Things to Know
1. It’s been 10 months since 72% of Massachusetts voters approved a ballot measure calling for the state auditor to be able to audit the legislature — yet the audit hasn’t begun. Why not?
In short: Lawmakers maintain that a review like the one Auditor Diana DiZoglio wants to conduct violates the state’s constitution. DiZoglio said she wants to take the issue to court, but is facing delays from the office of Attorney General Andrea Campbell. And Campbell says the auditor has not given her office enough information to properly represent her in court. You can read more about the issue here.
2. Nurses in New Bedford spent a day last week picketing their employer, St. Luke’s Hospital. Their union, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, is asking for higher staffing levels and a raise to bring nurse’s pay in line with other nearby hospitals.
They’re also asking for more specific roles for nurses in the hospital’s Family-Centered Unit, which covers labor and delivery, postpartum care and a Level II nursery (for newborns and infants who need special care.) Right now, union officials say, nurses can float from one area of the unit to another — meaning those whose specialty lies in one area are sometimes “forced to practice in areas in which they do not feel competent as they are floated from area to area.” “Both nurses and patients suffer in this system,” union officials said in a statement.
3. Fifteen Quincy residents are taking their city to court over the mayor’s plans to put statues of two Catholic figures — St. Michael the Archangel and St. Florian — in front of Quincy’s police and fire department headquarters.
Their attorney, Rachel Davidson of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said that’s a violation of the Massachusetts constitution, specifically “Article 3, which prohibits the government from engaging in religious favoritism. It says that the government should equally protect all religions.” The statues will cost $850,000 in taxpayer money, not including any additional expenses related to the lawsuit.
4. Boston has a new nonprofit organization to train young adults who are dealing with homelessness for healthcare jobs. The organization, Breaktime, bought a six-floor building on Franklin Street, near Downtown Crossing, and held a ribbon cutting ceremony late last week. The organization is not a shelter, but does offer job training and other services.
“Breaktime’s model, just to give you a bit of background, is three weeks of job training, a three-month paid job placement and then three years of continued wraparound and financial support,” co-founder Connor Schoen told GBH’s Marilyn Schairer.
Trump admin threatens to withhold MBTA funds over crime concerns
Last week, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent MBTA General Manager Phil Eng a letter demanding information about the T’s plans to reduce crime and vagrancy — and threatening to withhold federal funds if they don’t respond.
GBH’s Jeremy Siegel reports that the letter (which you can read in full here) asks that T officials say what they are doing “to reduce crime, the homeless population, and fare evasion on the transit system.”
Duffy specifically mentioned South Station. Last month, the MBTA’s Transit Police superintendent, Richard Sullivan, said that crime rates at South Station are “extremely low” and reports of all crime at the station are down 16% compared to 2024.
Eng said the MBTA will provide members of the Trump administration with the information they’re looking for. “We value and appreciate our long-standing partnerships with the USDOT and FTA, and we have a common goal to ensure that riders are safe and feel safe while using public transportation,” he said.
One more note: the T does use federal money for big projects, but not day-to-day operations, according to Jim Aloisi, a transit advocate and former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation. Most of the budget comes from a dedicated portion of the state’s sales taxes, passenger fares and other state funding, like money from the millionaires’ tax.
The amount the MBTA gets for those big projects varies a lot from year to year, according to the MBTA’s itemized budgets: the agency received about $10.2 million in Fiscal Year 2023, $31.3 million in 2024, and has $191 million coming in Fiscal Year 2025 — a significant jump, but just about 6% of its $3 billion total budget.
Aloisi told Siegel that makes the White House’s threat confusing.
“The day-to-day operations of the T or the [Chicago Transit Authority] are not funded at all by the federal government,” he said. “So the threat of pulling that money is nonexistent. It doesn’t exist.”
You can read Jeremy Siegel’s full story here.
Dig deeper:
-Trump administration cancels $20 million in funding for Roxbury street improvements
-You can now ride the T until 2 a.m. on weekends
-MBTA begins issuing fines for fare evasion. Riders have mixed feelings.
-Young driver deaths on pace to reach 10-year high in Mass.
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