Day care centers can’t hire teachers, casinos can’t find poker dealers and cities and towns can’t find bus drivers to get children to school.
With the state’s unemployment rate up a tick after August and hovering at 5 percent, the state’s economic recovery from COVID-19 is both well underway and also perplexingly uneven as the Delta variant has sowed new anxieties among workers and traditional patterns of work and life continue to be disrupted.
Hundreds of thousands of people lost their unemployment benefits this month and still “Help Wanted” signs are being hung literally and figuratively on businesses around the state as employers desperately seek qualified help.
Gov. Charlie Baker even had to activate 250 National Guard members this week to drive buses in school districts like Lowell, Lawrence, Lynn and Chelsea where officials had sought help from the state, and Early Education Commissioner Samantha Aigner-Treworgy presented a detailed short- and long-term strategy making hiring in early education easier for both the applicant and the provider.
“The workforce crisis is more severe than we thought,” Aigner-Treworgy told the EEC board.
The city of Boston is one employer that has had no trouble attracting applicants for its top job, but the hiring committee was a little thin. Voters didn’t exactly beat down the doors to the polls on Tuesday, nor did they clog the Post Office with mailed-in ballots.
But a win is a win.
City Councilors Michelle Wu and Annissa Essaibi George claimed the top two spots, in that order, advancing to the November general election after Tuesday’s preliminary, while Acting Mayor Kim Janey finished fourth behind District Councilor Andrea Campbell.
The results prompted a good deal of retrospection on why participation in the election was so low, and how in a race with three Black candidates not one could find their way onto the November ballot.
The final matchup, however, promises to be an intriguing showdown between new and old Boston. Regardless of who wins, the city will elect its first woman of color as mayor, and the dynamic between City Hall and the State House undoubtedly will change from the BFF days of Baker and Walsh.
Essaibi George, a moderate popular in some of the more conservative neighborhoods of the city, has already started painting Wu, a progressive, as a candidate overpromising Bostonians with “pie-in-the-sky” ideas like free public transit.
But Wu is not alone in that celestial bakery. Ben Downing, a former senator and candidate for governor, is among those who don’t think Wu’s ideas are out of reach. In fact, he’s made them part of his platform. And he’s offered ways to pay for it as well.
If the latest Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation report is to be taken to heart, the MBTA will need the new tax revenue.
The Beacon Hill think-tank estimated that by the time the next governor takes the oath in 2023 they will be faced with a decision of trying to sell to the public and legislators fare increases and service cuts, or a plan to dedicate $1.25 billion in additional revenue to the MBTA to keep up with operating and capital needs.
The “fiscal calamity” facing the T is “unequivocal and unsettling,” according to MTF, but Baker hardly seemed shaken.
Baker, in an interview on GBH radio, described the report as being on the pessimistic side, and said a lot will depend on whether ridership on rapid transit and commuter rail rebounds beyond current levels.
“I don’t think we should panic quite yet,” Baker said, pointing to the state’s surplus, the infrastructure bill being debated in Congress and other unallocated federal money that could be tapped.
It would be repetitive to say Gov. Baker wishes the Legislature would move more quickly to start committing the nearly $5 billion in unspent American Rescue Plan Act funds at the state’s disposal, but after a meeting between the Big Three on Monday House Speaker Ron Mariano finally put a timeline on a legislative plan, sort of.
Mariano said it would not be an “unrealistic goal” for an ARPA spending bill to be agreed to by Thanksgiving, so for now that’s the soft target.
Meanwhile, Baker told the New England Council on Monday that he planned to take another stab at health care reform, likely in January, and Senate President Karen Spilka continues to evade the question of when the Senate might take up sports betting or why she’s so reluctant to bring it to the floor.
The president said there would be “discussions among the senators about it,” which is basically what she’s been saying for the better part of the last two years. One has to assume some of those conversations have taken place.
If and when that debate happens in the Senate, Joe Boncore won’t be there and neither will East Boston Rep. Adrian Madaro.
The Senate set the date to replace Boncore after the Winthrop Democrat resigned to take over MassBIO, scheduling a primary for Dec. 14 and a general election on Jan. 11. Madaro, however, said he intends to remain in the House where he is co-chair of the Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use and Recovery and better able to achieve a work-life balance.
Madaro was widely considered to be among the frontrunners to replace Boncore, but you can’t win if you don’t run. And after spending weeks preparing to do just that, he went away on a family trip to Vermont, unplugged and realized he was missing too much time with his 4-month-old son Matteo.
So that leaves Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards and Revere School Committee member Anthony D’Ambrosio as the two officially eyeing the seat so far.
Boncore is barely an ex-lawmaker, but it’s now been over eight months since David Nangle’s legislative career came to an end and his name placard is still on the door outside his old State House office.
Nangle won’t be returning to that office, and pretty soon he’ll be relocating to a federal prison for 15 months after Judge Rya Zobel sentenced the Lowell Democrat to a prison stint for a raft of tax, wire and bank fraud crimes he committed after falling into gambling debt and relying on his campaign account to fund golf club dues, restaurant tabs and other personnel expenses.
Nangle’s sentencing came 19 months after his arrest and seven months after he pleaded guilty.
STORY OF THE WEEK: Wu and Essaibi George advance in their quest to become mayor, heralding a giant political leap forward for the city and, yet, for some in the Black community it’s more of the same.
SONG OF THE WEEK: The T is running out of money. Should we panic or chill?
