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🌂Cloudy with a chance of rain and highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 7:09 p.m.
Winter is in the rearview mirror, but all the rain in Boston won’t wash away the bill for last season’s snow removal efforts. The city is staring down a $48.4 million budget deficit — about 1% of Boston’s operating budget — driven by snowfall, healthcare costs and police overtime.
Boston’s city employees use an average of snowfall totals over the past five years to estimate how much they will have to spend on plows, salt and shoveling. But this year, the city got about 60 inches of snow, a total not seen since 2015. “Despite a series of expenditure controls first implemented in December 2025, the scale of major unforeseen expenses, particularly related to snow removal, has required additional action,” Chief Financial Officer Ashley Groffenberger wrote in a letter. Read the full report from GBH’s Saraya Wintersmith here.
Four Things to Know
1. UMass Amherst pollsters surveyed people across the country and found that 62% of respondents either strongly or somewhat disapproved of President Donald Trump’s job performance. His approval rating is at 33%.
“This should be a wakeup call to the White House that they need to change direction,” said Tatishe Nteta, director of the UMass Poll. “Whether that change of direction is on the war in Iran, whether the change in direction is the ways he’s dealing with the economy, or dealing with the question of undocumented immigration.”
2. Call it a sunset: the Connecticut Sun, New England’s only WNBA team, is moving to Houston in 2027. Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta will buy the squad from the Mohegan Tribe for $300 million, pending approval from the league’s Board of Governors, a person familiar with the sale’s details told The Associated Press. The team will become the Houston Comets.
The team received a higher offer that would have kept it in the region — a $325 million bid from Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca — but the WNBA blocked the deal, saying “relocation decisions are made by the WNBA Board of Governors and not by individual teams.”
3. A biography of Walter E. Fernald, the namesake of a now-closed institution for people with disabilities in Waltham, won the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award. Author Alex Green, a Waltham resident and Harvard Kennedy School professor, said he wrote “A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled” as “the untold story of how special education began in America, a program that now serves seven million children every year.”
“Walter Fernald … built this system in that school and exported it the world over,” Green said. “[He] set the laws of states and nations and played host to governors and people who became president ... And so I spent the last 10 years reconstructing that story, because I think it’s so important.”
4. The MBTA is offering free Commuter Rail rides every Friday from June through August, as well as half-priced monthly passes. In addition, monthly pass holders can bring another rider with them for $1 on weekends. “This is just a way to say thank you and to encourage more and more people to keep using the transit system,” said MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng. “We want to keep up the momentum for this summer.”
Riders can use the discounts to travel from Rockport to Providence to Worcester (all via Boston). The discount does not apply to special-events trains to Foxborough — such as for World Cup games or concerts — or to CapeFlyer service.
How Logan Airport steered clear of travel chaos seen elsewhere in the US
Transportation Security Administration workers were paid yesterday for the first time in weeks after President Donald Trump signed a memo ordering paychecks to be issued amid an ongoing partial government shutdown.
In the last few weeks about 500 TSA workers across the country — including 29 in Boston — left their jobs rather than work without pay. Some airports elsewhere in the country saw excruciatingly long lines, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who were not trained as TSA officers, at security checkpoints.
But Boston’s Logan Airport avoided much of that disruption, GBH’s Jeremy Siegel reports.
Jennifer Mehigan, a spokesperson for Massport, told Siegel she had “not heard anything about ICE being at Logan.”
“New England is a different place. We look at things differently,” Mike Gazyagian, president of the TSA officers’ union in New England, told Siegel. “We wanted it to work, and everyone got together and supported us.”
TSA officers received support from their union, local communities and the public, including Dunkin’ gift cards from travelers passing through their checkpoints. “We had offers of help from [Providence-based non-profit] United Way and the Greater Boston Food Bank,” Gazyagian said. “The credit unions have been really helpful, too, locally and regionally. I honestly can’t go through the whole list, but it really has been an uplifting thing to see.”
Still, as the shutdown continues, there remains uncertainty, Gazyagian said.
“This helps, but we want the shutdown to end,” he told Siegel. “People are relieved to be getting the money, but they’re just waiting to see what’s going to happen in the future.”
Find Siegel’s full reporting here.
Dig deeper: -ICE officers could remain at airports after TSA workers are paid (NPR)
-Airport bottlenecks ease as TSA workers get paid, but shutdown continues (The Associated Press)
-Stuck in a long TSA line? Here are some strategies for rebooking your flight (NPR)
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