# New England Ledger > Independent accountability journalism examining the people, institutions, money and decisions shaping New England. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About New England Ledger URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/about/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T11:40:11.000Z ## Independent. Nonpartisan. Community-driven. New England Ledger is an independent digital newsroom covering the people, institutions, money, and decisions shaping New England. We publish accountability reporting, community stories, analysis, and opinion grounded in documents, data, firsthand experience, and on-the-record reporting. Our guiding principle is simple: **Receipts over rumor.** ## Why we exist Decisions with enormous consequences are often made in rooms most residents never enter. Public money moves. Political alliances form. Neighborhoods change. Essential services are cut, expanded or quietly allowed to fail. Too often, the people most affected learn what happened only after the decision has been made. NEL exists to make those decisions visible, understandable and difficult to ignore. We report on stories the mainstream misses, revisit controversies after the cameras leave, point out hypocrites where they exist no matter their political persuasion, and ask the questions powerful institutions would prefer to leave unanswered. ## What we cover Our reporting focuses on: - Politics and public power - State and local government - Housing, health and public services - Race, equity, and economic development - Community leadership - Culture and identity - Public spending and institutional accountability ## How we work We believe journalism can have a point of view without abandoning fairness or facts. Our reporting may be direct, but our claims must be supported. We seek responses from people and institutions facing significant criticism. We link to public records and primary sources whenever possible. When we get something wrong, we correct it. Read our [**Ethics & Standards**](https://www.newenglandledger.com/ethics/) and [**Corrections Policy**](https://www.newenglandledger.com/corrections/). ## Who we are New England Ledger was founded in 2026 by concerned citizens frustrated with how mainstream and hyperlocal, biased outlets report on various communities. This is our effort to push all sides out of the way and find the truth. ### Send Us a Tip URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/tips/ Last updated: 2026-07-31T14:59:34.000Z Some of the most important stories begin with someone who knows the public is not getting the full story. If you have firsthand information, documents, photographs or a story New England Ledger should investigate, we want to hear from you. 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A name, document, meeting notice, contract, photograph or unanswered question may be enough for us to begin looking. ## What happens next Submitting a tip does not guarantee publication. NEL will review the information, assess its public importance and independently verify factual claims before deciding whether to report it. We take source protection seriously. If you are requesting confidentiality, say so at the beginning of the conversation. Confidentiality must be discussed and agreed upon with the team; it should not be assumed simply because information was submitted through this page. We will not publish your identity without your knowledge. However, legal demands and circumstances beyond a newsroom’s control can create risks that no publication or technology can eliminate. **Receipts over rumor. If you know something the public should know, send it our way.** ### Contact New England Ledger URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/contact/ Last updated: 2026-08-01T01:00:14.000Z Have a question, correction, story idea or membership issue? 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Read our full Corrections Policy. ## Questions about our standards Questions about these standards may be sent to: [**newsroom@newenglandledger.com**](mailto:newsroom@newenglandledger.com) ### Corrections Policy URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/corrections/ Last updated: 2026-07-31T14:29:23.000Z Accuracy is not optional. When New England Ledger makes a factual error, we correct it clearly, promptly and in the same spirit of accountability we expect from the institutions we cover. ## How to request a correction Email:[**corrections@newenglandledger.com**](mailto:corrections@newenglandledger.com) Please include: - The article headline and URL - The statement you believe is inaccurate - The correct information - Documents, links or other evidence supporting the correction - Your name and contact information A correction request does not guarantee that a change will be made. 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A failure to enforce a provision does not waive our right to enforce it later. ## 18\. Contact Questions about these Terms may be sent to: [newsroom@newenglandledger.com](mailto:newsroom@newenglandledger.com) New England Ledger [www.newenglandledger.com](https://www.newenglandledger.com/) ### All Stories URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/stories/ Last updated: 2026-08-01T00:40:17.000Z _No content available._ ## Posts ### Editorial: Fake Ledger Page Borrows From Mass Daily News Playbook to Peddle Misinformation URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/editorial-fake-ledger-page-borrows-from-mass-daily-news-playbook-to-peddle-misinformation/ Last updated: 2026-09-04T10:57:05.000Z An anonymous X account that had not posted publicly since 2023 changed its name, avatar and banner on the evening of Aug. 13 2026 and began presenting itself as a local news publication. Unfortunately, it dressed itself in used clothes, taking a name that already exists: ours. The account, which operates as "@TheNELedger," is not affiliated with the real New England Ledger, which began publishing at NewEnglandLedger.com in July of 2026\. Archived records show it previously operated as "@InoMass2" under the name "InoMass," and took part in political disputes involving South Boston and state Sen. Nick Collins. How did we come upon this information? Though usernames, biographies and profile photographs can be changed, as is the case here, the permanent account identification number ordinarily cannot. That number, 1125731390371266565, appears in a 2019 archived record assigned to @InoMass2\. It now belongs to @TheNELedger. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/09/inomass2-to-theneledger-identity-bridge-mobile.png) What that archive contains is worth examining to better understand why the user would reactivate the account in order to target the Ledger. InoMass was created in May 2019\. It listed Boston as its location and described itself as covering innovation and global economic trends. Early posts ran to cryptocurrency advice and national commentary before the account moved into Massachusetts politics. In September 2020, it entered an online argument involving Mr. Collins and state Representative Brandy Fluker Oakley, who was then challenging him for a state Senate seat. The account disputed criticism of Mr. Collins and asked another participant whether they were "butt hurt about this election." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/09/03-inomass2-opportunity-zones-collins-1301882901085200384.png) Its connection to the neighborhood became more explicit months later. Rachael Rollins, then the Suffolk County district attorney, had questioned why a major COVID vaccination site was being placed in South Boston rather than in a community with higher infection rates. InoMass replied that it did not want people traveling to be vaccinated "in my neighborhood," then suggested Chelsea receive a site instead. The person behind the account appears to have also been involved in the response to the pandemic, suggesting in a September 2023 post that they "worked on the procurement of the vaccine for a foreign government...in April of 2020" and advanced theories related to the spread of the virus. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/09/01-inomass2-vaccine-site-neighborhood-1353378277931540485-1.png) It stopped posting in 2023 and stayed gone for three years as far as our review of the records indicate. When it returned, it did not revive its former identity. On Aug. 18, five days after taking our name, a Medium page calling itself the New England Ledger published its first two articles. One attacked Mayor Michelle Wu's property-tax proposal. The other pushed a campaign-finance complaint against Latoya Gayle, who was challenging Collins for his seat, but ultimately wound up being defeated Tuesday night. An account that had defended a position associated with Collins in 2020 had returned with an article aimed at his current opponent. A reader who encounters the imposter account sees a profile established in May 2019 and may reasonably conclude that the publication has operated for seven years. The account has. It's just that the name and purpose are roughly three weeks old. Taking over an aged account rather than opening a new one confers an appearance of longevity, and the history that would contradict it is not visible on the page. The pattern has appeared before in Massachusetts, in the same media landscape. Mass Daily "News" began publishing in July 2025 after an existing anti-Wu account was converted into a news-branded operation. The account now posting as "@MassDailyNews" previously used the handle "@AntiWuCoalition" under the name Bostonians Against Mayor Wu. An old post address still preserves the earlier handle, though the post now displays under the Mass Daily "News" name. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/09/antiwucoalition-to-massdailynews-identity-bridge-mobile.png) Then we showed up. New England Ledger started publishing investigations into the influence of [political contributions](https://www.newenglandledger.com/red-white-sometimes-blue-pt-2/), the media bias of [local outlets](https://www.newenglandledger.com/mass-daily-news/), the [hypocrisy](https://www.newenglandledger.com/five-alarm-flynn/) of boy-who-cried-wolf politicians, and [actual](https://www.newenglandledger.com/white-noise-springfield/) conflicts of interest. Within weeks of our reporting on the favored sons of right-wing Massachusetts and the political machine of South Boston, InoMass returned. Understand what that means. Why resurrect a three-year-dormant account now? Why erase its old identity? Why borrow the name of a publication that had existed for barely a month? And why, within days, use that borrowed identity to publish political commentary that overlaps with the fights the real Ledger had already begun covering? We do not yet know who is behind the account or whether its purpose is to confuse our readers, dilute our reporting, redirect our audience, or simply provoke us. Those are questions worth answering, and we intend to keep asking them. But the timing permits one conclusion already: someone decided the New England Ledger was worth impersonating. That may be the clearest measure yet of how quickly this publication has entered Massachusetts' political conversation. Our investigations have challenged politicians, scrutinized supposedly independent media outlets, and followed money and influence into places where people accustomed to controlling the narrative would rather we did not look. The response, apparently, was not merely to criticize what we published. Someone decided to put on our name. There is something almost flattering about that. As for us, there will be no confusion. The New England Ledger is at NewEnglandLedger.com. We will continue doing what apparently made somebody notice us in the first place: following the receipts, naming the players, and publishing what we find. If somebody wanted to demonstrate that the Ledger had begun to matter, stealing our name was one hell of a way to do it. ### Ascend Used Social Equity to Win Its Boston License. Then Its President Helped Trump’s DOJ Prosecute His Former Partner. URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/ascend-used-social-equity-to-win-its-boston-license-then-its-president-helped-trumps-doj-prosecute-his-former-partner/ Last updated: 2026-09-04T11:00:38.000Z A federal jury has acquitted Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins of extortion charges, rejecting a prosecution built largely around testimony from Ascend Wellness President Frank Perullo. Perullo, Ascend’s cofounder and the government’s star witness, testified under immunity that Tompkins pressured him to sell the sheriff $50,000 in pre-IPO company stock and later refund the investment after its value fell. Jurors returned not-guilty verdicts on both counts within hours of beginning deliberations September 2. The verdict raises new questions about Perullo’s cooperation with the Trump administration’s Justice Department—and Ascend’s willingness to turn a partnership created to advance social equity into evidence against a former partner. Ascend, Perullo and company Vice President of Social Equity Danielle Drummond did not respond to New England Ledger’s questions before publication. ## From social equity to alleged leverage Prosecutors argued that Tompkins held power over Perullo because Ascend partnered with the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department on a program to train and hire people returning from incarceration. That partnership helped Ascend demonstrate the “positive impact” required to obtain its Massachusetts cannabis licenses. When Ascend announced its plans, former Massachusetts CEO Andrea Cabral said the company would “balance profits against conscience.” Years later, prosecutors portrayed that commitment as a vulnerability. Perullo testified that he worried Tompkins could threaten Ascend’s relationship with the Sheriff’s Department and jeopardize its license. Prosecutors alleged Tompkins reminded him, “I helped you get Friend Street,” while seeking access to the stock. But the defense argued that Ascend’s license was never in danger. The company donated approximately $1 million to the Last Prisoner Project and pursued other efforts to satisfy its positive-impact obligations. Perullo also acknowledged that neither state regulators nor Cabral ever told him the license was at risk. Tompkins’s attorneys portrayed Perullo as a sophisticated executive who cooperated only after federal investigators approached him—and because immunity protected him from potential prosecution. Jurors heard that Perullo and Tompkins remained extraordinarily close throughout the alleged extortion. They attended movies together, exchanged messages saying “I love you,” and referred to each other as brothers. Perullo also promoted Tompkins’s reelection, calling him a “man of integrity,” while allegedly feeling pressured by him. The jury acquitted Tompkins after a trial in which even prosecutors acknowledged Perullo was no hero. ## A $50,000 case against a former partner The amount at the center of the prosecution was minuscule compared with Ascend’s scale. The publicly traded multistate operator reported approximately $888 million in assets, $67 million in cash and $126 million in second-quarter 2026 revenue. The disputed $50,000 amounted to less than Ascend generated in an average hour. There is no public evidence that Ascend initiated the investigation. But its president accepted immunity and became the central witness in a failed Trump Justice Department prosecution arising from a partnership Ascend once showcased as evidence of its social conscience. That transformation matters because Ascend has also worked to weaken a separate safeguard intended to protect smaller and social-equity cannabis businesses. ## Ascend pushes for more licenses Massachusetts generally limits operators to three retail licenses. Many social-equity businesses consider that cap an essential protection against domination by multistate corporations. Ascend wants it raised. At a 2025 legislative hearing, Ascend sent representatives to advocate for license-cap expansion. Drummond argued that allowing larger companies to invest in more businesses could help struggling operators and allow Ascend to provide training and support. Equity businesses warned that expansion would instead give large operators more power to acquire smaller competitors in an already distressed market. Questions about Ascend’s reach predate that proposal. In 2021, former state representative Marie St. Fleur and former Suffolk prosecutor Amy McNamee sued Union Twist and several investors, including Ascend cofounder Abner Kurtin. They alleged unpaid wages, breach of contract and efforts to dilute their ownership interests. Their complaint also alleged that Kurtin and investor Gregory Thomaier held equity, authority or control over entities connected to more Massachusetts cannabis operations than state limits allowed. Union Twist