A ROBUST EXCHANGE of views is crucial to a healthy democracy, and we try to do our part by providing a forum for well-argued commentary that reflects a broad range of perspectives on issues facing the Commonwealth.
A look back at some of the year’s most compelling pieces offers a window into many of the pressing issues facing Massachusetts – from housing to health care and transportation. Some commentary pieces seemed noteworthy on their own. In other cases, it was the give and take of more than one op-ed piece on a topic that caught our eye. Here, then, is our top 10 list of CommonWealth Beacon commentary for 2024, either individual pieces or a group of them on a subject.
Newton leaders and residents made their own bed
The best commentary causes you to think about an issue in a new light, and that was the case with a piece by Greg Reibman, president of the Charles River Regional Chamber, a business nonprofit covering Newton, Needham, Watertown, and Wellesley. While there was no shortage of opinion over a late January teachers strike in Newton that bitterly divided residents of the affluent Boston suburb, Reibman connected the dots to argue that Newton teachers deserved more money – but a big reason why that put the city in such a fiscal pinch was its resistance to new development that would have brought much-needed new tax revenue to municipal coffers.
Both sides overselling MBTA Communities Act
A new law mandating zoning for multi-family housing in communities served by the MBTA has prompted fierce resistance in some communities. The state’s ability to enforce the MBTA Communities Act, which is aimed at addressing the region’s dire housing shortage, is now the focus of a case before the Supreme Judicial Court. But Luc Schuster, who directs Boston Indicators, a research program at the Boston Foundation, says the heated debate is obscuring two inconvenient truths being downplayed by both sides: The new zoning law is not nearly the burdensome intrusion on local control that opponents claim and it also is hardly the big home run for housing production that some proponents have painted it as.
The Steward fiasco
The collapse of Steward Health Care was the dominant story in health care in 2024. As the year began, Alan Sager, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, offered some pointed criticism that only seemed more on point as the year came to a close and we learned more about the bankrupt company, whose top executives managed to walk away from the mess they created with millions of dollars. Among his observations: “It was a delusion for many in state government to hope that for-profit health care could rescue needed hospitals.” “In health care, state government has long been seduced into a posture of ‘watchful waiting’ that became an excuse for dozing off on the job.” As the dust started to settle, in August, John McDonough of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Paul Hattis of the Lown Institute, took stock of the Steward implosion and concluded that the sale of six of the eight Massachusetts Steward hospitals to non-profit providers was about as good an outcome from a bad situation as could have been achieved. Steward, and its rapacious CEO, Ralph de la Torre, they wrote, “will rest forever in Massachusetts health care infamy.”
The never-ending transportation funding crisis
Can we fix, once and for all, the transportation funding structure that is key to supporting the mobility the state needs for a vibrant economy and liveable communities? All eyes are on a transportation funding task force Gov. Maura Healey established, which is due to release recommendations by the end of the year. Over the summer, Jarred Johnson of the advocacy group TransitMatters worried about reports that some funding solutions may already be “off the table.” Former state transportation secretary Jim Aloisi said there is “no magic solution” to be hoped for – only the political will to make the necessary tough calls. “We can no longer play the kick-the-can game, nor can we settle for simply returning to levels of funding that are never stable over time, and wholly inadequate to meet current and future needs,” he wrote. And if the task force is searching for ideas, wrote Reggie Ramos of Transportation for Massachusetts and Andrea Freeman of the Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts back in April, it should look to other states that are “light years ahead of Massachusetts” in implementing thoughtful funding solutions to their transportation challenges.
Free community college comes with questions
Over the summer, state leaders celebrated a new initiative making community college free to all state residents, but some education policy experts had questions about the plan. In January, before the new policy was adopted, Joshua Goodman, a professor at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, argued that such a program should be targeted at lower-income students. He also argued that a cost-of-living stipend proposed for community college students should also be made available to lower-income students attending four-year colleges so that the program doesn’t have the unintended consequence of drawing students to two-year community colleges who would have better long-term outcomes by enrolling at a four-year school. Meanwhile, Bob Schwartz, an emeritus professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, questioned launching such a program without a much clearer understanding of “the role we need our community colleges to play in our state and regional economies, and the resources required to enable them to play that role.”
