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.
🌤️Mostly sunny, with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 8:02 p.m.
Time for a city planning lesson: about a third of intersections in Boston use what’s called concurrent signaling, a system in which pedestrians and drivers looking to turn both have the right of way at the same time. By law, pedestrians have the right of way, but drivers must look past their green light or right-on-red path to notice them.
“People are very inconsiderate about pedestrians crossing, more so ... when it’s people with disabilities,” Casandra Xavier, who lives in the North End, told GBH’s Meghan Smith. She’s deafblind and uses a white cane to get around. “I would like it to [be] where, if they can fix it, pedestrians cross first, drivers go second. Prioritize pedestrians.”
So why does Boston use this signaling system? To speed up traffic. Isaac Prizant, senior traffic engineer with Boston’s Transportation Department, said the city’s traffic engineers are installing signals that give pedestrians a walk sign a few seconds before giving cars the go-ahead to turn. Those signals are at about 5% of intersections citywide. You can read Meghan Smith’s full story here.
Four Things to Know
1. Massachusetts lawmakers are asking the Navy for help recovering equipment from the Lily Jean, a fishing boat that sank off the coast of Gloucester in January, killing all seven people onboard. They hope the ship’s video recorder and hard drive could help determine why it sank, and assess how feasible it would be to recover the bodies of those who died, if their families choose to do so.
Gov. Maura Healey and Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr wrote in a letter to the Navy that they had asked the National Transportation Safety Board and the U.S. Coast Guard for help with the recovery. The NTSB declined to lead the effort.
2. After six months of contract negotiations, about 1,400 employees of Cape Cod Healthcare said they hope the hospital will reconsider its proposal to make long-time employees pay a larger share of their health insurance premiums. Right now, employees hired before 2011 pay 2% of their premiums, with the hospital covering the rest. Under the proposed contract, that would increase to 5.5% in 2027 and 8.5% in 2028, a hospital spokesperson said.
The contract covers workers in therapy, radiology, housekeeping and other departments. “We’re looking to make sure that those wages are competitive enough to keep them here as well. But what we’re also looking to do is make sure that health care is affordable,” said employee Anika Barty.
3. The largest Latino cultural center in New England opened in Boston’s South End on Friday. La CASA: The Center for Arts, Self-Determination and Activism, was developed over two years at the former site of a church. The four-story, 26,000-square-foot building features colorful murals and stained glass from the church it replaced. You can see more photos here.
“We want the community to see or hear that something is happening, and feel engaged and want to come in,” said Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, CEO of the nonprofit Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción. They’re already hosting their first gallery show: “Entretelas: Antonio Martorell y sus Amigos” featuring Puerto Rican artist Antonio Martorell and others.
4. Meet Alexis Walls of Cambridge, who has spent the last five years as a court-appointed special advocate for a teenager in foster care. She’s seen the young person grow from a 15-year-old in a group home to a 20-year-old living independently, and their connection has grown more personal.
“As she’s gotten older, some of the interactions look a little less formal,” Walls said. “We spend a lot less time on a virtual Zoom hearing or in a meeting, but rather, talking to each other on FaceTime or over the phone, spending time together over a meal. She might share some of the things that she’s grappling with or thinking through, and I might help encourage her with thinking about how to plan for those things moving forward.”
'We could not farm without them’: Small Massachusetts farms face immigration and labor pressures
To learn what life is like for people who work on and own small farms in Massachusetts, GBH’s Liz Neisloss spoke with workers who pick broccoli, tend asparagus, plant lettuce and hand-feed baby cows. They described an industry that’s becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
To start: about 70% of farmworkers nationwide were not born in the United States.
“We could not produce food without them,” one dairy farmer told Neisloss. “The majority of many agricultural products produced in the United States are produced by immigrant labor, working together with the farm owners, which is what happens in my case.”
Fears of the Trump administration’s immigration raids have made it harder to find people to work on the farms.
“We typically would have about 15 seasonal immigrant workers here in our peak season. This past year, we were only able to fill about 10 of those slots,” another farmer in Western Massachusetts said.
One man, who came from Mexico and has worked on a dairy farm for five years, said he worries about immigration raids.
“Because people who work here are honest, peaceful, then they grab them, deport them, so that’s very sad, you know?,” he said, speaking in Spanish. “There are people who don’t like the people who are Latino workers. So I think that at least they should try to work one day under the sun, or in the cold, with a minimum wage.”
A dairy farmer who is struggling to find workers said he sometimes gets calls from local parents offering help.
“There’s a good chance the scenario they tell me is that their son spends too much time on his cell phone, and they really think he ought to come work on a farm,” he said. That person might last a day, he added.
Neisloss spoke with farm workers and farmers about their frustrations with politicians and the kind of help they would like to see. She also has photos of lettuce seedlings, asparagus processing, and dairy cows.
Dig deeper:
-Could urban gardening be Boston’s answer to rising food insecurity?
-Despite missing federal funds, Boston lays out plan to meet five-year climate goals
-Cooperation with ICE common among Massachusetts law enforcement, new report finds
GBH Daily
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