The temperatures may have suggested the dead of summer, but preparations were in full swing this week to welcome students and employees back to classrooms and offices in the fall with COVID-19 still swirling in the hot, humid air.

Gov. Charlie Baker set the bar last week with a no-alternative vaccine mandate for thousands of executive branch employees, but as his administration opened negotiations with unions on the details of that policy, other public officials and agencies used the administration’s approach as a blueprint.

Senate President Karen Spilka announced that all Senate lawmakers and staff would have to be vaccinated by Oct. 15, though the Ashland Democrat said the date for a full return to the State House — a building still closed to the public — remains undecided.

The Massachusetts Gaming Commission also followed the governor’s lead and voted to require the vaccination of all its employees by Oct. 27 as it prepares to fully reopen its downtown Boston office on Nov. 1. The commission is giving its workers two weeks to either prove they have been vaccinated, schedule an appointment or make their case for a religious or medical exemption.

“I absolutely think given the state of affairs this is the way to go,” Gaming Commissioner Eileen O’Brien said, alluding to infection rates that are on the rise.

Mandating vaccinations became an easier decision to make after the Food and Drug Administration gave full approval to Pfizer’s shot, no longer authorized just on an emergency basis. Still, work-from-home and hybrid models will be very much the norm as workers return from vacations and settle into a post-Labor Day rhythm.

While businesses and government agencies consider ways to structure a more flexible work environment, education officials are crossing their fingers that the days of remote learning are behind Massachusetts students and teachers.

With all schools preparing for a full reopening to start the 2021-2022 school year, Education Commissioner Jeff Riley secured the authority he needed from the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to implement a universal masking mandate.

All students, teachers and staff over the age of 5 will be required to wear masks indoors, regardless of vaccination status, to start the school year as the Delta variant has fueled a resurgence of infections and students under 12 remain ineligible for a vaccine.

The board voted 9-1 to support the administration’s school masking plan, which would allow middle and high schools to revisit the issue after Oct. 1 if schools can achieve a vaccination rate of at least 80 percent.

Board member Paymon Rouhanifard cast the lone vote against masks, calling it “just, frankly, really bad public policy” to tie the proposal to vaccination rates. He said he thinks linking it to community spread of the coronavirus would have been a “more reasonable” alternative.

Republican Geoff Diehl, who is running for governor, said he believes the more reasonable thing to do would be to let parents make their own decisions about the health and safety of their children. Diehl, a former Whitman lawmaker, labeled Baker’s latest steps to control the spread of COVID-19 “government intrusion over parental and personal choices in our lives.”

Public opinion, however, is not exactly on Diehl’s side.

The most recent MassINC poll found broad support for masking in schools, even among Republicans. Democrats running for governor would like to see the boundaries pushed even further.

Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz and Danielle Allen both called for vaccines to be made mandatory for school personnel, and Chang-Diaz suggested Baker start a public process now to begin developing a vaccine credentialing system as more businesses — for both workers and patrons — are beginning to require proof vaccination.

Attorney General Maura Healey, who is still deciding whether to join Chang-Diaz on the gubernatorial campaign trail, said she thinks it’s too soon to say whether vaccine passports would be beneficial, or even necessary given the ease with which some fear vaccine cards could be forged.

“If certain things need to be designed or systems created then I think we should be open to doing that. I just don’t have a sense right now, to be honest…of how pervasive this is as a problem,” Healey said during a radio appearance.

Baker was noticeably quiet this week, but also went on the radio to donate and help raise money for the Jimmy Fund, spending more time during his WEEI interview talking about Tom Brady and Charlie Watts than any public policy.

Baker did, however, record a two-part interview with Jon Keller that will begin airing this Sunday before he and First Lady Lauren Baker headed out of town for the weekend on a “personal trip” to Tennessee.

Speaking of travel, Congressman Seth Moulton made international news when he and U.S. Rep.  Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican, snuck away on a secret reconnaissance mission to Kabul in defiance of the State Department and other agencies.

Moulton and Meijer, both veterans, wanted to observe first hand the conditions on the ground as the United States continued to evacuate American and Afghan allies from Afghanistan, but the trip drew strong condemnation from many who accused the pair of staging a political stunt and distracting from the mission on the ground.

Moulton rebutted that criticism, and the pair was back on U.S. soil by the time the Kabul airport became the site of a deadly terrorist bombing that killed dozens, including U.S. soldiers.

The Bakers may be making the most of the waning days of summer, but chances to win $1 million by getting vaccinated are over.

The final two winners of the VaxMillions sweepstakes were drawn this week, with the prizes going to Leominster’s Cynthia Thirath and Gretchen Selva, a sophomore at Four River Charter Public School in Greenfield, who hopes to study music.

