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☀️ Sun’s out, with highs in the 50s. Sunset is at 6:56 p.m.
Tonight Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is taking the stage for her third State of the City address. It’s an interesting moment: Wu is coming off a high-profile congressional hearing over Boston’s policies around limiting how police officers are allowed to cooperate with federal immigration agents. Wu will likely again refer to Boston as the safest major city in America ( GBH’s Adam Reilly did a fact-check on that claim here ) and talk about the city’s fast-moving infrastructure plans.
It’s also an election year, and Wu already has some declared challengers in the race: Josh Kraft, the son of billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; and Domingos DaRosa, a community activist and owner of a property maintenance company. Expected highlights: local civic heroes and community advocate collaborations.
Our own Adam Reilly, Saraya Wintersmith and Tori Bedford will be covering the speech live. You can follow along here , or on 89.7 FM, and expect their main takeaways in your inbox first thing tomorrow morning.
Four Things to Know
ICE in Chelsea: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were out in Chelsea yesterday, detaining three undocumented men on a painting job and taking a man in handcuffs from one car to another in a Market Basket parking lot. Jose Orellana, who was picking up the three men to go to a job in Needham, said he has not heard from them all day. “They asked me for my driver’s license, and they ask me my status. And I say I am an American citizen, and they check anyway,” he said. “It’s sad what happened, especially for the families.”
Mass. General Brigham is planning to invest $400 million over the next four years in cancer treatment and research as the hospital plans to split from the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Dana Farber plans to leave the state’s largest hospital system and partner with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to build its own cancer hospital. “We begin this work now with the goal of ensuring that MGB Cancer is fully operational using our own resources, ready to serve patients before the conclusion of our current agreement with Dana-Farber in Fall 2028,” Mass. General Brigham’s CEO Dr. Anne Klibanski wrote. The hospital system recently laid off about 1,500 employees.
After last year’s protests related to the war in Gaza, Emerson saw its enrollment drop 6%, despite undergraduate enrollment rising 5% nationwide. The school has a small student body — about 4,000 students — and had to cut its budget by $10 million this year. While it’s hard to definitively connect those numbers with the school’s reaction to protests, GBH News reporter Kirk Carapezza spoke with five Jewish students who left the school because they did not feel welcome there. “Certain people had started to conflate Judaism, or even just having an Israeli identity, with being violent or supporting genocide,” said Meira Fiber-Munro, who transferred from Emerson to the University of Oregon in Eugene.
Welcome home, astronauts: Needham’s own Suni Williams and her colleague Butch Wilmore are back on earth after an unexpected nine months living in the International Space Station. They were supposed to be there for just over a week, but issues with their Boeing craft left them stuck in orbit. Though both astronauts said the uncertainty was hard on their families, they said they were making the best of it. “We take life a little too seriously on earth,” Williams told Boston Public Radio in an interview from the Space Station back in October. “We get aggravated with some of the littlest, stupidest things that, really, we shouldn’t, because this is our one big planet. This is our one big place that we live. We don’t really know if anybody else lives anywhere else, so we really should just get along.”
Worcester has a lot of dirt roads. Residents say good luck driving on them.
Drive through New England’s second-largest city and you’ll find a not-so-pleasant surprise: about 80 miles of unpaved roads, covered in snow and ice in the winter and pockmarked with craters in the summer. Often the only indication that dirt is ahead is a tiny addition to street signs reading “private street: dangerous.”
Meghan Truitt lives on Baldwin Street, one of those unpaved Worcester roads, and once had an exposed sewer cap severely damage the bottom of her Ford SUV.
“It was like $16,000 worth of damage,” Truitt said (insurance helped pay for it.) “I thought I missed the sewer cap by going around it. But you have to weave up the street, which is dangerous in and of itself.”
Ryan Massimino, who lives on Wildey Avenue, said he thinks of the car parts that dot his street as a sort of fee.
“That’s the toll you pay to go up this road,” he said.
These roads were often built more than 100 years ago, when property owners could divide up their land into new lots and streets without the city requiring those new roads meet any specific standards.
Other cities have processes in place for residents to request that their private road become public, which means the city will pave and maintain it. Some cities require that the road’s residents foot part of the bill; in Boston, for example, the city covers half the cost. In Springfield, city officials use $3.5 million in municipal bonds to pay for repairs.
In Worcester, residents of private roads have to pay the full cost of repairs – and it can add up to more than $150 per foot. For Truitt and her neighbors on Baldwin Street the bill would be $100,000.
“With the cost of living where it’s at, there’s no way,” Truitt said. “We live in a paycheck-to-paycheck society.”
So unless another solution comes up, she’ll have to keep weaving up and down her street.
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