was legally separate from Ascend. The allegations nevertheless raised questions about whether overlapping investors and companies were extending their influence beyond what the law contemplated. In 2024, Equitable Opportunities Now, the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts and cannabis business owners cited that complaint and reporting by journalist Grant Smith Ellis while requesting a Cannabis Control Commission investigation. The coalition alleged Kurtin owned or controlled interests in six to nine Massachusetts licenses. Those claims remain allegations. No public commission finding cited by New England Ledger establishes that Ascend or Kurtin violated the ownership cap. But regulators have never publicly resolved the question raised by equity advocates: How much influence do Ascend’s founders and affiliated investors exercise over other Massachusetts cannabis businesses? Ascend promoted social equity when it needed approval to enter Boston. It later used a social-equity executive to argue that allowing large operators to expand would benefit smaller businesses. Then its president cooperated under immunity with the Trump Justice Department in an unsuccessful prosecution built partly on the claim that Ascend’s equity commitment left the company vulnerable. A jury has now rejected that prosecution. Ascend’s leaders declined to explain how many returning citizens its partnership ultimately trained or employed, whether those programs continue, why Perullo received immunity, or how its license-cap position benefits equity operators. For a company that entered Massachusetts promising to balance profits against conscience, those unanswered questions deserve attention. ### Disgraced Former Democratic State Senator and Boston NAACP Appeal to Trump Administration to Withdraw Funds URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/disgraced-former-democratic-state-senator-and-boston-naacp-appeal-to-trump-administration-to-withdraw-funds/ Last updated: 2026-09-22T19:11:28.000Z Former Massachusetts state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, whose political career ended after she admitted to accepting $23,500 in bribes, is once again attempting to influence how millions in public funding are spent—or not spent—in Boston’s Black neighborhoods. This time, she is appealing directly to the Trump administration. Wilkerson, Boston NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Committee Chair Reggie Stewart, and Garrison Trotter Neighborhood Association (GTNA) President Louis Elisa recently asked Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to withdraw approximately $80 million from Boston’s proposed Blue Hill Avenue redesign. The federal funding represents nearly half of the estimated $162 million project, which would reconstruct roughly three miles of Blue Hill Avenue with new sidewalks, crossings, lighting, trees, bicycle infrastructure and, controversially, center-running bus lanes. The lanes are intended to improve service for approximately 37,000 daily riders. City officials estimate they could shorten some rush-hour trips by 10 to 15 minutes. The letter was accompanied by a petition organizers say was signed by 2,600 residents. The US Department of Transportation confirmed that it received the request and is reviewing it, according to the [*Dorchester Reporter*](https://www.dotnews.com/2026/06/18/blue-hill-bus-lane-opponents-lobby-trump-officials-to-withdraw-80m-in-funding-for-blue-hill-ave-project/?ref=newenglandledger.com). "Understand the extraordinary moment we are in right now when a predominantly Black community throws up their arms after not being heard for five years and comes together and decides to appeal to the Trump Administration for protection," Wilkerson said at a June press conference. Wilkerson and her allies want officials to reconsider the bus-lane proposal and revive discussions about restoring rail service toward Mattapan. Withdrawing the grant, however, would not redirect that money to an Orange Line extension. No federal commitment, approved route, design or construction schedule currently exists for the rail proposal. ## Appealing to an administration cutting similar projects The request comes as the Trump administration moves against transportation and other investments associated with racial equity, environmental policy and reduced dependence on automobiles. Duffy has criticized what the administration calls “DEI bike lanes,” frozen or canceled bicycle and pedestrian grants, and encouraged restrictions on future bicycle infrastructure. In Fairfield, Alabama—a predominantly Black city where 17 percent of households lack access to a car—the administration canceled an $11.7 million grant for a walking and bicycle path. It has also frozen funding elsewhere and attempted to remove an existing bicycle lane near the White House. Stewart acknowledged the conflict in an interview quoted by the *New York Times* and republished by [*Boston.com*](https://www.boston.com/news/transportation/2026/08/31/do-dei-bike-paths-exist-the-trump-administration-says-yes/?ref=newenglandledger.com). "Ironically, in my climate and environmental justice work, we’re opposing a lot of what Trump is for,” Stewart said. “But in this case, he might be an ally." A further irony noted by some community members is that the chair of Environmental and Climate Justice would oppose funding for a project meant to address the issues said committee is believed to be focused on. Proponents for the project note studies showing the harmful effects of a large number of vehicles traveling through an area can have on the health of a population. Further evidence in other studies have shown that it can take a bus up to an hour to travel from Mattapan Square to Nubian Square, sitting for minutes at traffic lights emitting fumes into the neighborhood. It is unclear to the New England Ledger if this is permissible to the Boston NAACP. At the same time, opponents have raised legitimate concerns about parking losses, congestion, construction disruption and whether the city adequately incorporated community feedback. They also have pressed the City for years on addressing the concerns of small business owners who will most assuredly lose customers and revenue both during construction and following completion. Construction of the corridor would simultaneously take place with the use of a renovated White Stadium. At the writing of this, there is no public plan for addressing the convergence of these projects and mitigating the effects on residents, business owners, and other stakeholders. “ACE does not endorse the specific redesign that was previously proposed,” said Tristan Thomas, ACE’s director of policy and law. “ACE supports developing an alternative redesign that uses the available federal funding and meaningfully incorporates community feedback. We look forward to reviewing an updated proposal and participating in a healthy discussion about the pros and cons of the draft plans so the community can offer input and benefit from the resources on the table for Blue Hill Avenue.” Supporters also note that approximately 80 percent of the project budget would fund pedestrian-safety and streetscape improvements rather than the center-running lanes themselves. ## From City Hall to Trump's White House Wilkerson, the GTNA, and leaders of the Boston NAACP have increasingly emerged as a recurring opposition bloc to Mayor Michelle Wu on major projects affecting Black Boston. The most sustained example has been White Stadium, where they have challenged the administration’s planning, costs, transportation strategy and community-engagement process, supported efforts to stop or substantially alter the project, and accused Wu of ignoring Black residents. The legal campaign suffered its most significant defeat on Aug. 19, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rejected the challenge to the redevelopment and cleared construction to continue. The disputes themselves are not frivolous. White Stadium’s escalating cost, traffic implications and public-private structure have generated legitimate questions, just as the Blue Hill Avenue redesign has raised concerns about parking, businesses and whether years of public meetings amounted to meaningful public consent. Blue Hill Avenue represents an escalation in tactics. After failing to stop White Stadium, the group has carried their latest fight to the doorstep of a president whose administration has spent months dismantling many of the transportation, environmental and racial-equity policies these same organizations have traditionally defended. Of concern to the community is that if they successfully halt the projects, there is no binding guarantee that stopping them would produce any actionable alternatives. In effect, Black Boston could lose two major committed investments without either being replaced, leaving the community with fewer dollars and infrastructure needs that could remain unresolved for years. ## A recurring District 7 corruption story Wilkerson’s renewed attempt to shape public investment carries echoes of a troubling chapter in Roxbury politics. The first Black woman elected to the Massachusetts Senate, Wilkerson resigned in 2008 and later pleaded guilty to eight counts of attempted extortion. Federal prosecutors said she accepted eight cash payments totaling $23,500 in connection with her official duties. That investigation also reached then-District 7 City Councilor Chuck Turner. According to the [US Attorney’s Office](https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/ma/news/2011/January/TurnerCharlesSentencingPR.html?ref=newenglandledger.com), Wilkerson asked Turner to help Roxbury businessman Ronald Wilburn obtain a liquor license. Wilburn, who was secretly cooperating with the FBI, later paid Turner $1,000 while discussing the license. Turner was convicted of accepting the payment and lying to investigators. He was sentenced to three years in prison. Nearly 15 years later, District 7 was again consumed by a public-corruption case. Former Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson pleaded guilty to taking a $7,000 kickback from a staff member’s city-funded bonus. Prosecutors said the money was exchanged inside a City Hall bathroom. She was [sentenced to one month in prison](https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-boston-city-councilor-sentenced-prison-federal-public-corruption-charges?ref=newenglandledger.com), three years of supervised release and $13,000 in restitution. Wilkerson was not a distant observer during Fernandes Anderson’s tenure. She sat on the councilor’s District 7 Advisory Council, which Fernandes Anderson consulted about her resignation timeline and transition plans. Even after Fernandes Anderson agreed to plead guilty, Wilkerson publicly defended her and warned candidates seeking the seat against campaigning on a promise to “restore honesty and integrity.” “Don’t tell me you’re running because you want people to forget Tania,” Wilkerson told candidates at an April 2025 forum, according to the [*Boston Herald*](https://www.bostonherald.com/2025/04/22/dont-diss-tania-dianne-wilkerson-warns-candidates-vying-to-replace-disgraced-boston-city-councilor/?ref=newenglandledger.com). Wilkerson also appeared to question the federal case, saying candidates could not condemn how authorities “come in our community, destroy people” while embracing what she called “the story and the lies.” Stewart had an even more direct institutional connection. He served as director of community relations in the District 7 office during Fernandes Anderson’s tenure, acting as a liaison between the council office and residents. Now Wilkerson and Stewart are together asking another federal administration to intervene in Black Boston—this time by withdrawing $80 million from one of the community’s largest proposed transportation investments. ## Wilkerson’s unfinished reckoning Wilkerson has said she apologized for her own conduct, but her subsequent statements have stopped short of an unequivocal acceptance of wrongdoing. “If what I did was wrong,” she told *Boston Magazine* in 2022, “it was a stretch.” Wilkerson’s conviction does not disqualify her from participating in public debate. But her history—and her continued defense of another District 7 official convicted of misusing public money—makes her renewed attempt to influence $80 million in federal funding part of the Blue Hill Avenue story. If Duffy grants the group’s request, Boston could lose the funding without any requirement that the Trump administration replace it or invest the money elsewhere in the community. It begs the question for the reader: if Wilkerson and the Boston NAACP are successful in their request to the Trump administration to take back a Biden-era grant, and if there is little support and, likely, no chance that additional federal funds will be approved for an extension of subway service, what is their plan for improving and modernizing a large stretch of roadway that has been underdeveloped for decades? **Correction — Sept. 22, 2026:** An earlier version of this article characterized Alternatives for Community & Environment as supporting the proposed Blue Hill Avenue redesign while calling for stronger oversight and protections. ACE does not endorse the specific redesign previously proposed. It supports developing an alternative that uses the available federal funding and meaningfully incorporates community feedback. The article has been updated to accurately reflect ACE’s position and include an on-the-record statement from Tristan Thomas, ACE’s director of policy and law. ### This September 1st, Unfinished Business Is on the Ballot URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/this-september-1st-unfinished-business-is-on-the-ballot/ Last updated: 2026-08-31T01:51:03.000Z Massachusetts will elect all 200 members of its Legislature this fall, but in 118 districts, voters have only one listed candidate. As of the May filing deadline, 25 incumbent senators and 91 incumbent representatives faced no listed opponent in either the primary or the general election, according to candidate lists compiled by Secretary of State William Galvin's office. Two open House seats drew a single candidate. That leaves voters a choice in 82 of 200 districts. Just 14 percent of incumbents seeking reelection face a primary challenger. House Speaker Ronald Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka are unopposed. In Ballotpedia's 2024 assessment, the most recent nationwide comparison, Massachusetts ranked last in state legislative competitiveness for the fifth consecutive cycle. The easy conclusion is that the consequential races are elsewhere on the ballot. The Legislature's own calendar argues otherwise. Lawmakers gaveled out of regularly scheduled formal sessions on July 31, sending Gov. Maura Healey bills expanding abortion protections and restricting book bans, and leaving roughly a dozen major negotiations unfinished. Under rules adopted in 2025, conference committees formed by July 31 may keep working, and both chambers may return to formal session to take up their agreements before the term ends Jan. 5\. A lawmaker who loses in September or November could still cast consequential votes in December. The biggest fights remain alive under that rule. An energy bill is in conference after the House voted for roughly $1 billion in reductions to Mass Save, the state's flagship efficiency program, while the Senate declined the cuts. So are proposals on data privacy, cellphones in K-12 schools, primary care, government transparency, and economic development. The Senate's economic development package alone calls for $575 million in capital investments across 365 policy sections. Spilka has defended the pace, arguing that getting complicated legislation right matters more than getting it done quickly. The new rules give lawmakers more time to prove that case. Other priorities have no such protected path. Healey proposed a local-option real estate transfer fee in 2023, and lawmakers omitted it from the housing law they passed. Supporters returned with standalone bills letting cities and towns tax high-dollar property sales to fund affordable housing. The Senate version sits in Ways and Means, its House counterpart before the Revenue Committee, and neither reached conference before July 31\. If it does not move by Jan. 5, the issue returns to a Legislature chosen this fall. Rent stabilization follows voters into the next term for a different reason. On June 23, the Supreme Judicial Court barred a statewide rent-control initiative from the November ballot, ruling that the petition violated Article 48 of the state constitution because an exemption for facilities operated solely for religious purposes made religion a factor in how the law would apply. The court did not decide whether rent control is good policy. It removed the ballot route, not the argument. The pattern extends beyond housing. The End of Life Options Act, which