The Boston City Council is considering a new vandalism repair fund for small businesses across the city.
Many shops and restaurants in the city have been facing expenses for broken windows or graffiti on buildings.
Fornax Bakery in Roslindale re…
Massachusetts
More are calling the Mass. problem gambling helpline — some for IT help
The state’s problem gambling helpline saw a big jump in calls in the months after Massachusetts launched legal sports betting last year, but a public health official said Wednesday that most of that increase was due to calls from bettors mistakenly thinking they could get technical help with their betting apps.
The Department of Public Health said the (800) 327-5050 helpline received 3,050 calls in fiscal year 2023, which included the first five months of legal betting. That’s an increase of 1,672 calls or 121% over the 1,378 calls received in fiscal 2022.
Victor Ortiz, director of DPH’s Office of Problem Gambling Services, told the Public Health Council on Wednesday morning that one-third of the calls the helpline got were “non-helpline calls.”
“These are calls for those who are looking for technical support or assistance for their sports wagering mobile applications or platforms,” he said. “I just want to stress here that the staff who answer these calls, we owe a debt of gratitude to their work … and what they do on an everyday basis.”
Call volume was highest from February through June 2023, DPH said, with 2,069 calls in the months immediately after betting began and residents were crushed by a wave of advertisements all required to list the problem gambling hotline phone number. But 1,043 of the calls in that time period were “non-helpline” calls, the report said.
Calls from individuals related to their own gambling problem that resulted in a referral to treatment services increased by 41% to 636 in fiscal 2023, with 73 people citing sports betting as the reason they sought assistance.
More gambling news
While a relatively small part of the overall call volume, DPH said the 73 individuals seeking help for sports betting in fiscal 2023 represented a 1,117% increase from fiscal 2022, when only six callers referred to treatment reported sports betting as their main concern.
DPH said the increases in calls to the problem gambling helpline and referrals made because of those calls are “likely the result of improvement in helpline services in coordination with public awareness campaigns, community efforts to provide individuals and families with education and resources, and sports wagering advertisements.”
“There is currently no evidence to support that the increase in call volume and referrals is a direct result of an increase in problem gambling in the Commonwealth,” the department said.
Crowded Mass. shelters are having trouble finding and keeping staff
Shelter providers serving homeless individuals urged lawmakers Wednesday to provide funding for a workforce development program as they face an escalating demand for services, including among new arrivals to Massachusetts, that is straining the capacity of their facilities.
Ahead of next week’s Senate budget debate, advocates with the Coalition for Homeless Individuals are looking to build support for a Sen. Lydia Edwards amendment (321) that would inject $10 million into the shelter workforce development initiative to “provide pathways to careers in fields related to housing and homelessness.” The money is intended to address barriers to entering or staying in the field, such as transportation, loan repayment, tuition or certification fee reimbursement, and child care.
The Senate Ways and Means budget proposal did not allocate money for the program, though the House’s fiscal 2025 budget steers $10 million to the line item, said Lyndia Downie, executive director of Pine Street Inn, which operates four shelters in Boston. Downie said demand at the shelters serving individuals who are homeless increased by 35% over the last year.
“We’re here to really make the case that there’s been an increase. We’re looking for some support and trying to anticipate that next winter is going to be really difficult,” Downie told the News Service as she stressed the need for planning backed by state aid. “And then there’s some workforce dollars that the House put in the budget that we’re hoping to get in the Senate, as well.”
Both the House and the Senate Ways and Means budget direct more than $110 million for a separate homelessness program, including assistance for organizations that offer shelter, transitional housing, and services that help people avoid entering shelters or successfully exit shelters. The coalition is requesting $126 million, a roughly 15% increase over the current fiscal year to reflect heightened demand.
More than 6,500 individuals — meaning adults without children — are currently homeless in the commonwealth, according to the coalition, which represents 60 community-based providers. But the vast majority of those individuals are sheltered.
Providers say they have encountered a growing population of migrants who need to be housed and tend to stay longer than their Bay State counterparts. The state’s right-to-shelter law, which has come under scrutiny as a crush of migrant families inundate the family shelter system, does not apply to individuals experiencing homelessness.
“Our state does not have the right-to-shelter protections for individuals as it does for families,” Rep. John Moran said at the advocacy event in Nurses Hall. “And were it not for people in this room stepping up each and every day, we’d be in a crisis.”
Individual shelter demand has increased on average by 24% over the past year, which the coalition attributes to a lack of affordable housing, youth mental health, addiction, a growing elderly population, more frequent extreme weather, and the migrant surge. The spike has translated into towns recording larger volumes of homeless individuals in their communities.
“What we’re seeing here is just a tremendous increase of people needing our services in our emergency shelters. We’ve been in overflow all year,” said John Yazwinski, CEO of Father Bill’s and MainSpring, a shelter provider serving the South Shore. “Over the last year, we’ve seen about a 30% increase at the shelter. We’ve seen over a 40% increase of people that are unsheltered in the South Shore.”
Yazwinski said his organization has “huge” worker vacancies, including frontline staff who check people into shelters, as well as those in security, maintenance and food service roles.
“The workforce money is the money that gives our agencies the ability to give cost-of-living increases and bonuses to our frontline staff,” he said. “Our frontline staff during COVID never stayed home — they kept coming. So we want to make sure that they are valued in our state.”
Edwards filed her amendment, which mirrors language approved by the House, as an additional tool to tackle the state’s housing crisis, an aide for the senator indicated. Gov. Healey’s budget proposal didn’t direct money to the program either, with budget documents saying the administration “eliminated FY24 one-time costs.”
