This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
☀️Sunny and autumnal, with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 6:09 p.m.
In your local city or town hall, officials have likely spent the last few months figuring out how to stretch every dollar. With inflation, government funding cuts and ongoing economic uncertainty budgets simply don’t go as far as they used to.
“Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about health insurance for our employees or paving our roads or funding our school systems. The costs are really rising,” Newton Mayor Ruthanne Fuller said, according to GBH’s Marilyn Schairer. “Nobody wants to increase their taxes. They literally don’t know how to pay for groceries, or to fill their drug prescriptions. And yet, we all want these essential services.”
The Massachusetts Municipal Association looked at the budgets of cities and towns across the state and found that, when adjusted for inflation, spending was up just 0.6% between 2010 and 2022, according to a new report. That’s in part due to Proposition 2 ½, a 1980s-era law that limits how much city and town budgets can grow each year. If you’re curious about the surprisingly fascinating history of how municipal taxes helped shape the Massachusetts lottery, check out this episode of our podcast, Scratch and Win.
Four Things to Know
1. After a flood of consumer complaints about businesses that install residential solar panels, lawmakers in Massachusetts are considering new laws to regulate the sector. Since 2022, more than 1,700 people have filed complaints with the Massachusetts attorney general’s office about the residential solar industry — reporting that companies damaged their homes, installed faulty or even increased their energy bills.
“This problem is not just one for individual consumers, but a threat to the Commonwealth’s ability to increase its energy supply, because consumers will be justifiably hesitant to put solar on their roofs if they need to worry about getting taken advantage of,” said Carrie Katan of the Green Energy Consumers Alliance in Boston. You can read GBH’s investigation into solar’s shady practices here.
2. When Maya Evohr needs part of her wheelchair repaired or replaced, she knows she could be in for a long wait. “Anything that requires a part being replaced, I do have to wait on the wheelchair repair companies,” Evohr told GBH’s Meghan Smith. “Unfortunately, something even as simple as switching out a circuit board or one plastic part can take up to six months.”
Evohr was part of a group at the State House yesterday asking lawmakers to pass a bill that would give repair companies incentives to make repairs in a more timely manner. “These days, weeks, months, our lives are just you know disrupted and negatively impacted and that can mean us not being able to work, not being able to do volunteer work or go to school,” Ellen Leigh of Arlington said.
3. The owners of The Urban Grape, a wine shop in Boston’s South end, are closing their store. Owners TJ and Hadley Douglas said they’ve been trying to extend their small business loan for more than a year, but haven’t been able to reach an agreement with their lender. The shop’s Washington, D.C., location also closed at the end of August.
“In a city like Boston, where too often we all retreat to our corners, our legacy was bringing everyone together around one table. We succeeded in building a new kind of wine store that meant so much to so many,” Hadley Douglas wrote in a message on social media. “TJ and I have spent the last two nights wondering, is this the end of our legacy? The answer is no. We will gather around our tasting table again, Boston. You can count on it.”
4. Among the $7.5 billion in grants cancelled last week by the federal Department of Energy were several Massachusetts-based projects — all focused on renewable energy. Department officials said the projects did not “adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”
“It’s nothing to do with anything except their continued ideological attack on science and climate change,” Rep. Bill Keating said. “Are we just wasting the investment that occurred before? These are the kind of questions that we shouldn’t even have to ask, because when an agency makes these kinds of decisions across the whole United States, there should be a reason for it.”
Checking in: the federal government shutdown in Massachusetts
It’s day 10 of the federal government shutdown, and local federal workers say they’re worried about the Trump administration’s layoff threats.
“Republicans and Democrats need to come to the table, iron out their differences and open up the government,” David Gonzalez, a leader with New England’s branch of the American Federation of Government Employees union, told GBH’s Hannah Loss. “It’s not fair to the federal employees that federal employees are the scapegoat over a political debate.”
TSA employees, who are working without pay during the shutdown, are concerned about threats to withhold their back pay once the shutdown ends.
“Our job is to prevent bad actors from getting on airplanes. We have to be laser focused on what we’re doing all the time,” said Mike Gayzagian, local president of the TSA agents’ union. “And this is a huge distraction for people.”
Meanwhile, organizations in Western Massachusetts that provide food and housing to those in need are trying to plan for the long term.
“We’re providing food assistance to more than 120,000 people every month,” said Andrew Morehouse, executive director of the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts in Chicopee, according to New England Public Media. “And we anticipate that that number will increase, if not from the government shutdown, from what appears to be elevated prices for some time to come. We don’t know the impact of all of the Trump tariffs yet.”
Keith Fairey, CEO of the Way Finders housing assistance organization in Springfield, told NEPM he worries about the ripple effects of the federal shutdown and more sweeping Trump administration funding cuts.
“About 20% of our funding is federal,” Fairey said. “If we get to the point where we don’t have those resources flowing — let’s go through the whole chain: people won’t be able to pay their rent, landlords won’t get their money, they won’t be able to pay for their bills and it creates a whole cascade.”
Dig deeper:
-Cape Cod Seashore shutdown: What’s open, what’s closed, what’s on hold behind the scenes
-The government shutdown keeps snarling air travel. Officials say it could get worse
-Why some federal workers aren’t scared by the threat of shutdown layoffs
GBH Daily
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