would legalize medical aid in dying for certain terminally ill adults, again cleared two committees before landing in Senate Ways and Means, the same place similar legislation stalled last session. Child care shows a different failure. Major provisions of the 2024 EARLY ED Act became law through the fiscal 2025 budget, making Commonwealth Cares for Children grants permanent and capping what subsidized families pay. Yet as of March, roughly 32,000 children remained on the income-eligible child-care waitlist. A $31.2 million appropriation from the fiscal 2026 Fair Share supplemental budget, signed in June, should move up to 2,000 into care. Education poses the longest-running question. The fiscal 2027 budget reconvenes the Foundation Budget Review Commission to reexamine the formula Massachusetts uses to fund public schools. The previous review produced the Student Opportunity Act, the multibillion-dollar overhaul enacted in 2019\. This year's budget provides $7.66 billion in Chapter 70 aid and orders the commission to report by October 2028\. Legislators elected this fall serve through the entire review. Few of these fights break along party lines. Democrats disagree with Democrats over rent, energy, taxes, development, and transparency. The House and Senate, both held by supermajorities of the same party, routinely produce bills different enough that the year's largest proposals end in negotiations rather than on the governor's desk. Where party control is not in question, the identity of the individual legislator matters more, not less. And in districts where voters do have a choice, the decisive election is the Sept. 1 primary. In an Aug. 24 editorial assessing one of those Senate contests, the *Boston Globe* editorial board called a campaign centered on the effectiveness of the Legislature "a fair issue to raise" and said Beacon Hill deserves criticism for being "slow and lacking transparency." A legislative race is not only a verdict on an incumbent's attentiveness. It is a choice about who gets authority over the questions already waiting at the State House. Campaigns invite voters to look backward. Incumbents cite accomplishments, challengers cite failures. The more consequential question is forward-looking: who will be sitting in the House and Senate when the fights that stalled, split the chambers, or never reached a vote return in January. Competition is scarce, and where a real choice exists it often comes in September, long before attention settles on November. Those races deserve scrutiny precisely because so many others offer none. Beacon Hill has carried its unfinished business into the election. The legislative ballot decides who inherits it. ### The Crybaby Councilor Strikes Again: Flynn proposes limits to early voting in response to isolated poll incident URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/the-crybaby-councilor-strikes-again-flynn-proposes-limits-to-early-voting-in-response-to-isolated-poll-incident/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T12:25:59.000Z Three people at the Condon Community Center in South Boston were handed the wrong ballots during early voting last week. Poll workers caught it. All three got the right ballots. Everyone went home. On Wednesday, Councilor Ed Flynn asked the Boston City Council to use those three ballots to shrink early voting options for all 440,000 registered voters in the city. His resolution, first reported by [*Universal Hub*](https://www.universalhub.com/2026/boston-city-council-rejects-notion-brief-problem-early-voting-site?ref=newenglandledger.com), asked the Secretary of the Commonwealth to open a formal investigation into the Boston Election Department and to keep the department under state receivership through the 2028 presidential election. It also asked that early voting sites stop carrying ballots for the whole city. "I believe the city should only offer in person early voting in one's own neighborhood and district or at City Hall," Flynn told his colleagues. He went on to claim, without evidence, "When we allow residents to vote at every location throughout the entire city, I think it puts a tremendous strain on the system. I think it's also unfair to our poll workers that have to have a ballot ready regardless of where the person is coming in from. We only increase the chances of incidents where human error can occur when a poll worker provides the wrong ballot." Then he called it a civil rights issue. ### Using Civil Rights to End Civil Rights Vote-anywhere early voting is not a recent experiment. It is the oldest feature of early voting in Boston, and it arrived with a specific promise attached. Governor Deval Patrick, the first Black governor of Massachusetts, signed the 2014 election reform law that created early voting. Boston's first early voting period opened October 24, 2016\. Two weeks before it did, then-Mayor Marty Walsh penned an op-ed in the *Bay State Banner* describing what made it worth doing: > "One of the reasons this initiative is innovative is that voters participating during the early voting period will be able to cast their ballot at any polling location in the City, regardless of what neighborhood they live in. We hope that this additional flexibility will allow more people to take part." Walsh put $670,000 in that year's budget behind it, including the electronic poll books the city still uses to check voters in. The city has advertised the same promise every cycle since. A 2018 Election Department ad in the *Banner* read: "Registered Boston voters can vote at any early voting location in the City, including City Hall. Pick a time and place that is best for you." The coalition that won the 2014 law made the equity argument explicitly. Common Cause Massachusetts pointed to evidence that early voting and extended hours help people of color and lower income voters most, because their schedules are the least predictable. The point of letting a Roxbury resident vote in Chinatown on her lunch break was never administrative tidiness. It was that she works in Chinatown. The statute itself carries that instruction forward. Under Chapter 54, Section 25B, when a city designates early voting sites it "shall consider, to the extent feasible, diverse geographic locations and whether such sites would have an impact on access to the polls on the basis of race, national origin, disability, income or age." The law contains no provision letting a city tell a registered voter which early voting site is hers. Flynn is invoking civil rights to undo a program whose governing statute has a civil rights clause built into it. ### Armed With Accusations But Not Evidence Flynn offered no evidence to back up his claims. There is a reason. No Boston poll worker has publicly complained about carrying multiple ballot styles in testimony, in the press, or online. The only workload complaints in Massachusetts come from small-town clerks, and they are about something else entirely: the number of days. The president of the state Town Clerks Association told *State House News Service* this month that early voting is "a mini election every day" and that the answer is fewer days, not fewer ballots. Nobody in the Commonwealth has proposed what Flynn proposed. There is no measured increase in wrong-ballot errors since 2016\. Boston has spent a decade engineering against exactly that failure. Every early voting site in the city uses electronic poll books that pull the voter's record and identify the correct ballot on check-in. The Condon incident was a human overriding a machine built to prevent it, which is a training problem with a training fix. And the load he describes is shrinking, not growing. Statewide, early in-person voting was 30.7 percent of ballots in 2016 and 21.2 percent in 2018\. By the 2024 state election it was 17 percent, and in the 2024 primary, 3.4 percent. Galvin's office puts it plainly: early voting has dropped significantly since people started voting by mail. Flynn's claim requires early voting to be simultaneously so heavy it strains the system and so marginal that restricting it costs nobody anything. Both cannot be true. Boston turnout, meanwhile, is the actual crisis nobody filed a resolution about. Last November's municipal election drew 96,405 ballots, a 22.39 percent turnout, down from 32.66 percent in 2021 and 27.80 percent in 2017\. Presidential years run roughly three times higher. The city is not struggling with too many people voting. Councilor Ruthzee Louijeune, opposing the resolution, said the city should be moving the other way, toward same-day registration and wider access, "especially as the right to vote is under attack." ### A Solution in Search of a Problem Here is what makes the proposal perplexing rather than merely wrong. Boston's Election Department is in receivership because it did not send enough ballots to polling places. In November 2024, officials chose to send only enough ballots for 80 percent of each precinct's registered voters who had not yet voted, and a calculation error made the actual delivery smaller still. Police cars ran ballots to precincts with sirens on. The department did not answer more than a thousand calls from poll workers and residents trying to report it. The state's investigator found Boston in violation of the election law requiring one ballot to be available for every voter, and concluded that some voters were disenfranchised because they could not wait. Flynn's remedy for three mis-delivered ballots is to deliberately withhold ballots from polling locations. He is proposing, as a cure, the precise category of conduct that put the department in receivership. He also wants the receivership extended through 2028\. It is currently set to run through the end of this year, when Galvin's office will reassess based partly on how this election goes. Flynn is asking to prejudge that review before the election has happened. Boston reported no major problems last fall. ### Crying Wolf Two weeks ago, after two stabbings, Flynn [called](https://www.newenglandledger.com/five-alarm-flynn-at-it-again-councilor-calls-for-110m-solution-for-the-wrong-problem/) for the National Guard to be deployed in Boston. He filed no hearing order and named no cost. A New England Ledger analysis found that an occupation would cost taxpayers up to $110 million annually. The mayor called the idea foolish and irresponsible. Within a day he had backed off. He is rarely making the case alone, as we detailed in our [RIGGED](https://www.newenglandledger.com/mass-daily-news/) reporting. The *Boston Herald* ran his call for a probe. NewBostonPost followed shortly after, telling readers Boston voters had received wrong ballots "again," at a site "with a history of similar errors." Three ballots, quickly corrected, became a pattern, then a history, then an argument for attacking early voting access and two more years of state control. Flynn pulls the alarm, the outlets carry the sound, and by the time it reaches a reader in Jamaica Plain, the fire seems real. Ten years ago, Boston told its voters to pick a time and a place that worked for them. Ed Flynn has decided that was the mistake. It is the same argument being made in Washington. It does not get gentler because it has a Boston accent. ### Boston's Billion-Dollar Summer: Reports Show An Uneven Spread URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/bostons-billion-dollar-summer-reports-show-an-uneven-spread/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T03:45:05.000Z Boston spent the summer selling itself to the world. The Scots filled bars and trains. Sail Boston packed the waterfront. The nation's 250th anniversary brought another round of visitors and attention. City officials have begun calling the season a success, and there is evidence for it: spending rose, downtown businesses reported packed rooms, and a temporary loosening of liquor rules helped restaurants capture more of the crowds. Seven miles from City Hall, the victory lap looks different. Reporting from [*Axios*](https://www.axios.com/local/boston/2026/08/18/boston-economy-world-cup-ma-250-sail-boston?ref=newenglandledger.com) found that businesses in Roxbury, Hyde Park and other neighborhoods did not share evenly in the windfall. The sharpest number came from the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, which said it received no public funding for its summer programming and spent $155,138 of its own money on grants, technology, training and other support for businesses trying to reach the crowds. That figure raises a question Boston, the Commonwealth, and the private sector should answer before declaring the summer an economic development triumph: who actually got a piece of the pie? The answer is easier to predict than officials may want to admit, because the underlying numbers have not moved much in a decade. Boston's own 2020 disparity study reviewed 47,000 contracts awarded between 2014 and 2019 and found that minority-owned firms captured 2.5 percent of discretionary spending. Black-owned businesses received four-tenths of 1 percent. Latino-owned businesses received eight-tenths. The city has made real progress since, reaching as high as 15 percent of contract awards to certified minority and women-owned firms in fiscal 2023, according to a five-year review published this year. The state's record is thinner than its headline. Massachusetts spent about $4.5 billion with small and diverse businesses in fiscal 2025, a more than 20 percent increase. But when *GBH* [examined](https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-05-04/minority-owned-firms-see-big-jump-in-massachusetts-state-contracts?ref=newenglandledger.com) an earlier year's report, it found minority-owned firms accounted for roughly 5.4 percent of state contracts, and that the total counted more than $230 million spent with nonprofits governed by predominantly minority boards. The state auditor, reviewing the Massachusetts State College Building Authority, found minority-owned firms received two-tenths of 1 percent of discretionary spending in both fiscal 2023 and 2024, against an 8 percent benchmark. The private sector has been moving the other direction. In March 2025, State Street Global Advisors removed board diversity targets from its proxy voting guidelines, following BlackRock and Vanguard, and the company later took down diversity pages from its website. And State Street was one of only three announced local sponsors of Boston Soccer 26, the World Cup host committee, alongside Meet Boston and Sanofi. The company Boston watched retreat from a public diversity commitment was a headline underwriter of the city's biggest summer in a generation. None of the organizing bodies operated in isolation. Boston 26, led by Mike Loynd and stacked with figures close to the Kraft organization, ran the World Cup effort. Sail Boston received a $4 million state award for infrastructure, public safety and transportation. Meet Boston, under Martha Sheridan, drove tourism promotion and sponsored the host committee, making large contributions to boost the success of these events. MA250, coordinated through the Healey administration and the Office of Travel and Tourism, anchored the anniversary programming. Each raised money, awarded contracts and chose vendors. None has published what those decisions produced. That is the context for what happened when the world showed up. Event sponsorship and vendor selection are exactly the kind of discretionary, high-visibility spending that supplier diversity commitments were designed to reach. In a different climate, a season of this scale would have been an obvious place to demonstrate them. Instead, the season was organized around putting on a good show, and the show itself was seen by many as unremarkable against what other cities did with the same calendar. The imagination was smaller than the moment. The city's preliminary numbers suggest businesses across all 23 neighborhoods benefited to some degree, but Boston still has no complete economic impact analysis. *Axios* reported that nine business owners described capitalizing on watch parties and other World Cup activity, while others said the surge never reached their doors. That difference matters. Enormous events are justified in part by the money visitors leave behind. Public agencies supply transportation, public safety, permitting and planning. Business organizations spend months preparing entrepreneurs (at least they are supposed to). If the benefit clusters only in the major economic hubs and among firms already connected to organizers, a headline impact number conceals as much as it reveals. The World Cup added obstacles Boston did not create. FIFA tightly restricted sponsorships and the brands vendors could sell, and local organizers faced complaints about transparency and access. Those constraints were not the city's to set. The distribution of local opportunity was. Some things worked. Business owners repeatedly praised the temporary relaxation of alcohol rules, which