The $425 million bill the House is expected to pass Thursday would give the Healey administration new, but temporary, authority to restrict eligibility for state emergency shelters and new permanent mandates aimed at tightening security at the shelters where more than 6,000 families are currently living.
House Democrats released a bill Wednesday designed to fund the maxed-out emergency assistance (EA) system through the end of June while also imposing a new six-month limit on how long families can stay in shelters as well as a rigid cap on the number of families the state will serve in 2026 -- no more than 4,000 at a time, a one-third cut from the caseload as of Jan. 30 (6,012 families). The administration had previously said its goal is to reduce the system’s caseload to 4,000 families by June 2026.
“By creating stricter eligibility requirements, along with increased security measures, this supplemental budget is the latest iteration of the House’s continued commitment to protecting vulnerable children and families in Massachusetts in a fiscally sustainable manner,” House Speaker Ronald Mariano said in a statement.
Gov. Maura Healey declared a state of emergency in August 2023 as an influx of migrants and thousands of families of Bay Staters sought the shelter that Massachusetts by law provides to families and pregnant women. Caseloads shot up from the typical 3,500 families to peak at 7,500 and the system swelled from about $350 million annually to cost taxpayers more than $1 billion in recent years.
The Ways and Means Committee had been weighing Healey’s spending plan since Jan. 9 and the governor made additional proposals to reform the 1983 Right to Shelter Law in a Jan. 15 letter to top lawmakers . The half-billion dollars in direct appropriations and one-time funds that lawmakers have already approved for the EA system in fiscal 2025 ran out Jan. 31 and the administration has said it will not be have money to pay bills that come due until more funding is approved.
The House bill would draw the $425 million from the state’s Transitional Escrow Fund, a reserve fund created initially as a stash for a state budget surplus that has taken on greater significance in state finance over the last few years. Healey’s office has said using money from that account can shield programs in the regular state budget from the possibility of shelter-affected cuts.
Nineteen members of the 31-person House Ways and Means Committee voted to advance the bill Wednesday while five voted against and one representative reserved their rights. Six members of the committee did not vote at all. Chairman Aaron Michlewitz’s office said he would not be available Wednesday to discuss his recommendation to spend $425 million and make sweeping changes to a significant state program.
Mariano’s office said the committee bill adopts the administration’s recommendation around so-called presumptive eligibility by allowing the state to verify eligibility for shelter benefits during the application process by “requiring applicants to prove Massachusetts residency and an intent to stay in Massachusetts by providing certain documentation.”
The administration has said that a “presumptive eligibility” mandate was added to the EA system line item in 2005 requiring the state to place families into shelter based on self-attestations of eligibility. Administration and Finance Secretary Matthew Gorzkowicz and Housing Secretary Edward Augustus said last week that roughly half of all families that apply for shelter “are determined to be ineligible for the benefit based on their initial application materials and prior to being placed in the system” and that the state’s conservative estimate is that at least 6% of families are determined to be ineligible after being placed presumptively based on initial information they provided.
Officials said they were confident that removing that language and reverting to the prior practice of requiring pre-placement verification of eligibility for most families would “further reduce demand” on the system. The cost of one month of “presumptive eligibility” in the EA shelter system is between $10,000 and $15,000 per family, the secretaries said.
The House bill also gives the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities the authority to “require benefits to be provided only to families who are residents of Massachusetts and who are United States citizens; persons lawfully admitted for permanent residence; or otherwise permanently residing under the color of law in the U.S.,” the speaker’s office said, but also requires that temporary respite sites be made available to non-eligible families for up to 30 days upon arrival in Massachusetts.
There are also measures to reduce the maximum length in an EA shelter from nine to six consecutive months, and to remove the availability of two 90-day extensions for certain situations. EOHLC would be allowed, under the House bill, to deem families that have income exceeding 200% of the Federal Poverty Level for three consecutive months to be no longer eligible for shelter benefits.
While the governor’s team told the House that its proposed reforms “should be permanent,” the eligibility changes the House seeks would be temporary since they would be effectuated by amending the fiscal year 2025 budget.
“Over the past several years, as the population of the emergency shelter system has grown, the House has attempted to uphold the Commonwealth’s right to shelter law while also being mindful of the long-term fiscal sustainability of the program,” Michlewitz said in a statement. “The reforms contained in this proposal will ensure that right to shelter is maintained by further capping the length of stay and verifying eligibility, while also enacting stricter background checks on those who enter the shelter system to better protect the families who need these services the most.”
One Corner Office proposal that the House did not adopt would have explicitly required that the situation or incident that made a family eligible for EA shelter benefits occurred in Massachusetts. Currently, families can be eligible based on several types of no-fault eviction or if they are in a housing situation “not meant for human habitation” -- but there is nothing imposing a geographic limit on those criteria.
About one-third of families that applied for EA benefits in the last six months said on their applications that they did not live in Massachusetts at some point within the 90 days prior to their application, Gorzkowicz and Augustus wrote to lawmakers last week. The administration said making the geographic requirement explicit would be in line with the original intent of the state’s 1983 Right to Shelter law, which “aimed to address homelessness occurring in Massachusetts and impacting Massachusetts residents.”
“[W]e have seen numerous instances in which applications for shelter were based on homelessness that occurred in one of our border states,” the secretaries said, adding that 4% of families that leave the EA system transition directly to housing in another state.
On the safety front, the House bill proposes to require that each individual adult applicant or beneficiary in the EA system disclose all prior criminal convictions in Massachusetts and any other jurisdiction, except for convictions that are sealed or were expunged. It also would require CORI background checks for each individual adult applicant or beneficiary prior to shelter placement. The Healey administration imposed a new background check policy on Jan. 27.
The House bill also directs EOHLC to permanently require each adult applicant or beneficiary that joins a family in the EA system to provide notice, and EOHLC would be required to review all information necessary to verify the individual’s eligibility.
Mariano’s office said the security-related measures included in the House bill would be permanent changes to the EA system.
The House bill drew a rebuke from the Mass. Fiscal Alliance, a group largely aligned with President Donald Trump that last week called on the state to do away with the EA system entirely. The group said the House bill was “an unserious solution to a very serious problem” and would be ineffective unless it authorized state cooperation with federal immigration enforcement authorities, an idea that the House has never embraced.
“The Speaker claimed to have offered some 'reforms’ which are just carry over ideas from what Governor Healey proposed in her letter to lawmakers last month, including asking applicants to self-declare any past criminal convictions,” spokesman Paul Craney said. “Asking criminals, many of whom we cannot verify the identity of in the first place, to self-declare past crimes will not work and is no substitute for allowing ICE to cooperate with state resources.”
The House plans to gavel in at 11 a.m. Thursday and told representatives to be ready for roll call votes starting at 1 p.m. House Democrats plan to caucus at 12 p.m., and Mariano and Michlewitz usually speak to reporters after that closed-door meeting. Before the shelter system can be recapitalized, the spending bill will also have to clear the Senate, be reconciled into a final compromise version (if necessary), and be signed by the governor.