It may never be known how many of the 2.5 million entrants in the vaccine Lottery got the shot just for a chance to win, but Treasurer Deb Goldberg is convinced that at the end of the day it was a “win-win for everyone.”

Rep. Andy Vargas is hoping it will be a win-win just for him in the 2022 primary and general elections as the Haverhill Democrat first elected to the House in 2017 launched his campaign for state Senate this week. Vargas is running in the district currently represented by Sen. Diana DiZoglio, who is running statewide for auditor. If elected, he would be the first Dominican-American to be sworn into the Massachusetts Senate.

Long before that race is decided, a new state representative from the 4th Essex District will be seated in the House.

Rep. Brad Hill plans to leave next month to become the newest member of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, and the House this week set the election dates to replace him. The primaries will be held on Nov. 2, followed by a general election on Nov. 30 as the Republican Party — down to 30 seats in the House — attempts to stop the bleeding and hold on to a seat held by Hill since he was first elected in 1998.

Trailing in new public and internal polls released this week that showed City Councilor Michelle Wu leading the pack to become the next mayor of Boston, Mayor Kim Janey pulled back the city’s waterfront redevelopment plan, casting fresh doubt on plans for 600-foot tower on the site of the Boston Harbor Garage next to the New England Aquarium.

There’s intense interest in what happens to Boston’s waterfront, and understandably so, but Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni wishes just a little more attention could be paid to properties not along the eastern seaboard.

Gulluni pulled his staff from the Roderick Ireland Courthouse in Springfield on Wednesday where he said the conditions of the building had deteriorated so much that visible mold was growing in parts of the structure.

Until a remediation team could conduct a thorough decontamination of the building, Gulluni said prosecutors would only work inside on an as-needed basis for trials and other proceedings, but he also said it was time to put a more permanent solution on the books.

“I believe that if we were farther east this building would have been replaced a long time ago,” Gulluni said.

Board of Ed Ties Lifting Of Mandate to School Vaccination Rates

Massachusetts is poised to start its third pandemic-influenced academic year with a mask mandate in place across K-12 schools, after a 9-1 vote Tuesday by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Education Commissioner Jeff Riley said the mandate he plans to impose will require all students and staff to wear masks indoors through Oct. 1. After that date, Riley said, his department will “begin to look for off-ramps on masking in schools.”

“I want to be clear that we are hopeful that this will be a short-term measure, and we continue to work with the health and medical community on off-ramps for masking,” Riley said ahead of the vote.

He said he could not rule out the possibility that masks “may be required intermittently throughout the year” based on the path the virus takes.

Under Riley’s plan, starting in October, middle and high schools where at least 80 percent of students and staff have been vaccinated against COVID-19 would be able to lift the mask requirement, for vaccinated individuals only.

The mandate will apply to students age 5 and up, and education officials have said it will include exceptions for students who cannot wear masks because of medical conditions or behavioral needs.

Education Secretary James Peyser said the policy would both ensure “that we have a smooth opening of school without any confusion or ambiguity about the health protocols that everyone is expected to follow” and “reinforce the importance of vaccinations.”

“Obviously, circumstances may change in the coming weeks, which may allow us to take a different course as the commissioner said, but for now the safest and simplest path forward is to mask up in schools as we all work to meet or exceed the 80 percent vaccination benchmark that we’re talking about,” Peyser said.

While it’s unclear how school district officials will gather the information, Riley told board members in a memo that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education would provide schools with an attestation form they could submit to demonstrate they met the 80 percent threshold.

A shift from the Baker administration’s previous approach, the board’s vote comes after dozens of school committees, boards of health and other local officials across the state had already decided to require masks in their schools, often following lengthy debates at the local level.

Over the past month, more than 100 districts have put policies in place requiring universal masking when school starts, according to a list compiled by the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. With a combined enrollment of about 454,000, those districts serve half the state’s students.

State education and health officials had previously issued what Gov. Charlie Baker called a “strong recommendation” that students in kindergarten through sixth grade — as well as older students and adults who are unvaccinated — wear masks indoors. That recommendation did not require districts to adopt any particular policy, and Baker had said he believes local officials are best suited to make the calls for their communities.

On Friday, after the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced Riley would seek to impose a mask mandate, Baker characterized that move as “appropriate” and said “an ongoing conversation” about back-to-school among state and local officials has been “evolving for the past month or so.”

“I think the commissioner felt this would give everybody sort of what I would describe as a common place to start the year, as well as some pretty heavy incentives for those who can get vaccinated to get vaccinated,” Baker said. “I want to see more people get vaccinated, too. It really is the only way out of this.”

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education received thousands of comments, mostly from parents, ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, member Martin West said.