allowed an extra hour of service and public drinking districts. That is evidence Boston's nightlife regulations may be leaving money on the table the rest of the year. Boston may already be preparing for its 400th anniversary in 2030\. That leaves four years to decide whether the next celebration distributes opportunity deliberately or repeats the pattern the city's own disparity study documented. The City Council and the Legislature should hold hearings before then, and this time the answers should arrive well before the events do. Councilor Ruthzee Louijeune held a hearing in early 2026 pressing stakeholders for a supplier diversity plan. For a follow up hearing, the witness list writes itself: the city and state's procurement and economic opportunity offices, Boston 26, Meet Boston, Sail Boston, MA250 and the Office of Travel and Tourism, and the Supplier Diversity Office. Each should be asked the same questions. What did you spend, with whom, and how much of it reached businesses in the neighborhoods you said would benefit? Officials may tout the summer of 2026 as one of its best. The numbers will tell us for whom. ### Connecticut Just Toppled a 28-Year Democrat. Is Massachusetts Next? URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/connecticut-just-toppled-a-28-year-democrat-is-massachusetts-next/ Last updated: 2026-08-25T11:00:42.000Z For nearly three decades, John Larson was practically synonymous with Connecticut's First Congressional District. Then Democratic voters decided 28 years was long enough. Former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin decisively defeated Larson in the Democratic primary, capturing roughly 54 percent of the vote and ending the 14-term congressman's nearly three-decade run as the party's nominee. This wasn't a squeaker. It was a flat-out rejection. And in a few days, Massachusetts voters will confront a strikingly similar choice. ## Is Massachusetts Next? In Massachusetts' Eighth Congressional District, 71-year-old Rep. Stephen Lynch is facing 39-year-old attorney and voting-rights advocate Patrick Roath in the Sept. 1 Democratic primary. Lynch has been in Congress since 2001. Like Larson, Lynch is emphasizing experience and seniority. Like Bronin, Roath is arguing that this political moment demands a new generation of Democratic leadership. The parallels aren't perfect, but they're difficult to ignore. Roath has attacked what he calls the "politics of the past" and argued Democrats need more urgency confronting President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Lynch also has vulnerabilities Larson didn't. He was one of the few congressional Democrats to vote against the Affordable Care Act in 2010\. More recently, Lynch was the only member of Massachusetts' congressional delegation to vote for the Laken Riley Act, which expanded mandatory detention requirements for some undocumented immigrants accused of crimes. Roath, meanwhile, has secured endorsements from the Boston Teachers Union and progressive organizations across the district. Recent reporting has described the race as potentially competitive. That would have been difficult to imagine not long ago. So was John Larson losing. ![Side-by-side photos show an older man in a dark blazer speaking at a podium surrounded by news microphones, left, and a younger man in a white button-down shirt standing outdoors with his arms crossed, right.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/roath-lynch-wbur_cleaned.jpg) U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, left, and Democratic challenger Patrick Roath, right. Roath is challenging the longtime congressman in Massachusetts’ Eighth Congressional District Democratic primary. ## A Different Kind of Democrat Bronin, 47, built his Connecticut campaign around a straightforward argument: Democrats cannot respond to an extraordinary political moment with business as usual. "We are at a moment when our country is in crisis," Bronin told supporters after his victory. "We have a president who's out of control and we need to build a Democratic Party that's bringing a whole new energy to this fight that is clearer and bolder about what we're fighting for." Voters listened. But Bronin's victory shouldn't simply be characterized as progressives defeating moderates. Connecticut's Working Families Party actually backed Larson and criticized Bronin's record with organized labor. Bronin nevertheless campaigned on positions including abolishing ICE, expanding renewable energy, addressing affordability and adopting a more confrontational posture toward Trump. The lesson may be more complicated than left versus center. Democratic voters increasingly appear interested in something simpler: Who looks prepared to fight? ## Red, White and Sometimes Blue There is a particular kind of Democrat increasingly vulnerable in this environment: politicians who campaign blue but govern cautiously enough that voters struggle to identify what the party actually stands for. As our running series calls them: **red, white and sometimes blue.** Reliably Democratic when election season arrives. Proudly partisan when Trump is the subject. But sometimes cautious, incremental or willing to cross the aisle on issues where their own base expects something different. Lynch may provide Massachusetts voters with an unusually clear test of that politics. He's a Democrat from one of America's bluest states who voted against Obamacare and, this year, joined Republicans on immigration legislation opposed by every other member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation. But Lynch also has deep union roots, decades of constituent relationships and an argument increasingly unfashionable in Democratic politics: experience matters. Massachusetts voters will decide whether that's enough. ## Black Voters Aren't Automatic Votes The question has particular relevance in diverse urban communities in both states. Hartford has a substantial Black and Latino population. Massachusetts' Eighth District stretches from Boston neighborhoods including Dorchester through communities including Brockton, Quincy and much of the South Shore. For generations, Black voters have been among the Democratic Party's most dependable constituencies. But dependable shouldn't mean automatic. Black voters can overwhelmingly oppose Trump while simultaneously being dissatisfied with Democratic leadership. Those aren't contradictory positions. Fear of Republicans cannot permanently substitute for enthusiasm about Democrats. Voters dealing with housing costs, economic inequality, immigration, struggling schools and public safety increasingly want to know not simply what Democrats oppose, but what they're prepared to fight for. ## From Hartford to Boston: It Isn't Just About Age That's what makes Bronin's victory relevant beyond Connecticut. But Massachusetts voters are about to test whether this insurgency is really about age — or something deeper. Two longtime Massachusetts Democrats face younger challengers Sept. 1\. Lynch, 71, faces the 39-year-old Roath. Meanwhile, 80-year-old Sen. Ed Markey faces 47-year-old Rep. Seth Moulton. If this were simply a revolt against aging politicians, both incumbents should be in trouble. They aren't. Recent polling has Markey leading Moulton by a commanding margin. Markey has spent decades building credibility with the Democratic left, most notably as co-author of the Green New Deal, and voters continue to associate him strongly with progressive causes. That creates a fascinating contrast with the Lynch-Roath race described above. Massachusetts voters could simultaneously decide that 25 years is too long for Lynch — and that Markey's decades in Washington aren't a reason to replace him. If that happens, the message would be difficult to reduce to generational change. **Maybe voters aren't simply asking how old their representatives are. They're asking what they've done with the time they've had.** Connecticut has already delivered its verdict on Larson. Massachusetts votes Sept. 1. Being against Trump may not be enough. Being a Democrat may not be enough. And being **red, white and sometimes blue** may not be enough anymore. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/markey-moulton-image_cleaned.jpeg) Democratic candidates running for U.S. Senate for Massachusetts Seth Moulton and incumbent Senator Edward Markey. (Jesse Costa/WBUR) ### Judge Denies Injunction in Springfield Courthouse Suit, Finding No Evidence of Conflict URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/breaking-judge-denies-injunction-in-springfield-courthouse-suit-finding-no-evidence-of-conflict/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T21:45:59.000Z A Hampden Superior Court judge has [denied](https://www.masscourts.org/eservices/searchresults.page?x=T%2A02tltWswZYn4KC6t1dpIW2fexHdnr7wilMA3268pCi220iaVw14Jgyb9UAyilKlKuUT0QiMxDCCd-1k8FWzyN%2AeOtG0uVycc4WqLDqLdEzSRFJdURD-e-iS7gNwdVpJK2DfXwPhid3Acz8%2A7GaD9icLTNgoDDR2qiPlBuOzTPXMqt-Qk4S%2A-o6EZ%2AZNqW1ACYrMAmsHX1EuaCJcNq83A&antiCache=1787603034231&ref=newenglandledger.com) an attempt by two unsuccessful bidders to halt Springfield's new courthouse project, handing the Healey administration and the Liberty Junction development team their first major courtroom victory in the dispute. Judge David M. Hodge's 29-page memorandum of decision, issued Monday, denies the request by USPB JV LLC and Springfield Tower Square LLC for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction. No court order now prevents the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance and the Massachusetts Trial Court from continuing lease negotiations with Liberty Junction. It is not a final judgment. The developers, associated with James "Jeb" Balise and Dinesh Patel, are still seeking to overturn the state's selection and force a new procurement. But Hodge declined to freeze the project, and he did so after finding the plaintiffs had shown no likelihood of success on any of their four claims. The state selected Liberty Junction in July to redevelop 125 Liberty Street into the new Roderick L. Ireland Regional Justice Center. The team includes government-facilities developer FD Stonewater, CoJo Partners, Suffolk Construction and a courthouse-focused architectural practice. The numbers in the decision explain the outcome. Total estimated annual cost of occupancy under USPB's proposal was $59,242,690.73\. Under Liberty Junction's, it was $48,560,429.46\. That is at least $600,000 a month, roughly $420 million less than the plaintiff's own bid over the term, and nearly $300 million below the next closest finalist. Liberty Junction drew "better" or "best" rankings on 13 metrics. Hodge found the price tag was the number one driving factor and that the selection rested on objective ones. The losing bidders alleged that John Barros's participation through CoJo Partners created a conflict after he became interim executive director of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. Hodge found the claim had "myriad difficulties," beginning with the fact that it was brought against DCAMM, which is not a state employee and so cannot violate the statute governing state employees. Beyond that, he found no evidence in what he called a voluminous record that Barros violated any provision. Barros, the judge wrote, "went above and beyond." The timeline in the decision is the one the coverage never printed. Before his appointment, Barros disclosed his Liberty Junction interest in writing to MCCA's general counsel and consulted the State Ethics Commission's general counsel. Both advised he could keep the interest but should not participate in discussions or presentations to DCAMM, and that no filing was required until a proposer was selected. He skipped the March 5 interview. He had no communications with DCAMM, the selection committee or the Trial Court. He filed the disclosure the day after selection. He later divested entirely. The plaintiffs' theory of improper influence rested on the fact that Administration and Finance Secretary Matthew Gorzkowicz sits on the MCCA board. Hodge found they "surmise" a connection without alleging any facts describing how it would work. As The New England Ledger reported in "[White Noise](https://www.newenglandledger.com/white-noise-springfield/)," much of the political and media fury scapegoated Barros and his CoJo partner Conan Harris, two Black men attached to a much larger development team, while giving far less scrutiny to Mayor Domenic Sarno's relationships with the people behind competing proposals. Harris appears in this decision essentially once, as a co-owner of CoJo. There is no allegation against him anywhere in 29 pages. Sarno promoted Peter Picknelly's riverfront courthouse plan years before the formal competition. Members of the Picknelly family contributed roughly $8,000 to Sarno during the 2022 to 2023 cycle, and Picknelly later hosted a Sarno fundraiser. Patel, meanwhile, was publicly described by Sarno as a friend. For Gov. Maura Healey, the decision keeps a signature Springfield project and its projected taxpayer savings moving. For Attorney General Andrea Campbell, whose office called the complaint a fever dream of imagined malfeasance, it validates the state's opposition to emergency judicial intervention. For Barros and Harris, it does more than reject an injunction. It puts on the record that the conflict allegation had no evidence behind it. For Liberty Junction, the ruling clears an immediate legal obstacle, although litigation risk remains. For Springfield, it preserves momentum toward replacing a courthouse plagued by mold, safety concerns and years of complaints from employees. On the public interest, Hodge was direct: enjoining the state would delay an already protracted process for a building the Trial Court says urgently needs replacement. The lawsuit continues. For now, so does the courthouse project. ### Democratic Senator Nick Collins Hired a Trump Operative. Voters Are Asking Why. URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/democratic-senator-nick-collins-hired-a-trump-operative-voters-are-asking-why/ Last updated: 2026-08-25T14:04:08.000Z State Senator Nick Collins represents one of the Commonwealth's most diverse districts. Yet recently, his office has come under heavy scrutiny from those he claims to protect. The reason? His chief of staff, Haley Walsh, appears in photographs from the 2024 Republican National Convention wearing Trump-branded clothing. Another image posted to her Facebook account showed Trump-branded liquor celebrating his election. The photographs have circulated [widely on social media](https://x.com/Tweetorelli/status/2085435617203093692?ref=newenglandledger.com), drawing attention to the politics of one of the most powerful people in Collins’s State House office. Walsh is not an intern, volunteer or low-level staffer. A chief of staff manages personnel, advises the senator, helps shape legislative and budget priorities, coordinates political strategy and controls access to the elected official. The question is not whether a Republican may work for a Democrat. It is what Collins knew about the politics of the person he chose to help run his office—and whether those politics matter in a district with thousands of Black, Latino and immigrant constituents affected by the Trump administration. New England Ledger contacted the Collins campaign seeking answers to those questions but received no response at the time of publication. ![State Senator Nick Collins and his chief of staff, Haley Walsh, smile together along the route of Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The image is a screenshot of a South Boston Beat social media post.