BOSTON — With the state’s family shelter system under pressure from mounting costs and violent on-site incidents, Gov. Maura Healey on Wednesday recommended statutory changes to the decades-old Right to Shelter Law, asking House and Senate leadership to fold the reforms into a supplemental budget.
In a new letter, Healey called for “strengthening” criminal background checks for shelter applicants by requiring the Executive Office of Housing to conduct CORI checks before families are placed in the emergency shelters. She had previously told the press that comprehensive background checks were conducted on all shelter residents, before her administration last week said that had not actually been done.
All family members looking to stay in a state shelter would also have to prove their lawful U.S. residency under the governor’s recommendation, unless a child in the family already has lawful residence. Currently, only one member of the family unit must show citizenship or lawful presence.
The governor is also seeking to require families to show proof of eligibility up front before they are given a shelter spot, and removing the option of someone showing their eligibility through “self-attestation.”
A massive number of families have arrived in recent years looking to access the state shelter system, competing with Bay State families already seeking shelter access. Around 48,000 people have lived in the state-run sites over the past three years, Healey said last week.
“The Administration proposes requiring in the line item that all members of the household must be residents of Massachusetts, and that anyone receiving EA show an intent to remain in Massachusetts, which may be shown either through independent documentary verification of an intent to remain in Massachusetts, or through three months of physical presence in the state,” Healey wrote in her letter to House Speaker Ronald Mariano, Senate President Karen Spilka, and the two branches’ Ways and Means chairs.
Healey last week filed her mini-budget with another $425 million for the costly shelter system (H 51) and some major policy changes, including a proposed six-month limit on how long families can stay in shelters. The bill is pending before the House Ways and Means Committee.
It was three days after she filed the bill that her administration told The Boston Globe it had not been conducting comprehensive background checks on all shelter residents as the governor had previously stated. Healey since then has spoken about altering the Right to Shelter Law so it “actually aligns with its original intent.”
She told reporters last Friday that she was going to work with the Legislature on amending the law, which she said was written “to protect and take care of poor women and children” and did not contemplate “a broken immigration system and waves and waves of people arriving in Massachusetts.”
The reforms were not presented as legislation but rather as bullet-point ideas in a four-page letter.
House Republican Leader Bradley Jones Jr. said the “hasty” follow-up from Healey “seems a lot more like damage control, full retreat.”
The North Reading Republican said he interpreted the letter as saying, “‘We’re taking on water badly, we gotta do something, and we’ll send a letter to the Legislature saying please save us from ourselves.'”
“Which the Legislature’s happy to do,” he added.
Republican lawmakers this week called for more system transparency and accountability, and GOP lawmakers wrote a letter to Auditor Diana DiZoglio on Tuesday asking her to audit the EA shelter program. DiZoglio indicated her office is already engaged in an audit of the Executive Office of Housing.
“During this incredibly challenging time, in which the shelter system has operated at full capacity, we have heard concerns raised by residents who want to ensure their taxpayer dollars are being spent in a transparent, appropriate, efficient and impactful manner,” DiZoglio wrote in a letter shared by Republicans on Wednesday.
Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr said Healey’s new proposals “fall short of where we need to be,” but “signal her conceptual agreement to what we have been pursuing for so long.”
House budget chief Aaron Michlewitz told the Herald this week that he wanted more information on the spate of shelter-site crimes before advancing the governor’s bill, which will make its next stop on the House floor.
Mariano on Wednesday pointed to previous House efforts to rein in program costs and said the House is open to additional changes.
“As the House continues to work on the supplemental budget proposal that was filed by Governor Healey earlier this month, we will remain focused on instituting further reforms centered around fiscal responsibility and safety, policies that will be informed by conversations with House members, through continued collaboration with the Healey-Driscoll administration, and by actions taken at the federal level,” Mariano said.
A spokesman for Senate President Karen Spilka says she recognizes by the responsibility to support families in crisis and the need to responsibly manage taxpayer dollars.
“She has long recognized our moral responsibility to keep families in crisis off of our streets, and will work with her colleagues to review this proposal with the gravity that it deserves,” spokesman Gray Milkowski said.
Senate budget chief Michael Rodrigues said last week that he thought a proposed residency requirement “raises constitutional issues,” but did not foreclose considering it.
“I have evaluated the Right to Shelter Law and regulations as well as the operational burdens on the system,” Healey said in her letter to legislative Democrats. “Based on that review, and in the face of continued inaction by Congress and no assistance from the federal government, I believe these changes are appropriate and needed to ensure the long-term sustainability of the state shelter system in a way that aligns with the original intent of the law.”
The Republican Party said GOP lawmakers have been calling for reforms for two years, and said changes are only advancing now due to “the release of damaging information that has been known to the administration for some time.”
“These reforms are shocking — not because they’re being implemented, but because they should have been put in place at the onset of this crisis. It is incomprehensible that we’ve been housing adults with children, and those adults weren’t even required to complete a CORI check,” MassGOP spokesperson Logan Trupiano said.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Healey expands shelter law shakeup