West, who voted to grant Riley the authority, was one of three board members to speak during the 20-minute meeting and voiced concerns around “the lack of a clear end date or exit criteria for elementary school students who are not currently eligible for vaccination.” He also said he was not sure that requiring unvaccinated older students to still mask up while their vaccinated peers did not need to would work “on both practical and ethical grounds,” questioning how schools would know who had the shots and suggesting students might end up “tattling” on inappropriately maskless classmates.

The sole dissenting vote, Paymon Rouhanifard, said it was “just, frankly, really bad public policy” to tie the proposal to vaccination rates, and said he thinks linking it to community spread of the coronavirus would have been a “more reasonable” alternative.

“I’m old enough to remember how this all started,” he said. “When this all started, it was about flattening the curve, and the curve, you may recall, was about hospitalization rate and count, and all of a sudden, we’re now focused on case count, and I do believe the goal posts have shifted and there hasn’t been an honest discussion about that.”

Rouhanifard, the co-founder and CEO of Propel America and former superintendent of Camden, N.J. schools, said he was “genuinely surprised” that Baker backs the mandate because he considers the governor “to be really smart about technocratic policy solutions.”

“When this all started, and as our school reopening debate demonstrated, a debate about the pandemic and how we address it and policy solutions really became a debate about Trumpism itself and where you stand ideologically, rather than meeting in the messy middle to determine evidence-based policy solutions,” he said.

Board member Matt Hills, who praised state leaders as “unafraid to pivot” in their pandemic response, voiced confidence in Riley, describing the commissioner as someone who would not “just keep restrictions in place for the sake of it.”

Riley is authorized to issue the mask mandate under the state’s regulations around student learning time. Those regulations say that when the board declares — as it did in Tuesday’s vote — that exigent circumstances exist that hinder students’ ability to safely attend classes, the commissioner “shall issue health and safety requirements and related guidance for districts.”

As of Aug. 13, 57 percent of the Massachusetts population between the ages of 12 and 17, or 271,900 people, were fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to federal data. A total of 333,070 members of that age group had received at least one dose.

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday granted full approval to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for use in people age 16 and older, and those shots are also available to youth between the ages of 12 and 15 under an FDA emergency use authorization.

There is still not a COVID-19 vaccine authorized for kids under 12. State officials have said they hope that could change as soon as this fall, but there is not yet a clear timeline for how much of the coming school year will play out with younger students still ineligible for a vaccine.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students and visitors in K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status. Locally, groups including the Massachusetts Medical Society and the Massachusetts Academy of Family Physicians have also said masks should be required indoors for everyone in schools.

Massachusetts Teachers Association President Merrie Najimy said the vote was “a significant advancement toward keeping our communities safe as we prepare for a return to full in-person learning.”

“Students of all ages have been champions from the beginning,” Najimy said in a statement. “They quickly learned an important lesson of life – that when they wear their masks, they are protecting their peers, educators, and the entire school community. Masks have become routine for them. We can count on students to do their part once again to help this comprehensive policy succeed as classes resume. As we have been saying for many months now, our top priority is to get our schools open safely and keep them open for full in-person learning. This vote is a step toward that goal.”

The Community Leadership Institute is now accepting applications for the 2021-2022 program year. The Community Leadership Institute began in 1988, known then as Leadership North Central.  Over the last 25 years, more than 275 participants have graduated from the Institute and become leaders in their communities, with over 100 in the last five years.  Participants for the Institute are sponsored by their business and are seen as leaders or potential leaders within that company. The best leaders know that training their successors to be competent, knowledgeable and well-connected community leaders is crucial for the North Central Massachusetts community’s economic vitality. The Community Leadership Institute was developed to support the access to region’s many organizations, industries and business leaders as part of the succession plan not only for individual businesses but for the community at large in this 21st century technology and knowledge-driven economy.

Deadline to apply for the 2021-2022 Community Leadership Institute is August 27, 2021.

Please contact Kat Deal with questions regarding the Community Leadership Institute at 978.353.7600 ext. 235 or by email .

 

Chamber Receives National Communications Award The Chamber received a Communicator Award for its “A Message to North Central Massachusetts” video. During an unprecedented time, the video sent out a message of hope and resilience to the people in the communities of North Central Massachusetts. The video was shared through NorthCentralMass.com and on social media channels allowing people throughout the communities to hear the message. The Communicator Awards is dedicated to recognizing excellence, effectiveness, and innovation across all areas of communication. We are the leading international awards program honoring talent in this highly competitive field. Founded nearly three decades ago, The Communicator Awards receives almost 5,000 entries from companies, agencies, studios, and boutique shops of all sizes, making it, globally, one of the largest awards show of its kind. The Communicator Awards is sanctioned and judged by the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts, an invitation-only group consisting of top-tier professionals from acclaimed media, communications, advertising, creative and marketing firms. AIVA members include executives from organizations like Amazon, Big Spaceship, Chelsea Pictures, Conde Nast, Critical Mass, Disney, ESPN, GE Digital, IBM, The Nation of Artists, Next door, Spotify, Time, Inc., the Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones, and Wired