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/walsh-collins-together_cleaned.jpeg) State Senator Nick Collins and chief of staff Haley Walsh attend Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Walsh holds one of the most influential positions in Collins’s State House office. Photo via South Boston Beat. ## Part of a Larger Pattern If Collins had an unambiguously progressive voting record, Walsh’s convention appearance might amount to an unusual staffing choice. Instead, the photographs surfaced amid broader questions about Collins’s politics. As we reported in our "[Red, White, & Sometimes Blue](https://www.newenglandledger.com/red-white-and-sometimes-blue-nick-collins-1/)" series, he has broken with most Massachusetts Democrats on major votes involving policing, immigrant driver's licenses, and other issues. More recently, his opposition to Boston's property-tax proposal left homeowners paying substantially more than they would have under the city's plan. On June 9th, Collins waffled on his support for rent control when talking to voters at a Ward 4 & 5 Democratic Committee forum, despite previously indicating support for it in candidate questionnaires and forums when advocates were attempting to put the issue before voters on the ballot. And just last week, Collins bailed on widely advertised candidate forum held by the Black Agenda Coalition where he could have addressed myriad questions to his diverse constituency, favoring instead a lightly attended public safety meeting with his strongest ally, South Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn, where it remains unclear what the result or takeaways were. In that context, the politics of the person Collins chose to help run his office become more than State House gossip. They become part of a larger question:Who exactly is shaping the agenda inside Nick Collins's office? ## Black Homeowners Have Paid the Price Collins's commitment to residents has equally come under scrutiny as a large share of his campaign contributions have come from real estate developers and investors. As New England Ledger [previously reported](https://www.newenglandledger.com/red-white-sometimes-blue-pt-2/), Collins opposed Boston’s proposal to limit the property-tax burden shifting from commercial buildings onto homeowners. The average single-family homeowner subsequently faced an approximately 13 percent increase—about $780—with particular consequences for Black homeowners and seniors on fixed incomes. That vote is part of the record now shaping how constituents view Collins’s less direct position on rent control ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-07-22-at-11.28.13---PM_cleaned.png) Nick Collins posing for a picture at the annual Juneteenth Celebration at Franklin Park in June 2026 At a June 9 forum hosted by the [Ward 4 and Ward 5 Democratic State Committees](https://youtu.be/i117iGmnMFc?si=r6RBflsxBPlU09vk&ref=newenglandledger.com), Collins appeared alongside [LaToya Gayle](https://www.latoyaforsenate.com/?ref=newenglandledger.com), who is challenging him for the Democratic nomination. When the candidates were asked about rent control, Gayle directly stated that she supports it. Collins took a different approach. He said he supports allowing cities and towns to adopt rent control locally and that he opposes no-fault evictions. But he did not say whether he believes Boston—or any of the communities he represents—should actually adopt rent control. That distinction matters. Supporting a local option means supporting a municipality’s authority to decide. It does not tell voters how Collins believes Boston should use that authority. He can support allowing cities to adopt rent control while personally opposing Boston doing so. His opposition to no-fault evictions is also a separate position. Protections against eviction without cause may help tenants, but they do not necessarily prevent landlords from imposing rent increases that tenants cannot afford. Collins had an opportunity to clearly state whether he supports rent control. Gayle answered yes. Collins did not. That ambiguity is especially significant in a district where rising housing costs are displacing Black, Latino and working-class residents. Voters deserve to know whether their senator supports rent control for the communities he represents—not simply whether he believes local governments should be permitted to consider it. ## Then the Photos Surfaced Attending a political convention and holding conservative beliefs are not misconduct. But a chief of staff is not an ordinary employee. Walsh can influence legislation, strategy, scheduling and which constituent concerns reach Collins. That makes several questions relevant: Did Collins know about Walsh’s politics and RNC attendance when he selected her? Has she advised him on housing, immigration or policing—issues where he has broken with fellow Democrats or avoided taking a clear position? The photographs matter because of that broader record. Collins has split with his party on police accountability, immigrant driver’s licenses and emergency-shelter requirements. He opposed Boston’s property-tax proposal and would not say whether he supports rent control for Boston. Each decision may have its own explanation. But voters deserve to know who is helping shape the pattern behind Collins’s office door. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/IMG_0942_cleaned-1.jpeg) Nick Collins Chief of Staff Haley Walsh pictured bottom right in the same MAGA Red trench coat she's seen wearing in the photo above at the Republic National Convention as a Delegate. ### Red, White, & Sometimes Blue (Pt. 2) URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/red-white-sometimes-blue-pt-2/ Last updated: 2026-08-24T05:54:09.000Z Nick Collins sells one thing better than almost anything else: proximity. He is the neighborhood senator, South Boston born and raised, host of the St. Patrick's Day breakfast, a fixture in union halls, neighborhood meetings and parades. His campaign's argument is that he understands the district because he came out of it. But the money keeping him there increasingly comes from somewhere else. A New England Ledger analysis of 1,909 contributions reported to OCPF between January 2024 and Aug. 5, 2026 found that roughly 59 percent of the dollars Collins raised came from contributors listing addresses outside Boston. That figure understates the distance. The First Suffolk sits entirely within the city, so every dollar from Quincy, Newton, Brookline, Winchester, Milton or Hingham is out-of-district by definition, and plenty of the Boston dollars are too. Quincy contributors gave more than $22,000 during the period examined, Brookline more than $15,000, Newton more than $14,000, Winchester and Milton more than $13,000 each, Hingham nearly $13,000. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/collins_2_boston_vs_outside_dollars_and_count.png) So how much does a neighborhood senator cost? Commercial real estate provides part of the answer. *WBUR* [exposed](https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/12/04/senate-collins-wu-tax-bill-real-estate-campaign-money/?ref=newenglandledger.com) the first wave in 2024, reporting that Collins took $17,250 from real-estate-related interests in October and another $17,200 in November while he was stopping Mayor Michelle Wu's property-tax proposal. Roughly sixty percent of everything he raised that November came from the industry. Collins responded that a majority of his contributions came from Boston residents. The Ledger's analysis of six years of his filings shows that Boston has never been a majority of his contributions, on any measure, in any period. Insert Maury Povich meme. What happened after that story left the headlines is the part nobody has told. The checks kept coming. On April 22, 2026, four BXP employees and executives gave Collins $2,700 in a single day, among them chairman and chief executive Owen Thomas and executive Doug Linde. BXP is one of the region's commercial-real-estate giants, with a Boston portfolio spanning 16.5 million square feet across 52 properties, including the Prudential Center, 200 Clarendon, 100 Federal Street and Atlantic Wharf. Two weeks later came a more concentrated haul: on May 6, Collins raised $4,950, and six contributors from Oxford Properties and Pappas Properties supplied $4,200 of it, nearly 85 cents of every dollar that day. Oxford entered Boston by acquiring 2.7 million square feet of office space and says it became the city's second-largest landlord within two years. Then on June 3, Collins raised $3,000, of which three employees of WS Asset Management gave $2,250, or 75 percent of the day's total. WS Development controls 33 acres and 7.6 million square feet in the Seaport and calls it the largest active development project in Boston's history. The Ledger's review also found money from people tied to the Davis Companies, Corcoran Jennison, Synergy, HYM Investment Group, TCR Development, Lincoln Property Company and other firms embedded in Boston's development economy. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/collins_1_quarterly_real_estate_share_2024.png) As [Part 1](https://www.newenglandledger.com/red-white-and-sometimes-blue-nick-collins-1/) laid out, these donors knew exactly where Collins stood. Falling commercial valuations meant homeowners were about to absorb more of Boston's existing tax burden while commercial owners received reductions. Wu wanted to slow that transfer. Collins stopped her, and Boston homeowners ultimately [faced](https://www.axios.com/local/boston/2025/12/09/boston-property-tax-increase-wu-bill-senate-homeowners-commercial?ref=newenglandledger.com) an average 13 percent increase. The timing tells the story better than any single donor does. In 2023, before the fight, real-estate-linked money accounted for 15.7 percent of Collins's fundraising. In the fourth quarter of 2024, the quarter he was blocking the mayor's petition, it accounted for 65.5 percent. The three quarters before it ran between 15 and 32 percent. Then the industry's share fell back toward its baseline, and the money kept arriving anyway. And now it is showing up on lawns. OCPF records show the campaign spent $3,449.94 on signs in July 2026 alone through Connolly Printing, a family-run union shop founded in 1969, and $38,847.24 on mailings through the same company in the same month. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/collins_3_south_boston_vs_real_estate.png) Consider what that means on an ordinary Boston street. A homeowner opens a tax bill that is higher because more of the city's levy shifted onto residential property. Outside, staked in the grass, a Nick Collins sign asks that homeowner to reelect the senator who fought the proposal designed to hold the increase down. The treasury that paid for the sign was filled, in part, by executives whose companies own some of Boston's largest commercial portfolios and had a direct financial interest in preserving their own decrease. The buildings got the decrease. The homeowners got the lawn signs. The mailers work the same way. Tens of thousands of dollars of Collins literature is landing in the hands of residents carrying larger tax bills, financed by a donor base that includes the industry that fought to keep the burden off its own buildings. That is what campaign money buys: repetition, visibility, field staff, glossy mail, and the power to tell voters who is supposedly fighting for them. Collins calls himself the neighborhood senator. His filings describe a political operation financed by people who do not live in the neighborhood, do not vote in the district, and did not need to. When *WBUR* questioned his real-estate money in 2024, Collins said a majority of his contributions came from Boston residents, including organized labor. Over the nearly three years the Ledger examined, only about four in ten dollars came from contributors listing Boston addresses. The rest came from somewhere else. Which leaves the First Suffolk with a question that gets harder to avoid each time another Collins sign appears beside another higher tax bill. Who does Nick Collins really work for? --- ***"Red, White & Sometimes Blue" examines New England Democratic politicians whose governing records reveal a more complicated ideology than their party label suggests: lawmakers who campaign on Democratic values but often side with Republicans, business interests, or traditional power structures on issues affecting their working-class constituents.*** [Sen. Collins OCPF Contributions Report (2024-2026)Sen\_Nick\_Collins\_OCPF\_Contributions\_Report\_2024\_2026\_.xlsx167 KBdownload-circle](https://www.newenglandledger.com/content/files/2026/08/Sen%5FNick%5FCollins%5FOCPF%5FContributions%5FReport%5F2024%5F2026%5F.xlsx "Download") ### Five Alarm Flynn At It Again: Councilor Calls for a $110M Boondoggle, Then Retreats the Next Day URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/five-alarm-flynn-at-it-again-councilor-calls-for-110m-solution-for-the-wrong-problem/ Last updated: 2026-08-25T14:03:57.000Z On Thursday, Ed Flynn called for a military occupation of Boston. "I know it's somewhat controversial, but I do believe the National Guard could play a critical role in supporting, in a supportive role with Boston police," he [said](https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/boston-city-councilor-ed-flynn-suggests-national-guard-help-after-two-serious-stabbings-two-days/N6TTUYO5DNHPRKKCF3FUYR7Q6U/?ref=newenglandledger.com). His reasoning was staffing: "Simply because we don't have enough police officers, Boston acknowledges this, and it's creating neighborhoods that are not safe." Here is what he was responding to. [An incident occurred ](https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/north-station-boston-stabbing-2-injured/?ref=newenglandledger.com)near North Station where a man stabbed a woman multiple times in a hallway behind a Dunkin' and then stabbed himself. "It is apparent to us that the two of them were involved in a domestic relationship, and we believe this incident to be domestic-related," Superintendent Paul McLaughlin said at the scene. The woman is thankfully expected to survive. The man's wounds are life threatening and self-inflicted. The night before, a man was tragically killed on an escalator inside South Station after a fight with a friend. Both had traveled from Memphis to raise money for a youth basketball program back home. Police called it targeted rather than random, and the man who killed him fled the station and has still not been caught. An intimate partner assault that ended in an attempted suicide. A fight between two friends over a $25 phone bill. There is no configuration of armed personnel on Causeway Street that prevents either one. Flynn knows this. He proposed a military solution anyway, because the army and the police are the only two things he ever proposes. By the end of Friday, Flynn had retreated. Mayor Wu's reaction to his proposal was that it was "frankly foolish and irresponsible," saying the specific causes are the only route to solutions. The councilor from South Boston shriveled up. By that afternoon the Guard was no longer going to play a critical role. It was, "is there a role for the National Guard to play? Or is there not a role for them to play? It's worth having the conversation." Then the police union broke with him, telling reporters the department is understaffed but nowhere near the level that warrants calling in the Guard. Even Nick Collins, his closest ally, told CBS he believed the stabbing was an isolated incident and that the transit system is safe. Twenty four hours took Flynn from a demand, to a question, to running away from the idea overall. The pattern is the story, and it has been for years. Whatever the problem is, the answer is more uniforms. The city's own crime data through August 9 shows homicides down 17 percent from last year, reported rapes down 22 percent, and shooting incidents running nearly a quarter below the five-year average. What has risen is aggravated assault, which is the offense category that patrol presence is least able to touch because it happens between people who already know each other, and in South Boston a jump in shoplifting and auto theft that accounts for nearly the entire increase in that district's crime total. Robbery and assault in Flynn's district both sit below their own five-year averages. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/nel-boston-crime-vs-five-year-average-1.png) So the honest summary is this: the violence Flynn invoked is falling. The categories that are climbing are either invisible to deterrence or are retail theft. He proposed a military deployment to address shoplifting. The bill for that is not theoretical. The Congressional Budget Office [estimates](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/guard-deployments-us-cities-cost-010314436.html?ref=newenglandledger.com) that each additional 1,000 Guard personnel deployed to a city in 2026 costs between $18 million and $21 million a month. Five hundred soldiers in Boston runs somewhere near $110 million a year. And Flynn asked for the *Massachusetts* Guard, which means state active duty, activated by the Governor. States directly fund state active duty orders. Massachusetts residents pay every dollar. The only alternative route is federalization under Title 10, where President Trump would take command and Washington would pay, which trades the money for control of our streets. Is that what you really want? Washington has already run the experiment. The deployment there cost $332 million through February, roughly $1.65 million a day. Per a [U.S. Senate Committee report](https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/NationalGuardReportExecutiveSummary.pdf?ref=newenglandledger.com), it is on pace to pass $600 million at the one-year mark, more than the entire annual budget of the D.C. police department. The Pentagon now projects another $1.43 billion to keep troops in place through January 2029\. What that purchased, according to the Niskanen Center, was a 24 percent reduction in property crimes such as theft and vehicle break-ins, and no discernible decrease in violent crime. Their phrase for it: "an expensive tool deployed in the wrong places for the wrong types of crime." Six months in, Guard leadership could not name a single measurable public safety outcome attributable to their presence. None of this should surprise anyone who has looked at the research, because the premise underneath Flynn's request has been failing tests since 1974\. That [year](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/kansas-city-preventive-patrol-experiment-technical-report?ref=newenglandledger.com), the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment cut patrol to zero in five police beats, doubled or tripled it in five others, and left five alone. There was no significant difference in crime, in residents' fear of crime, or in their satisfaction with police. The department's own conclusion was that routine patrol in marked cars has little value in preventing crime or in making people feel safe, and that those resources could safely be spent elsewhere. And Flynn, who insists Boston cannot afford its own programs, wanted to spend $110 million a year on it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/nel-guard-cost-vs-city-budgets-1.png) Remember that he was the single vote against Wu's property tax fix. The Council passed it 12 to 1, with Flynn casting the sole no. His [stated](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/10/30/metro/boston-city-council-passes-mayor-michelle-wu-revised-property-tax-home-rule/?ref=newenglandledger.com) reason: "We just can't continue spending money non-stop on every single program...We have to be fiscally responsible and fiscally disciplined." Nick Collins (who left him high and dry on the Guard matter) then blocked the measure from reaching a Senate vote and Bostonians got the bill. As a result, the average homeowner's tax bill went up 13 percent, or $780\. Bostonians are paying more right now because of the position Flynn took and the senator he stood beside. Yet, he wanted you to dig deeper for his burning desire to see men with rifles on your street. *This* is not fiscal discipline. This is a man who calls every expense reckless except the one he likes, and who reaches for the most expensive instrument in American government whenever a camera is pointed at him. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/nel-what-110-million-buys_1_CLEAN-1.png) There is a real conversation to be had, and it starts with what safety actually means. Safety is being able to walk, work, and live across this city without fear of molestation. It is not people in helmets on every corner. The money in question could fund the mental health response that Thursday's call on Causeway Street genuinely required. It could fund summer employment for young people, which is among the most promising and cost-effective violence prevention interventions cities have. It could fund the unglamorous physical work that keeps showing up in the [research](https://everytownresearch.org/report/summer-youth-employment-programs/?ref=newenglandledger.com): studies in Youngstown and Flint found that maintaining vacant lots cut violent crime sharply, and researchers confirmed the crime did not simply move next door. We have local examples that prove this too. Ray Flynn–Ed's father, a fact he will never let you forget–became mayor in 1984 and governed through the worst violence in the modern history of Boston. The crack epidemic nearly [doubled](https://grokipedia.com/page/Raymond%5FFlynn?ref=newenglandledger.com) Boston's homicide rate between 1987 and 1990, ending in a record 152 killings in 1990\. Juvenile handgun homicide victims tripled over the same three years, from 22 to 73\. Not two stabbings in a week. One hundred and fifty two bodies in a single year. Flynn the Elder did not call for the National Guard. His administration's approach was neighborhood-focused and proactive rather than purely reactive, and when the violence moved into the streets, his method was to engage, making house calls to the families being victimized. He went to the door. Whatever else he got wrong, he understood that the work was person to person, in the neighborhood, done by people who lived there. His son had two stabbings, one of them a domestic assault, and went to every pen and microphone he could find to demand armed troops. For Ed Flynn, this is not a case of the apple falling far from the tree, but rather a whirlwind picking up the apple and carrying it two continents away. A future Ledger investigation will look further into Flynn's follies. For now, it should be clear that there is a reason we call him "Five-Alarm Flynn:" he is pulling fire alarms over cigarette smoke and sticking taxpayers with the bill. ### Is Boston’s Trump Train Having Family Drama? URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/is-bostons-trump-train-having-family-drama-depina-threatens-to-voodoo-councilor-erin-murphy-then-apologizes-days-later/ Last updated: 2026-08-25T14:03:35.000Z Is there family drama aboard Boston’s Trump Train? Joao Zezito DePina, the longtime Boston activist turned increasingly right-wing political provocateur, spent several days publicly attacking Boston City Councilor At-Large Erin Murphy, a politician DePina says he previously supported and helped fund. He accused Murphy of betraying him. He warned that “some white people” will smile in your face while stabbing you in the back. And, after tagging Murphy, he publicly asked for the contact information of a “voodoo doctor.” Then came the plot twist. DePina apologized after realizing Murphy had already texted him offering to meet. The bizarre episode offers a glimpse into the volatility of Boston’s emerging anti-Wu political coalition, and into DePina's dramatic political transformation. ## “I thought she had my back” The feud appears to stem from a May encounter at City Hall. On July 28, DePina posted video involving Murphy and a Boston police officer, accusing the councilor of failing to defend him during a discussion about his behavior. “This is a women I’ve supported and funded her campaign,” DePina wrote. “I thought she had my back the way I had hers.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-624787ba-fb89-4fc4-94c5-b61209658a3d.webp) The important part wasn't simply that DePina was angry with Murphy. By his own account, she had been an ally. That quickly changed. Days later, DePina posted: > “Some white people will smile in you face while stabbing you in the back!” He tagged Murphy directly underneath. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-1a4c328a-6bb8-41a5-ae00-1d10eb907730.webp) Another post accused Murphy of not keeping her word and “being messy.” Then things got stranger. ## Enter the “voodoo doctor” DePina posted: > “I can’t wait to come across a good voodoo doctor.” He tagged Murphy, Mayor Michelle Wu and others. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-14-at-12.33.09---AM_cleaned.png) When a commenter said she knew “a good one in Brockton but costly,” DePina responded: > “give me his or her information because it will be worth every penny!” DePina didn't explain precisely what he intended by the comment. But it came amid his public attacks on Murphy, whom he tagged in the post. And then, suddenly, the feud was over. ## He forgot about the text Days after attacking Murphy, DePina acknowledged that she had, in fact, attempted to contact him. He had apparently overlooked the message. “I disregarded or forgot a text” from Murphy offering to sit down, DePina wrote, before apologizing for his “statements and misunderstanding.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-f335e814-8217-48b8-aa06-f7a76d9831a3.png) So DePina went from describing Murphy as someone he supported, to accusing her of betrayal, to invoking race, to seeking a “voodoo doctor,” only to discover that Murphy had already tried to meet with him. Apparently, everybody's cool again. ## A much bigger transformation The episode is more notable because DePina himself has undergone a dramatic political transformation. In 2021, DePina was a Democratic ward committee member running for Boston City Council on issues including affordable housing, racial equity and police reform. Today? DePina recently posted: > “I think It’s time for me to switch to the republican platform!” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-3e047575-114e-46c5-9c65-4d2780bbc322.png) His rhetoric has transformed along with his politics. DePina's social-media feed is now filled with confrontations with politicians and community figures, including people he previously considered allies. In May, he mocked Councilor Sharon Durkan's weight and suggested it was a side effect of Zepbound. He has criticized Councilor Ed Flynn despite saying the two had “no issues.” And several Black women in Boston's political, business, and community circles have publicly accused DePina–himself the founder of a local small business, JD Florist–of degrading, intimidating or abusive behavior. Those accusations remain allegations, but they show that concerns about DePina's confrontational style predate the Murphy feud. In November 2024, Dani Johnson, owner of SparkFM who, as we [reported](https://www.newenglandledger.com/own-the-block-sparkfm-is-fighting-to-turn-a-lease-into-a-legacy/) earlier, is on the precipice of owning her own real estate, accused DePina of showing up at an event where she was speaking, degrading and belittling her, and saying that she and her child should die. Johnson said she filed a police report. > “I will NOT protect a black man that continues to torment and harass black women,” Johnson wrote. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-d42ca4d1-07e1-4ad0-8c14-6a2c8b2c06ab.webp) In October 2025, Toy Burton alleged that DePina called her after she liked a Facebook comment criticizing him, called her a “B\*\*\*\*,” said “FU” and hung up. DePina subsequently posted publicly about Burton: > “hope all your finances are in order! All the grants and federal money you got!” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-13-at-11.52.00---PM_cleaned-2.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-13-at-11.56.18---PM_cleaned.png) Another community member, Shanta Simmons-Farley, publicly asked DePina: > “Now let's talk about abusing Black women in our community.. why do you keep doing it?” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-13-at-11.54.03---PM_cleaned-1.png) And Jacques Dady Jean, writing in July 2025, accused DePina of verbally abusing and intimidating a Haitian woman. Jean said he had previously considered DePina “a brother” and offered him a warning that now seems especially relevant: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/e3/17e39ce0-1e5f-40c0-aebe-c510255fec7f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-13-at-11.57.03---PM_cleaned.png) > “You can’t make enemies of everyone and expect peace.” The underlying accusations have not all been independently verified by NEL and should be understood as the accounts of the people making them. But taken together with DePina's own posts, they reveal a recurring pattern of public relationships deteriorating into intensely personal conflict. It should be noted that New England Ledger reviewed a portion of DePina's public posts and found no comparable public apology to any of the Black women–elected or otherwise–who have accused him of degrading, intimidating or abusive behavior. ## Trouble aboard the Trump Train? That's what makes the Murphy feud politically interesting. Boston's anti-Wu political coalition brings together conservatives, Trump supporters, public-safety hawks, disaffected Democrats and anti-establishment personalities who don't necessarily share the same politics. Sometimes their strongest bond appears to be who they're against. But an alliance built around common enemies can get complicated when allies start becoming enemies themselves. Murphy is a perfect example. According to DePina, he supported her. He helped fund her. He thought she had his back. Then he decided she didn't. Within days, Murphy went from ally to alleged backstabber to the target of a “voodoo doctor” post — and then right back to someone DePina was willing to sit down with. All because of a text message he says he forgot. Maybe everyone aboard Boston's Trump Train is headed in the same general direction. The question is whether they can make it to the next stop without turning on each other. ### WHITE NOISE: How the Right-Wing Media Lynch Mob Ignored Donor Ties and Scapegoated Two Black Men URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/white-noise-springfield/ Last updated: 2026-08-13T11:02:51.000Z --- *Don't have time for the full article? Listen to The Ledger Files episode on Spotify.* --- When Massachusetts selected a team to build Springfield’s new courthouse, the story was quickly packaged as a scandal about Boston. Mayor Domenic Sarno blasted “Boston power brokers.” Mass Daily News put U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s husband in its headline. Fox News followed. The *New York Post* reached for the tired “Squad” label. Two losing bidders went to court, turning John Barros, a partner in the winning development team who had since become interim head of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, into evidence that something had gone wrong. Weeks later when you strip the story back to the actual record, you'll find that Scooby got the wrong villain. The state [chose](https://www.mass.gov/info-details/springfield-regional-justice-center-project?ref=newenglandledger.com) a proposal that was cheaper than every competitor–saving Massachusetts taxpayers nearly $300 million over 40 years than the next-lowest finalist–among the fastest to deliver, highly ranked for design and accessibility, and led by a developer with extensive experience building government facilities. CoJo Partners, the Black-owned firm founded by Barros and Conan Harris, was a small part of a team that also included national firms like FD Stonewater, whose business is federal buildings, Suffolk Construction, the largest construction company in Massachusetts, and a courthouse design practice. The state evaluated the full team. Yet much of the political and media scrutiny centered on two Black men, then migrated to a Black congresswoman who had nothing to do with selecting the project. Meanwhile, some of the relationships surrounding the people who lost received considerably less attention. We suspect that you already know why. ## Sarno Had Picked His Favorite Years Earlier The courthouse competition did not begin on a level political field. In June 2022, three years before the formal RFP was issued, Sarno stood beside Peter Picknelly and city development officials to unveil Picknelly’s North Riverfront vision: housing, retail, a marina, and a new state courthouse on property Picknelly controlled. Sarno called it “[visionary](https://www.springfield-ma.gov/cos/news-story?cHash=5aa91b673ce69e7ac15611281f8d261d&tx%5Fnews%5Fpi1%5Baction%5D=detail&tx%5Fnews%5Fpi1%5Bcontroller%5D=News&tx%5Fnews%5Fpi1%5Bnews%5D=15718&&ref=newenglandledger.com).” He kept promoting it in 2023, 2024, and into the state procurement process. The advocacy became so conspicuous that Massachusetts Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro raised it publicly before bids were even selected. “I think there’s a chilling effect on the ability for a competitive process,” Shapiro [told](https://www.nepm.org/regional-news/2025-01-22/springfield-courthouse-project-moves-forward-but-not-without-some-objection?ref=newenglandledger.com) the Asset Management Board in January 2025, warning that developers might hesitate to compete when local officials had already embraced a preferred location. There was another aspect to this relationship as well. Members of the Picknelly family contributed roughly $8,000 to Sarno during the 2022-23 election cycle, according to Western Mass Politics & Insight. In late 2024, Peter Picknelly hosted a Sarno fundraiser at The Student Prince where the mayor announced plans to seek another term. By the time Sarno condemned the state for “shunning” local developers, he had spent four years publicly championing the project of a political supporter. And the state had already studied the riverfront. In a 2023 DCAMM site [assessment](https://www.mass.gov/doc/springfield-courts-complex-relocation-assessment-dcamm-mass-state-project-no-trc2301-may-15-2023/download?ref=newenglandledger.com), 125 Liberty Street scored 149 points. Two North Riverfront locations around Avocado Street and West Columbus Avenue scored 115 and 120\. Among the weaknesses identified were zoning, parking, site visibility, and vehicular access. The later procurement started fresh, and Picknelly’s Park View South proposal ultimately made the final four. So did 125 Liberty. Liberty Junction won. It was approximately $600,000 per month cheaper than its nearest competitor and, [according](https://businesswest.com/page/3/?p=fmtcqywx&&ref=newenglandledger.com) to DCAMM Commissioner Adam Baacke, “one of the strongest, regardless of