“The state rules have to catch up with the reality of climate change,” said Matthew Fee, a Nantucket select board member. “A town road can’t be abandoned if someone’s [living] on it, but what happens when the road goes into the ocean?”
CW in Depth
Posted inEducation
Mass. education secretary’s votes reflect growing Democratic hostility toward charter schools
Growing Democratic opposition to charter schools was cast in sharp relief at February’s state education board meeting, where Gov. Maura Healey’s education secretary, Patrick Tutwiler, voted against all five proposals for expansion of charter schools.
Posted inImmigration
‘It’s not going to be pretty’
Immigrant advocates have good reason to think New Bedford may figure prominently on a list of places that will be targeted under an aggressive deportation campaign by the new Trump administration.
Posted inCourts
Post-Bruen decision, everyone has to be a gun-law historian
The decision has opened almost all aspects of the state’s gun safety law regime to challenge and sent lawyers scrambling for history books. As recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decisions have shown, if a policy is not tied to a founding-era law or practice – a so-called historical analogue – it likely will not survive judicial scrutiny.
Posted inPolitics
Why are so many amendments being withdrawn on Beacon Hill?
A lawmaker gets up to make a speech, notes how important it would be for his or her colleagues to pass the amendment, and then withdraws the very amendment that was supposed to be so important.
Posted inBallot Questions
Lessons to learn from Oregon on psychedelics ballot measure
A group called Mass. for Mental Health Options has gathered the necessary signatures to put a question on the November ballot that would make it possible for Massachusetts residents to do the same. However, the measure in Massachusetts is much more expansive than the one that legalized psilocybin therapy in Oregon in 2020.
Posted inPolitics
Seeking a right to medical aid in dying
Margaret Miley is frustrated, in pain, and dying. But Massachusetts has thus far resisted the movement, now law in nearly a dozen other states, to allow patients near their end of their life to obtain medication that would hasten their death.
“Who benefits from this?” she asks.
Posted inEducation
In wake of pandemic, Mass. achievement gap has widened
As schools try to recover the learning loss students experienced in recent years, a study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities shows that the achievement gap separating poor and non-poor students in Massachusetts has widened more since the pandemic than in any of 15 states they studied.
Posted inPolitics
The bomb-tossing bean counter
Not even halfway through her first term as auditor, Diana DiZoglio has essentially returned to the campaign trail. She is lobbying voters, and emptying her own campaign coffers, to support an initiative she wants to put before voters this November.
Posted inPolitics
The last of Somerville’s old guard
Corruption cases, and attempted prosecutions, were once regular headlines in Somerville. The recent bribery conviction of a one-time local power broker, with echoes of another era, came and went without much fanfare.