Legislation relies on $5 billion surplus; includes $1 billion for unemployment relief and proposal to support local nonprofits

The Baker-Polito Administration today filed a final Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21) supplemental budget proposal that aims to improve Massachusetts’ economic competitiveness as the Commonwealth continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. The $1.568 billon supplemental budget would provide $1 billion in unemployment insurance relief for employers, support greater resources for local charities and nonprofits and ensure that small businesses do not bear a tax burden for assistance received through pandemic relief programs. The legislation relies on a FY21 surplus of approximately $5 billion and would also make critical investments in housing, human services, and education.

“Thanks to careful management of the Commonwealth’s tax revenues and strong economic activity, Massachusetts has an unprecedented surplus at the close of Fiscal Year 2021, and this legislation ensures those resources are put to work to support local economies and small businesses,” said Governor Charlie Baker. “Our proposal to provide employers with unemployment insurance relief is fiscally responsible and would provide much-needed support for businesses and workers across the Commonwealth. By combining this bill with our $2.9 billion plan to spend a portion of Massachusetts’ federal funds on urgent priorities like homeownership, environmental infrastructure and job-training, the Commonwealth has an opportunity to leverage significant resources to promote further economic growth and support our hardest-hit communities.”

“This legislation provides an opportunity to reduce significant burdens on our employers, enabling them to hire and retain workers in communities across the Commonwealth,” said Lt. Governor Karyn Polito. “Thanks to strong economic activity by consumers and businesses, Massachusetts has a unique opportunity to leverage these surplus funds to further strengthen the economy and support our communities. We look forward to working with our partners in the Legislature to make these critical investments.”

The Administration’s supplemental budget proposes dedicating $1 billion of Massachusetts’ FY21 surplus toward the Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund. This affordable proposal would help stabilize the UI Trust Fund and lessen employers’ future UI obligations. The legislation also includes language to make the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) advances, Shuttered Venue Operators grants, Restaurant Revitalization Fund grants, and state MGCC grants nontaxable for all Massachusetts recipients, consistent with federal tax treatment.

The bill also proposes to finally implement the income tax charitable deduction, a measure that was first approved by voters nearly twenty years ago. Given the Commonwealth’s strong fiscal situation, the proposal is fiscally responsible and would support greater resources for the local charities and non-profits who supported vulnerable populations through the pandemic.

“The strong working relationship we enjoy with our colleagues in the House and Senate allowed us all to approach an uncommon fiscal year thoughtfully and deliberatively,” said Administration and Finance Secretary Michael J. Heffernan. “We are fortunate to end FY21 with an impressive surplus buoyed by rare federal activity. The Commonwealth must seize this opportunity to implement sensible fiscal policies like finally implementing a tax deduction to boost charity organizations that was approved by voters two decades ago, a measure that is affordable and should be done now.”

At the close of FY21, the Commonwealth’s Stabilization Fund now stands at a balance of $4.63 billion – the highest level ever by more than a billion dollars. The $5 billion surplus included more than $1 billion in excess capital gains deposited into the Stabilization Fund; another $1.1 billion of the surplus made a planned withdrawal from the Stabilization Fund no longer necessary.

In addition to the $1 billion UI transfer proposal, the legislation also proposes additional investments necessary to continue operating state government and invest in key priorities, including:

• $405 million for a collective bargaining reserve to fund the retroactive and fiscal year 2022 (FY22) costs of agreements that are either in place or anticipated but not yet signed, thus mitigating pressure on the FY22 budget; 
• $39 million to support rate increases for the human service workforce;
• $20 million to support the workforce in Chapter 766-approved special education schools; 
• $17 million to support an additional 800 temporary individual shelter beds throughout FY22 and pay for a one-time six-month 10% increase in provider rates, ensuring the Commonwealth’s individual shelter system has the resources necessary to protect vulnerable populations;
• $5 million to pilot an evidence-based permanent supportive housing model for individuals experiencing homelessness, creating fast and sustainable pathways out of homelessness and;
• $3 million in supplemental campus support for Quinsigamond Community College and Worcester State University as it absorbs nursing students displaced by the closure of Becker College.

The legislation also includes several other policy proposals including:

• Allow survivors of servicemembers who die in training incidents to be eligible for a Medal of Liberty;
• Grant MassHealth the authority to directly negotiate rebate agreements for certain medical supplies and other non-drug products;
• Extend the municipal vulnerability preparedness grant program to tribes and other regional and local entities who are not municipalities; and,
• Allow civil service evaluations to be in an electronic format and provide greater flexibility in administering civil service evaluations.

To read the Governor’s filing letter, click here.