cost.” That is a much different story than Boston insiders stealing Springfield’s courthouse. DCAMM ensured that rather than stolen, the taxpayer dollars of Springfield's and other Massachusetts' residents were saved. ## The Other People Who Wanted the Deal Dinesh Patel’s Tower Square team and Jeb Balise’s group sued the state after losing. Patel was hardly a stranger to Sarno. Springfield’s own website records the mayor calling him “my friend Dinesh Patel,” while repeatedly celebrating Patel’s investments in Tower Square and the downtown Marriott. The lawsuit therefore came from developers pursuing the same prize themselves: a government-backed lease lasting at least 40 years. And while those developers were demanding scrutiny of the winning team’s relationships, Sarno was attacking a result that defeated a project backed by one political supporter and challenged by another developer he publicly called a friend. Those relationships belong in the courthouse story as much as anything else. ## Then Black Success Became the Scandal This is where the story took a familiar turn. Black ownership remains extraordinarily rare in American commercial real estate. [Brookings](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-devaluation-of-assets-in-black-neighborhoods-the-case-of-commercial-property/?ref=newenglandledger.com) found that only 3 percent of Black households own nonresidential commercial property, compared with 8 percent of white households. Among households that do own it, average holdings were about $3,600 for Black families compared with $34,000 for white families. Into that landscape stepped CoJo, who partnered with experienced national developers and builders on the biggest public real estate project in Springfield in generations. The team then beat its competitors on cost, schedule, transportation access, government-development experience, and overall value. And somehow the public narrative became about John Barros and Conan Harris. Mass Daily’s headline declared: “Rep. Pressley’s husband set to profit in lavish $2 billion Western Mass. courthouse deal.” It introduced Harris through Pressley, calling her an “anti-landlord Congresswoman,” then turned her wealth and political positions into part of a procurement story she did not participate in. Fox News went national with “Company of ‘Squad’ member’s husband lands $2B contract from blue state.” The *New York Post* followed with “‘Squad’ Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s hubby still on $2B government contract.” That was to be expected, dogs always react to the sound of whistles. What was unexpected was how local media covered the story. The *Boston Globe* spent 2017 documenting the city's reputation on race in a seven-part *Spotlight* series, and in the wake of the George Floyd murder and subsequent uprising, its editor circulated a memo committing the paper to examining race and equity in its coverage, not only its hiring. That same month it launched a public partnership with *GBH* and the NAACP Boston branch called "The State of Race." However, six years later, its news coverage of this manufactured crisis–and that of other local newsrooms who claim to prioritize rooting out bias in their reporting–reacted to the same whistle, focusing on the smallest part of this project rather than a documented warning against a sitting mayor with a donor relationship to the bidder he favored. Reporters, columnists, and opinion writers have been focused on a lawsuit rather than the facts. Note that Barros had joined the MCCA afterLiberty Junction submitted its proposal. His attorney said he consulted agency lawyers and the State Ethics Commission, remained passive in the courthouse project, and was advised to file the required disclosure if his team was selected. He followed instructions and filed it July 1\. He later [removed](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/29/metro/john-barros-mcca-springfield-courthouse-bid/?ref=newenglandledger.com) himself entirely as a result of the white noise. None of that changed Liberty Junction’s score. It did not make the competing proposals cheaper. It did not give Picknelly better transit access. It did not erase the nearly $300 million difference taxpayers were projected to save. And it did not give Ayanna Pressley a vote in the selection room. Yet two Black men succeeding in commercial real estate, one of them married to one of the right-wing lynch mob’s favorite political targets, became easier to scandalize than the network already sitting in plain sight: developers, donors, political friends, favored projects, and the assumption that City Hall, not the state, controlled this contract. Springfield was told to look east for the fix. The more revealing story is how Springfield's power brokers crashed out because they thought the fix was in their favor. [Springfield Regional Justice Center Selection Committee Memo to CommissionerSpringfield Regional Justice Center Selection Committee Memo to Commissioner.pdf223 KBdownload-circle](https://www.newenglandledger.com/content/files/2026/07/Springfield-Regional-Justice-Center-Selection-Committee-Memo-to-Commissioner.pdf "Download") [Springfield Regional Justice Center Comparative Analysis260625 Springfield Regional Justice Center Comparative Analysis.pdf50 KBdownload-circle](https://www.newenglandledger.com/content/files/2026/07/260625-Springfield-Regional-Justice-Center-Comparative-Analysis.pdf "Download") [Mayor Sarno Backs Picknelly's Courthouse Plans as early as 2022Mayor Sarno Backs Picknelly's Courthouse Plans 2022.pdf33 MBdownload-circle](https://www.newenglandledger.com/content/files/2026/07/Mayor-Sarno-Backs-Picknelly-s-Courthouse-Plans-2022.pdf "Download") [Mayor Sarno Praises Losing Bidder Jeb Balise as "a great friend" in 2023Mayor Sarno Praises Balise.pdf5 MBdownload-circle](https://www.newenglandledger.com/content/files/2026/07/Mayor-Sarno-Praises-Balise.pdf "Download") [Picknelly and family are major Sarno campaign contributorsSpringfield Race is Over, but the Campaign Finance Refs Still Reviewing the Tape… — Western Mass Politics & Insight.pdf476 KBdownload-circle](https://www.newenglandledger.com/content/files/2026/07/Springfield-Race-is-Over--but-the-Campaign-Finance-Refs-Still-Reviewing-the-Tape--------Western-Mass-Politics---Insight.pdf "Download") ### Red, White, & Sometimes Blue (Pt. 1) URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/red-white-and-sometimes-blue-nick-collins-1/ Last updated: 2026-08-25T14:03:48.000Z --- *Don't have time for the full article? Listen to the episode on Spotify.* --- In the spring of 2013, in a district that ran from the triple-deckers of South Boston down through Dorchester into Mattapan and the edge of Hyde Park, roughly 21,700 people voted in a Democratic primary and ended a dynasty by a few hundred ballots. Linda Dorcena Forry, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, beat South Boston state Representative Nick Collins and took a seat once held by William Bulger for twenty-five years, then Stephen Lynch, then Jack Hart. Collins did not lose because South Boston abandoned him. He lost because the rest of the district finally outvoted it. He has never had to face that arithmetic again. Forry left for the private sector in 2018 and endorsed her old rival at his campaign kickoff, a courtesy extended by a colleague on her way out the door in a city where such courtesies are currency. No other Democrat filed. Three years later, the ground itself was rearranged. The 2021 redistricting traded Dorchester precincts for more of South Boston and the waterfront. In a single step, the district's Black share fell from roughly 36 percent to 21 while its white share climbed from 34 to 46 and its median household income crossed six figures. Voting rights advocates warned lawmakers at the time that the map was pulling voters of color out of a Boston Senate seat and leaving a white bloc decisive. The map passed anyway. Collins did not draw those lines. He has simply never stopped standing on them. And when Boston tried to move power the other way, he turned up to help stop it. In 2022, the City Council approved a municipal map moving several predominantly white precincts out of District 3 and into District 4, which centers on Mattapan, and moving minority precincts the other way. A lawsuit followed, funded in part by two sitting councilors (Frank Baker and Ed Flynn) at $10,000 each, on the theory that race had wrongly predominated the decision. Among those the *Bay State Banner* [reported](https://baystatebanner.com/2023/03/15/white-politicians-seek-to-overturn-redistricting/?ref=newenglandledger.com) were lined up to testify against the map: Congressman Stephen Lynch, Councilors Ed Flynn and Michael Flaherty, former city clerk Maureen Feeney, and the sitting senator from the First Suffolk. In May 2023, a judge granted a preliminary injunction on Fourteenth Amendment grounds and barred the city from using the map. Lay the voting record over that geography and the pattern stops looking accidental. At four in the morning on July 14, 2020, the Senate passed its police accountability bill 30 to 7\. Collins voted no, one of five Democrats standing with two Republicans. Representative Russell Holmes, then chair of the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus, whose Dorchester and Mattapan constituents were also Collins's constituents, said he was surprised. Makes sense when you consider that at the time, Collins was representing what was then one of only three majority-minority Senate districts in Massachusetts. In 2022, when the Senate voted to let residents obtain driver's licenses regardless of immigration status, Collins voted no, one of five Democrats alongside three Republicans. In 2025, he voted for an amendment barring families from emergency shelter unless they had lived in Massachusetts a year. Six senators supported it. Five were Republicans. That May he was one of four Democrats who crossed party lines to block the state's transition to zero-emission vehicles. Then came the vote that decided something. When collapsing office valuations threatened to push more of Boston's tax levy onto homeowners, Mayor Michelle Wu asked the Legislature for temporary authority to shift part of it back toward commercial property. Collins tabled the petition three times in 2024 and helped bury it in 2026, when the Senate rejected it 33 to 5\. Four of the six senators representing Boston voted yes. Collins was one of the two who did not. Homeowners absorbed an average 13 percent tax increase, roughly $780 on a single-family house. Wu has [said](https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/07/24/nick-collins-michelle-wu-property-tax-plans?ref=newenglandledger.com) Boston homeowners would have kept more than $150 million over two years had the Senate let it through, and that South Boston residents alone would have saved $8 million last year. After stymying efforts in a non-election year, Collins then offered his own remedy in 2026: exemptions, credits, and permission for the city to spend its own surplus on rebates. In other words, he let the bill land for everyone, then proposed public money to soften it for a chosen few. Collins attends Juneteenth and other Black cultural events. He posts the photographs. He circulates the endorsements of Black elected officials. The currency of those endorsements is the implication that he can be trusted with the interests of the people who elected them. It is worth asking what exactly that trust is purchasing. The city's own Assessment of Fair Housing [found](https://www.boston.gov/sites/default/files/file/2024/04/City-of-Boston-Assessment-of-Fair-Housing-2023.pdf?ref=newenglandledger.com) that 44 percent of white households in Boston own their homes against 30 percent of Black households. The gap is not closing on its own: in 2023, Black households received 9.4 percent of mortgages for one-to-four-unit homes in Boston while white households received 65 percent. Property taxes are the mechanism by which a city decides who carries the cost of owning something. Tilt the levy toward residential property and the burden falls on a class Black Boston was systematically kept out of and is struggling to hold onto. Preserve the commercial cut and the benefit accrues to a class it was never in. Closing a wealth gap that was built deliberately requires deliberate action in the other direction. What the First Suffolk got instead was intentionality pointed the same way it has always been pointed. The Black History Month photographs are free. The tax vote cost his Black constituents money, and it was a choice, made on a recorded roll call, in a chamber where four of his six Boston colleagues chose otherwise. The rest of the operation matches. Based on images being widely [circulated](https://x.com/OrganizerMemes/status/2086939168928612552?s=20&ref=newenglandledger.com) on social media, Collins chief of staff, Haley Walsh, appears to have attended the 2024 Republican National Convention in Trump-branded attire. A chief of staff advises on which bills get filed, which amendments get backed, which constituents get a call returned, and how a senator's budget priorities are written. So: did Collins know before he handed the most powerful staff job in his office over that her politics may align with an ideology that threatens the lives and livelihoods of his own constituents? Does he consider attendance at the convention that nominated Donald Trump and other now-deleted social media posts disqualifying, irrelevant, or an asset? And in a district where more than a fifth of residents are Black and immigrant families who are under siege by the policies and personnel of the Trump administration, whose interests does he believe are being represented in the room where his legislative agenda is set? Then there is Mass Daily News, whose editorial pattern the Ledger documented in [RIGGED](https://www.newenglandledger.com/mass-daily-news/). It has told readers that rising taxes were "not Nick Collins'" fault, accused his challenger of being a "far-left activist," and counted her pronouns on Instagram as evidence. A politician does not get adopted by this publication like that passively. In fact, based on our analysis, it only seems to choose one type of politician who embraces one type of worldview. He either welcomes it or repudiates it. Collins has done neither, and the questions follow: has his office or campaign supplied information to Mass Daily, and does he endorse the way it has characterized a Black woman running against him? Silence is an answer. We suspect it is not the one he would give at the Martin Luther King annual breakfast. Thirteen years ago this district looked at Nick Collins and said "no." He never won those voters back. He never had to. The precincts that beat him were moved, the coalition thinned, and he has governed ever since as though it no longer exists. Someone is still paying for the lawn signs going up on streets where the tax bills went up too. South Boston, the neighborhood that is his entire identity, supplies roughly a dime of every dollar he raises. Commercial real estate supplies twice that. Part 2 follows the money. Stay tuned. --- **"Red, White & Sometimes Blue"* examines New England Democratic politicians whose governing records reveal a more complicated ideology than their party label suggests: lawmakers who campaign on Democratic values but often side with Republicans, business interests, or traditional power structures on issues affecting their working-class constituents.* ### Five Alarm Flynn: The Case of the Crybaby Councilor URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/five-alarm-flynn/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T14:28:49.000Z --- *Don't have time for the full article? Listen to The Ledger Files episode on Spotify.