House passes $425 million bill limiting families

The legislation, voted 126-26 largely along party lines, now heads to the Senate, where the chamber’s budget chief, State Senator Michael Rodrigues, said they will likely take it up early next week.
The legislation would require families to prove they are eligible for shelter and have lawful status in the US at least through the fiscal year ending June 30. It would seek to place a six month limit on how long families can stay in the shelter system. And it would cap, for one year, the number of families in the system at 4,000, beginning Dec. 31.
Massachusetts House lawmakers passed a $425 million bill Thursday to finance the state’s beleaguered emergency shelter system that would also change the requirements for who can stay in the shelters and for how long.
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The changes come as a surge of migrants and a housing shortage in Massachusetts have driven up the program’s costs, which House Speaker Ron Mariano told reporters before the vote the bill’s changes intended to tackle.
“I don’t know so much that it’s meant to keep migrant families out of the system — it’s meant to control the expense side that we are faced with in a budget that’s under stress from a lot of different ways,” Mariano said. “We lost our federal partner. We see what’s going on in Washington, we see the changes that are being offered up, and we’re very concerned about going forward and making this a manageable, successful program.”
The new requirements align with changes Governor Maura Healey proposed last month to the state’s unique right-to-shelter law, which she said was not designed to support “waves and waves of people” coming into Massachusetts. The Healey administration said the system ran out of money last Friday, preventing them from paying nonprofit shelter providers.
State Representative Aaron Michlewitz, a Democrat and the chamber’s budget chief, said on the House floor Thursday that the emergency shelter system had “ballooned beyond anyone’s imagination, and the influx has overwhelmed our capacities.”
“With no relief from Washington in sight, and with every federal assistance dollar now in question, we are left with no choice but to put a temporary restraint on the emergency shelter assistance program,” Michlewitz said. “Otherwise, we will be forced to consider the unthinkable — potentially ending the right to shelter completely.”
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Under the current system, the Healey administration has a limit of 7,500 families that can stay in the system for up to nine months. The House bill would limit families to a six month stay, a change Healey proposed in January, and also temporarily lower the systemwide cap to 4,000 families for a year beginning Dec. 31.
As of January, roughly 6,000 families were enrolled in the emergency shelter program, according to state officials.
The bill would also require all shelter applicants to disclose past criminal convictions and would mandate the state run some form of criminal background checks.
The bill released Wednesday sparked criticism from Republicans who lamented Democrats had not implemented these changes sooner. Several Republican lawmakers introduced amendments to implement harsher restrictions, most of which Democrats soundly rejected. Republican Minority Leader Brad Jones of North Reading, for example, proposed cutting funding to $200 million and requiring criminal background checks for residents.
“On this side of the aisle, we think it needs to go a little further, and that we’re starting today where we probably should have started a couple years ago,” Jones said of the system changes while discussing an amendment to require adults to undergo criminal background checks.
That proposal drew condemnation from Representative Michael Day, a Stoneham Democrat, who called it an attempt to “back door strangle our emergency shelter law altogether and attempt to kill it from within.”
Another amendment from Representative Paul Frost, an Auburn Republican, sought to implement a specific six or 12 month residency requirement for those in the shelter system. Mariano told reporters before the vote House leaders believed “a set amount of time of residence in the Commonwealth is unconstitutional.”
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But lawmakers added a Jones amendment to the bill at the end of its debate that would require the state use a competitive bidding process on any contracts “providing services” to families in the system. The Healey administration had faced criticism for awarding a no-bid contract worth $10 million to an East Boston caterer that later delivered undercooked chicken to families.
Not all House Democrats initially appeared onboard with the changes. Several, including Representatives Marjorie Decker, Mike Connolly of Cambridge, and Erika Uyterhoeven of Somerville, filed amendments seeking to eliminate the new 4,000 families cap. All, however, were withdrawn and not voted on.
The House approved two amendments that would expand who can receive hardship waivers to extend the proposed six-month limit to include families with children under the age of 6 and people with disabilities.
The legislation, passed without a public hearing, came as the House and Senate have still not finalized their rules packages or assigned members to committees. Mariano, however, said the delays to rules and committee assignments came because lawmakers “had this issue dumped in our lap” after the fiscal year 2025 budget did not provide enough money to fund the program for a whole year.
“This is the quickest bill of this magnitude that we’ve done in a session in a long time,” Michlewitz added, “because a $425 million spending bill in the first week of February is much more faster than we’ve done in previous sessions.”
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A couple dozen people gathered outside the House chamber Thursday morning to protest the bill’s changes, holding banners urging lawmakers to “stop the shelter cuts.” Advocates have criticized Healey’s proposal, saying the new restrictions could leave vulnerable families without housing.
“This is a supplemental budget and the funding is urgently needed, but the conversations about dramatically shifting how the state provides shelter and addresses the housing and homelessness crises really should be taken out of the process,” said Kelly Turley, associate director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless.
“The family homelessness crisis didn’t emerge overnight, and we’re not going to end it overnight in a way that actually centers the needs of children and families,” she added.
Globe staff Matt Stout and Samantha Gross contributed to this report.
Anjali Huynh can be reached at anjali.huynh@globe.com.