Body cams: an untapped resource to improve policing
The value of body-worn cameras, which are increasingly common in US police departments, is usually in documenting what happened during the most serious encounters officers have on patrol, including those involving use of deadly force. But Jim Jordan, the retired director of strategic planning at the Boston Police Department, said the thousands of hours recorded by body cameras of more routine police-citizen interactions represent a tremendous, untapped resource that, with the aid of artificial intelligence, could be used for professional development training and feedback to greatly improve police practices.
White Stadium remake: Boon for city or boondoggle?
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu wants to rebuild White Stadium, a run-down high school sports facility in Franklin Park, through a public-private partnership that would produce a gleaming new stadium for Boston high school athletics while also serving as the home field for the city’s new entry in the professional National Women’s Soccer League. Chris Dempsey, a skeptic of government spending on sports stadiums who helped lead the effort to kill Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics, says this is a deal that makes sense. Andrew Zimbalist, an economist who specializes in the sports industry – and who co-authored a book with Dempsey about the folly of Boston’s Olympics bid – disagrees strongly with that view, and penned a commentary piece laying out why in June and another this month after new information came out on cost overruns already hitting the project. Jessica Spruill, a nurse whose Dorchester backyard directly faces Franklin Park, also took a dim view of the proposal.
Everett soccer stadium debate exposes problem of being guided by centuries-old boundaries
It’s been a year for debate over soccer stadiums, with Everett officials and the New England Revolution moving a big step closer to building a 25,000-seat venue on the banks of the Mystic River after the Legislature approved a key zoning change that was needed. The stadium proposal, and concerns raised by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, caught the attention of Garrett Dash Nelson, president of the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. He offered this insightful essay detailing all the ways that the basis for authority over big land use decisions – municipal boundaries that often date to the 1600s – make little sense when thinking about the interconnectedness of Greater Boston communities in the 21st century.
The lesson for Democrats from Trump victory
The presidential race sucked up a lot of oxygen this year, and after the votes were counted there was no shortage of post-election analysis trying to make sense of it all. In deep blue Massachusetts a lot of that has occurred among Democrats offering their take on what went wrong for their side. Liam Kerr, a co-founder of WelcomePAC, which supports Democratic candidates nationally in center-right districts and advocates for a big-tent Democratic Party, said the problem is a party overly dominated by left-leaning interest groups that narrow its appeal among moderate voters, and a record of blue-state governance that has not done a good job solving bread-and-butter issues of top concern to voters. Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Massachusetts and Henry Wortis of Our Revolution Massachusetts, argued that the problem was just the opposite – a failure to more clearly embrace a full-throated progressive agenda. “The Democratic Party’s desire to raise money from the very industries that it promises to rein in creates a contradiction that will always result in muddled or muted messaging,” they wrote.
The bottom line with many contentious issues? It’s complicated.
Controversial issues can draw sharply divided views, but Jim Peyser, who served as secretary of education under Gov. Charlie Baker, set out to do something that rarely happens in the heat of big public policy debates: acknowledge that these issues are often complicated and that both sides may have reasonable arguments to support their views. Over the course of the year, after first laying out the premise of his series in two essays (here and here), Peyser teed up nine important public policy debates, doing his best to serve as an honest broker by laying out the best arguments from each side. He examined the call for a moratorium on new prison construction or expansion; proposals for free community college and free MBTA service; the state’s right-to-shelter law; allowing municipalities to enact rent control; whether the state should legalize supervised injection sites; whether to give school librarians more control over book selection while limiting the say of school committees and parents; whether Massachusetts should establish a reparations commission; and whether to require voters to produce an ID before casting their ballot.
It was an admirable undertaking, one inspired by the headline on his initial essay in the series, which carried a message worth considering as debate on issues ramps up during the new year ahead of us: “Restoring civic discourse by embracing complexity: Can we get beyond viewing disagreements as mortal threats and opponents as sworn enemies?”
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