“If we look at the staffing for homeless shelters, if they’re not able to fund that staffing and they can’t retain that personnel, then that’s less people they can bring into the shelter. That means there’s more homeless people,” Christianna Golden, Edwards’ legislative and policy director, said. “We in Massachusetts have been successful in addressing individual homelessness but we can’t continue to be successful without a workforce.”
A spokesman for Senate Ways and Means Chair Michael Rodrigues, asked about the lack of funding in the committee’s budget for the workforce development program, said the committee bill allocates $1.14 billion in total funding for housing-related programs, an increase of $66 million over fiscal 2024.
“We are proud to commit over 1 billion in funding to support access to housing for our most vulnerable and marginalized residents, scaffolding them with the support services they need to transition into permanent affordable housing,” Rodrigues spokesman Sean Fitzgerald said in a statement. “This builds on the work from earlier this session when the Senate led on initiatives to increase funding for the low-income housing tax credit and for market rate housing in gateway cities.”
Fitzgerald called the housing crisis a “strong Senate priority” for the rest of the session.
“We look forward to tackling this issue with the $4.1 billion Housing Bond Bill, while also improving on the Committee’s recommendations through the amendment process as members work collaboratively to shape the final Senate budget,” Fitzgerald continued.
The migrant crisis has unleashed a new challenge for individual shelter providers. Downie said individual migrants lack a path out of shelter due to the backlog in obtaining work authorization permits.
“When people don’t have a path out, you don’t have a bed for the next person who becomes homeless, and then that person is then sleeping on the floor,” Downie said. “Of course, our worry is that we’ll collectively run out of space, and we’ll say to people, ‘We don’t have a bed — you know it’s December, and there’s no more room.’”
Yazwinski said his organization has helped more than 60 individual migrants, including those who came to Massachusetts with relatives but did not qualify for the family shelter system. A mother with two children may be separated from her father, uncle or brother, who are then directed to the individual shelter system, he offered as an example.
People from Massachusetts typically stay in shelter for four to five months, though Yazwinski said an undocumented individual or migrant could end up needing to remain for more than a year or two. Individuals are never turned away from shelter, Yazwinski said.
“What we’re doing is we’re taking our cafeteria, our conference rooms and we’re converting them into warming centers, so usually we have people sleeping on mats,” he said. “We got to a place where we couldn’t have enough — we had too many people sleeping on the mats — so then we turned to having people just be in a warming center, where people are just sitting in chairs, just so they’re not outside.”
Protesters march from MIT down Mass. Ave. in Cambridge
A large protest closed part of Massachusetts Avenue to traffic as supporters of the Palestinian people marched through Cambridge after gathering at MIT.
According to the school’s police department, Mass. Ave. was closed between Vassar Street …
Worcester firefighters union alleges ‘toxic work environment’
Worcester’s firefighters union is sounding the alarm about what they’re calling an internal emergency in their own department.
The union on Wednesday released their first of many social media posts from a 13-page report detailing a “to…
Steward hospitals’ ‘level of intensity of care’ declining, doctor says
State officials continue to encourage people to seek care at Steward Health Care’s eight Massachusetts hospitals despite the company’s bankruptcy, but a doctor from a neighboring hospital said the message doesn’t tell the whole story.
Since Steward filed for bankruptcy in Texas last week, Gov. Maura Healey and others have sought to make clear that the legal proceeding does not necessarily mean that anything has changed for patients, urging people to keep their appointments at Steward facilities and encouraging residents to seek emergency care at Steward hospitals without reservation.
Public Health Commissioner Robbie Goldstein told the Public Health Council on Thursday that the state’s “consistent message to patients in the community has been and continues to be that all Steward hospitals in Massachusetts remain open, patients should keep up with their health care needs, maintain their appointments, screenings and tests.”
But the chief of medical affairs at Lawrence General Hospital, which is near to Steward’s Holy Family Hospital in Methuen and Haverhill Hospital in Haverhill, told the council that underneath the state’s rhetoric “is a reality, which is that in spite of these hospitals remaining open, their level of intensity of care is clearly declining.”
“And that’s a message that is not really advertised, but it is real. For the ones that are next door to them, we can see that vital support services — not just having emergency room physicians and nurses, but you need to have orthopedics, neurosurgery, you need to have all of these other things to be able to care for these patients. So what we are finding is that they get in, they get evaluated, but then they get transferred out. And appropriately, because you don’t want to admit them to a situation where they may not have an essential service,” Dr. Eduardo Haddad, a council member, said. “I think it’s important for the state to be aware of this and not, you know, understand that they are functioning at a full level of care, because the likelihood is that this is going to continue to decline.”
Haddad’s comments sparked a conversation about the capacity crunch that has stressed Massachusetts hospitals in recent years, and the fears that Steward closures — or significant degradation of available services — could put other hospitals under even greater pressure.
Goldstein said DPH monitors have been closely watching for staffing, capacity or other issues at Steward’s hospitals, and said that team includes five regional “captains” who have been in touch with Steward hospitals as well as other nearby hospitals or community health centers “so that we can understand those changes in care and access that you’re describing, Dr. Haddad.”
“What we have learned from those conversations is that, at this moment, while there may be shifts in individuals that are providing care at one facility or another, the hospitals are still able to provide the care that they were previously providing,” the commissioner said. “And I think it’s really important for us to have that message out there because we don’t want people with chest pain driving past the Holy Family campus to go someplace else. And we certainly don’t want a pregnant person who is in active labor to drive past Good Samaritan Hospital, and to try to drive to South Shore Hospital or something else in the region.”
