The New England saying, “Wait five minutes and the weather will change,” goes doubly so for hurricanes. Hurricane Bill is a Category 4 storm, one that could pack a devastating wallop if it makes landfall at that strength. New England emergency managers definitely have Bill in their sights. Right now, the storm is on a […]
State House News Service
Posted inEnvironment, State House News Service, The Download
Stimulating a Bristol County cleanup
Bristol County is receiving the largest infusion of total federal dollars ($162.4 million) outside Suffolk County ($323.2 million) according to a county-by-county breakdown of federal stimulus funds flowing to the Bay State compiled by ProPublica, the national investigative reporting organization. That's $14.2 million more than Middlesex County, the state's largest ($148.2 million). Why is the […]
Posted inState House News Service, The Download, Transportation
The Pottery Barn Rule of MBTA management
When Dan Grabauskas emerged from the initial two-hour plus MBTA Board of Directors executive session on Thursday, he looked like he’d been hit by a Silver Line bus. With the clock ticking on his tenure as general manager, he sat stoically through the rest of the open meeting while an MBTA employee manager explained the minutiae of […]
Posted inState House News Service, The Download, Transportation
How the MBTA general manager wins friends and influences people
Newton Mayor David Cohen, chairman of the MBTA Advisory Board, is the latest public official to side with MBTA general manager Dan Grabauskas in the still-smoldering MBTA civil war. In a letter to Gov. Deval Patrick, Cohen related how Grabauskas comported himself after the 2008 Green Line collision that killed Therese Edmonds, the operator of […]
Posted inState House News Service, The Download, Transportation
Head games at the MBTA
Now that four MBTA board members have come out in support of embattled MBTA General Manager Dan Grabauskas, perhaps Gov. Deval Patrick should take a page out of President Barack Obama’s playbook and have Grabauskas and Transportation Secretary James Aloisi over for a beer. Somewhere Machiavelli is shaking his head over the Patrick administration’s amateurish […]
Posted inEducation, Politics, State House News Service
Hub youth work to bring civics class back to public schools
It’s civic engagement at its finest. Like most students, Boston youth organizer Katherine Garcia, 16, had never designed a curriculum for a high school course. Roy Karp, executive director of Boston–based Civic Education Project, had never recruited students to work on one. But Garcia and five other young people joined forces with Karp and others […]
Posted inState House News Service, The Download, Uncategorized
Did Al Sharpton save the Cambridge Police Department?
Did the prospect of dealing with Al Sharpton prove to be the catalyst that propelled the Cambridge Police Department, the Middlesex District Attorney's Office, and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates into full Kumbaya mode quicker than you can say "media circus?" Any way you slice it, the curious arrest of Gates, director of the […]
Posted inState House News Service, The Download, Uncategorized
Tip, Ronnie, and Tricky Dick walk into a bar…
What would Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill think about competing against the likes of Richard Nixon and Franklin Roosevelt? We'll never know, but only one of the unlikely trio will be inducted into The Fix's new Political Hall of Fame representing the greats of "the last 100 or so years of American politics" as […]
Posted inEconomy, State House News Service, The Download
Senate wants to hide names of tax credit recipients
Can you have tax credit transparency without identifying who's receiving the tax credits? That's the question facing House and Senate budget negotiators as they try to resolve differences between two tax credit transparency initiatives approved by the two branches.The House budget proposal, borrowing language first proposed by Gov. Deval Patrick, would require state agencies that issue tax credits to […]