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About 15 percent of Massachusetts voters in 2024 — 770,000 people — were listed as inactive, typically because they didn’t respond to an annual letter from their city or town asking them to verify their address. Those voters faced an additional hurdle when they showed up at the polls: they had to present ID or otherwise verify their address.
“A large number of residents of cities and towns don’t even know that not responding demotes them as a voter,” said Geoff Foster, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts. “We know that expecting a voter to provide some sort of proof of residency alone can be a major barrier to voting — not everyone has readily on their person at any given moment an ID.”
State lawmakers have proposed a bill that would change that, decoupling voter registration status from responses to the annual address verification forms. But it’s not clear whether there’s enough support to get it passed. The state also uses the information on those forms, called street lists or municipal censuses, to issue jury summons. The bill currently under consideration would allow cities and towns to warn residents that they could face unspecified fines if they don’t return the annual address verification forms.
Four Things to Know
1. Federal workers at Boston’s Environmental Protection Agency office said their bosses told them to keep working last week, even as many government workers were furloughed — placed on mandatory unpaid leave. Workers also said they’re not sure they’ll get paid. During the last government shutdown, in 2018, the agency had enough funding to pay them for two weeks.
“They have not told us that this time,” said union president Lilly Simmons. “They have said, well, check your email and see if we have money to work today. So you can’t even plan for two weeks like we did in 2018. It’s day by day.”
2. Residents in The Fenway are asking the MBTA to extend the hours of the 55 bus, which goes from West Fenway to Arlington Station in the Back Bay, and currently runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. An MBTA spokesperson said the agency doesn’t have enough buses to increase service, and wants to prioritize busier routes.
“The Green Line, while it accesses the West Fenway, is not a viable option for all the passengers, because it is not 100% ADA accessible and it’s overcrowded,” Fenway resident Conrad Ciszek said. “It requires many who are seniors and people who have disabilities to travel a great distance to the Fenway stop. That’s particularly challenging in the winter months.”
3. Brooke Doyle, head of Massachusetts’ Department of Mental Health, is leaving her post after five years — effective today. “While it may never feel like a 'good’ time to make a transition, for me it’s the right time,” Doyle said in a statement. Deputy Commissioner Beth Lucas will step into the job for now.
Back in January, Gov. Maura Healey suggested cutting half of the department’s caseworkers. The department ended up avoiding those layoffs through a deal with their union. In April, union members voted “no confidence” in Doyle and asked Healey to remove her from her job, saying they had concerns about “the mismanagement of services, lack of transparency and failure to effectively address the needs of both employees and clients.”
4. This week is Banned Books Week, the annual event launched in 1982. Our colleague Callie Crossley marked the occasion on Under the Radar by speaking with Kim Snyder, director of the documentary “The Librarians,” which follows people working in small-town libraries.
“I wanted ... to remind people of the archetypal image we all, I think, grew up having of our beloved librarians in small-town America,” Snyder said. “And to juxtapose that to this idea of criminalizing them simply for distributing books and doing the job that they’re trained in. I really wanted to pay homage to that injustice and just how incredulous that was.”
Some Worcester residents spend hours just getting to and from a supermarket
It used to take Jacquie Ormo about five minutes to get to her nearest supermarket. But the Stop & Shop in her neighborhood, Lincoln Village in Worcester, closed about a year ago. The next-closest supermarket, a Shaw’s, is about a 10-minute drive — but Ormo doesn’t have a car and uses a mobility scooter to get around. If she can’t catch a ride with someone, she sometimes has to rely on multiple bus routes that turn her trip into a three-hour journey.
“It’s inexcusable,” she told GBH’s Sam Turken, who followed her on a recent grocery run. He timed the trip: it took them three hours and four minutes to get to the store, shop, and come back. “When you’re old and disabled, it wears on you, both emotionally and physically.”
City Councilor Jenny Pacillo, who represents Ormo’s neighborhood, said it’s an issue that impacts more vulnerable people in New England’s second-largest city.
“I can get in my car and drive to a Market Basket. But when you’re in an area where a lot of people don’t drive or have access to a car like Jacqui … to take away a full-service grocery store has such a huge impact on their lives,” Pacillo said.
So why doesn’t Ormo’s neighborhood have another supermarket? There’s a Target, which local residents said is more expensive, and an Aldi, which doesn’t always have everything they need. Another grocery store in the city, Price Chopper on Cambridge Street, closed this year after 22 years.
Pacillo said it’s an unintended consequence of the city’s commercial tax rate: the city keeps it higher in order to keep the residential tax rate lower, she said. But as a result, taxes on businesses are more than twice as high as they are in nearby suburbs.
“If I owned a large business, like a Market Basket, and I’m looking at Shrewsbury’s commercial tax rate and Worcester’s commercial tax rate, I would go to Shrewsbury,” Pacillo told Turken.
Another possible solution, Pacillo said, would be adding a direct bus route between Lincoln Village and a supermarket. The Worcester Regional Transit Authority said it’s considering how to redesign its route system.
After Ormo got her groceries — and a few scratch-offs — she made her way back to the bus stop. The long trips take their toll, she said.
“Once I go home, get everything put away, I’ll [take a nap] for an hour or two,” she said. “I’ll take Tylenol and put a pain patch on my back.”
You can come along on their full journey to the supermarket with more photos and audio here.
Dig deeper:
-Worcester Regional Food Hub opens new headquarters at Union Station
-How a veterans’ housing project almost fell through amid funding cuts and tariffs
-Empty apartments across Massachusetts could be key to solving housing crisis
GBH Daily
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