* --- Councilor Ed Flynn did two things on Tuesday, August 4. The first was to add his name to Mayor Michelle Wu's letter urging the U.S. Senate to preserve Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haitian immigrants. It was the right letter. It was also somebody else's words and sentiments. Flynn supplied a signature, which is the cheapest thing a politician owns, to sentences he did not have to compose, defend, or mean. The second was to open his own social media accounts and speak in his own words. That is where you learn what a man believes, and what Flynn believed, urgently, was that a private citizen should lose his job. He did not, and has not since August 4, posted anything about his signing onto Wu's letter. The citizen was Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Massachusetts. His offense, committed more than a week earlier on his personal social media, was a joke about a sign: State Sen. Mike Rush's campaign signs give off "such a strong conservative vibe," Cohn wrote, and a voter who knew nothing about Rush would take him for a Republican. Cohn added that he knows a good deal about Rush and reaches the same conclusion anyway. That is the entirety of it. A wisecrack about sign's vibe, attached to a criticism of a voting record, which is the most ordinary act–and a protected right–available to a citizen of a democracy. Here is what Flynn told the city that Cohn had written. Progressive Mass, he said, had attacked Rush "for using the word 'Veteran' on lawn signs." The word "Veteran" does not appear in Cohn's post. Flynn did not misread a sentence. He repeated one that had been manufactured upstream and handed to him ready for use. Readers of this publication have seen that assembly line up close. Our review of 1,333 Mass Daily News articles, published in a report and subsequent article called [RIGGED](https://www.newenglandledger.com/mass-daily-news/), documented an operation that functions less like a newsroom than like a foundry, where an unremarkable remark is fed in at one end and emerges at the other as an atrocity, aimed with striking consistency at immigrants, at the mayor, and at anyone who advocates for either, and sustained by the same donation pipelines that underwrite the city's permanent anti-Wu campaign. The foundry needs two inputs. Raw material is easy. Respectability is not. Respectability is what Flynn donated. A fabricated quote circulating on a partisan site is a rumor. The same fabrication in the mouth of a sitting Boston city councilor is a fact, or close enough for the people who needed it to be one. He called the invented line "appalling, hurtful and shameful." He announced that its author "should resign immediately." He did not check. Checking would have cost ninety seconds and ruined the afternoon. That would have been politically inconvenient though. So on Tuesday the councilor sprinted toward smoke from a fire nobody lit. On Wednesday morning a building *was* burning. That was the day Haitian residents of Boston lost the legal right to work. The Supreme Court opened the door in June; the Trump administration walked through it in August. In Massachusetts that is roughly 45,000 people. They staff hospital floors, drive buses, pour concrete, and mind other people's toddlers. They contribute an estimated $418 million a year to this economy, a number that does not become smaller because the workers behind it become illegal. Councilor Ruthzee Louijeune, the first Haitian American elected in Boston, filed a resolution asking the city to coordinate services it already funds: rental assistance, eviction prevention, legal referral, one phone number so that a family that lost its paycheck on Wednesday does not spend Thursday petitioning four separate agencies and surrendering immigration paperwork to each of them. Flynn wanted to know the cost. Louijeune told him there were no dollars attached. He asked again. Could anyone guarantee the city would not wind up covering somebody's rent or mortgage? Council President Liz Breadon told him to stop assuming facts not in evidence and reminded the chamber that thousands of Boston residents were facing a very unfortunate future. He knew this. He objected anyway. A single councilor can freeze a new measure in Boston, and he used that tactic. The resolution was sent to committee. The council does not reconvene until Aug. 26, and nothing guarantees the committee meets before then. Rent is due on the first. This is the member who instructs his colleagues to stop grandstanding and attend to potholes, sidewalks, and Mass and Cass. Mr. Fundamentals. Mr. Watch the Checkbook. Presented with a $418 million hole opening under the local economy and 45,000 workers moving from payroll to housing court, Mr. Fundamentals brought no jobs response, no legal fund, no landlord notification program, and not one dollar of original thinking. He brought a hypothetical about a mortgage payment, aimed at a resolution that spent nothing. The single item on the table that might have helped somebody, he stopped. His devotion to committee process is recent and seasonal. In September 2024, when Councilor Ben Weber, the body's only Jewish member, declined to rubber-stamp Flynn's resolution to fly the Israeli flag over City Hall and sent it to subcommittee for discussion, Flynn protested that there was "nothing controversial about this." In August 2025 he deployed the same one-man objection to stall a resolution backing the mayor against federal immigration agents, then lectured the room about potholes. When someone slows Flynn's flag, it is an outrage. When Flynn slows a lifeline for Haitian families, it is diligence. The rulebook leaves the drawer when immigrants need something. Read the ledger of his attention and the arithmetic is not hard. A white veteran, allegedly insulted, in a story that never happened: days, at full volume, in his own voice. Forty-five thousand Black and brown neighbors losing work, housing, and legal standing: caution, delay, and a borrowed pen. Four weeks ago Flynn voted to condemn the Court's ruling and told the chamber Boston must show compassion for victims of disaster and those in need. Fine speech. Free. Wednesday the invoice came, and the councilor had questions about the total. Now the city knows exactly who Ed Flynn cries for. ### Sean O'Brien's MAGA Turn URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/sean-obrien/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T15:02:52.000Z Sean O'Brien came up through Boston's Teamsters Local 25\. He now runs the whole International Brotherhood of Teamsters, 1.3 million members, one of the most diverse rank-and-file armies in American labor. Remember that number and that diversity, because it is exactly what he put on the auction block. In July 2024, O'Brien became the first Teamsters president in history to address a Republican National Convention, in prime time, in front of a room built around Donald Trump. He praised Trump from that stage, calling him "one tough SOB." A union that had backed Democrats for decades watched its leader walk into the other party's convention and hand it a labor celebrity's blessing. Then he went further. O'Brien publicly tweeted that Senator Josh Hawley was "100% on point" for an article attacking corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and, in Hawley's own words, "the religion of the trans flag." Read that slowly. The head of a union full of Black, brown, immigrant, and LGBTQ workers went out of his way to co-sign an attack on the very idea of inclusion. His own house revolted. The official Teamsters account posted a statement condemning the Hawley endorsement, then hastily deleted it. Union Vice President John Palmer called the RNC decision "unconscionable." A member of the executive board said flatly that he was "embarrassed." This was not outside noise. This was the union's own leadership recoiling in real time. And here is the betrayal in black and white. The Teamsters' own governing documents pledge that the union is "pro-union and pro-equality" and commit to full respect for LGBTQ workers and their families. O'Brien did not just drift from that promise. He publicly applauded the politicians writing the playbook against it. A leader is supposed to carry his members' values into the room. He carried the opposition's. Now think about who pays for that image. Boston's unions, especially the building trades, carry a long and documented history of shutting Black workers out, and that reputation still keeps Black families at arm's length from one of the surest ladders into the middle class this country ever built. When the most visible union boss in America, a Boston product no less, cozies up to a movement openly hostile to diversity, he hardens the very stereotype that unions are hostile to Black people. Every worker he pushes away with that message is a family locked out of union wages, union benefits, and union pensions. That is not just a bad look. It is fuel on the racial wealth gap, and it makes the lie that unions are anti-Black a little more believable to the people who most need to know it is a lie. Then came the silence that said everything. For the first time in decades, the Teamsters declined to endorse in the presidential race, even as its own president cozied up to the ticket that labor leaders across the movement warned was on the bosses' side. The AFL-CIO's Liz Shuler put it plainly: Trump and Vance stand with the bosses, and workers would not be fooled. O'Brien apparently would be. So the question for every Teamster, and for the Boston labor community that made him, is simple. When your president trades the union's multiracial, pro-equality foundation for a prime-time slot and a pat on the head from the anti-union right, who is he actually working for? And who gets left standing outside the hall he just handed away? Boston built Sean O'Brien. Boston's workers can also tell him what they think of the trade. The Teamsters have offices and a membership with a voice. Use it, and make him answer for the stage he chose. ### SparkFM Is Fighting to Turn a Lease Into a Legacy URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/own-the-block-sparkfm-is-fighting-to-turn-a-lease-into-a-legacy/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T15:03:46.000Z --- *Don't have time to read the story? Listen along below.* OWN THE BLOCK SparkFM Is Fighting to Turn a Lease Into a Legacy 0:00 /145.214688 1× --- Boston has plenty of media outlets that talk about Black and Brown communities. SparkFM hands them the microphone. Founder Danielle Johnson—known to listeners as “Ms. HotSauce”—launched the station in 2020 after years of watching Boston’s larger broadcasters overlook the city’s Black, Caribbean and urban voices. She had raised money, purchased equipment and prepared a studio when COVID-19 shut down the city just days before launch. Johnson kept broadcasting anyway. What began with five weekly programs grew into dozens of live shows covering music, politics, business, financial wellness and community life. SparkFM also became a professional platform for local DJs, artists and personalities who rarely received opportunities from commercial radio. Now Johnson is attempting her biggest move yet: turning SparkFM’s headquarters into community-owned infrastructure. The station relocated from Hyde Park to 1195 Blue Hill Avenue in 2024, taking over newly renovated space inside the former Lenny’s Tropical Bakery building near Morton Street. The location includes broadcasting studios, podcast and music-production space and an events area designed for public gatherings. SparkFM’s **“Own the Block. Power the Culture”** campaign is raising money toward purchasing the building it calls home. The station says it is pursuing a broader $200,000 goal, while its Givebutter campaign currently lists a $150,000 target. The money is not simply about real estate. Ownership would give SparkFM permanent space to train young media professionals, support entrepreneurs, produce original programming and host the conversations Boston’s mainstream outlets too often miss. It would also place a Black woman-led media institution firmly on a Blue Hill Avenue corridor where longtime residents remain wary of displacement. Johnson has already built the platform. Now she is asking Boston to help protect it. Because communities do not preserve their voices by renting the microphone forever. Eventually, they must own the room. ### Rotary Clubs Rescue Connecticut Pantries from MAGA Policies URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/meals-over-maga/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T15:06:50.000Z --- *Don't have time to read the story? Listen along below.* MEALS OVER MAGA Rotary Clubs Rescue Connecticut Pantries 0:00 /332.303625 1× --- While the federal government was busy subtracting, Connecticut spent a Saturday adding, one sealed meal at a time. Hundreds of volunteers crowded into the Wakeman Boys & Girls Club in Bridgeport this weekend, gloves on, hairnets up, moving assembly-line fast. By the end of the day, Rotary Clubs from Bridgeport, Fairfield, Monroe and Trumbull, backed by Rotary District 7980's Disaster Task Force, had packed roughly 100,000 shelf-stable meals bound for local food banks and pantries. Organizers had set out to hit around 86,000 and blew past it. The food, supplied through The Outreach Program, went out in boxes of 36 packages, six servings each, straight to the shelves where the need is worst. This was not a ribbon-cutting with a photo line. It was a rescue. And make no mistake about what they were rescuing their neighbors from. The hole in Connecticut's food supply did not appear by magic. It was cut. Since President Trump returned to office, his administration and its allies in Congress have squeezed federal food aid from every direction: canceled purchasing programs, fewer deliveries, and a budget law that reengineered SNAP. The numbers tell it plainly. Connecticut Foodshare received 84 truckloads of food through the federal emergency food program in the first quarter of 2025\. For the same stretch of 2026, the projection is [just 26](https://ctnewsjunkie.com/2026/01/12/food-insecurity-on-the-rise-in-connecticut/?ref=newenglandledger.com). Foodshare president Jason Jakubowski has counted 36 canceled truckloads and about 850,000 fewer pounds of federal food year over year. That is not a rounding error. That is a warehouse going empty. When the administration [canceled](https://bristoledition.org/blog/2026/01/20/report-federal-cuts-deepening-food-insecurity-in-connecticut/?ref=newenglandledger.com) roughly $500 million in national emergency food-assistance funding last spring, about 1.4 million pounds of food, including 34 truckloads Foodshare was set to hand out over the summer, never made it to Connecticut shelves. Then Washington made the squeeze personal. The federal budget law layered new SNAP work requirements onto more people, putting thousands of Connecticut residents at risk of losing benefits in 2026, even as the program's dollars are technically funded through September. The cruelty is in the design: people knocked off their grocery benefits get funneled toward pantries, and the pantries are the exact places the federal government just stopped restocking. One door shuts, and the floor under the next one is gone. The human toll is already here. Connecticut has the highest food-insecurity rate in New England at 14.3%, and in the cities it is far worse, hitting 22.5% in Bridgeport, the very community that showed up to pack boxes. Seniors like 75-year-old Barbara Stringer describe waking up and wondering how they got here, with grocery prices up sharply. Jakubowski has called the recent SNAP crisis the biggest threat to food-insecure people he has seen in his lifetime, and warned it has done "permanent damage" to the system, with people now afraid to even sign up for SNAP because they think it is disappearing. That is the wreckage the Rotary volunteers walked into. And here is what they did about it. No eligibility interview. No demand that a hungry kid prove a parent logged 80 hours. No spreadsheet deciding whether a veteran had earned dinner. Just neighbors, feeding neighbors, as fast as their hands could move. The contrast could not be sharper. Washington treated food as a line to cut. Bridgeport treated hunger as an emergency to answer. The federal government counted savings. Connecticut counted meals. So celebrate this, loudly, because it earned it. A hundred thousand meals in a single day is an extraordinary act of organization and heart, four clubs turning frustration into a production line. This is Connecticut at its best, the version of America where people see a neighbor in trouble and run toward them. But hold two truths at once. The generosity is real, and it is not a solution. Foodshare has said the federal cuts will strip millions of meals from the neighbors it serves, its most vulnerable ones, seniors, children, working families and people with disabilities. Volunteers, however heroic, cannot permanently replace truckloads measured in the dozens and dollars measured in the millions. Food pantries were built for emergencies, not to stand in for a national government that walked off the job. Connecticut has [scrambled](https://larson.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/larson-visits-connecticut-foodshare-mobile-pantry-east-hartford-urges?ref=newenglandledger.com) to help, setting aside emergency money for grocery cards, but a one-time card is not a food system. So thank the Rotary Clubs of Bridgeport, Fairfield, Monroe and Trumbull. Then ask the harder question their gloves and hairnets force on all of us: why were good neighbors made to run this hard to do what the federal government was supposed to be doing all along? This weekend, four clubs made sure thousands of their neighbors would not sit down to an empty plate. The least the rest of us can do is notice who emptied it, and who filled it back up. ### RIGGED: How Mass Daily "News" Spreads Right-Wing Propaganda and Crowns False Heroes URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/mass-daily-news/ Last updated: 2026-08-13T01:47:24.000Z --- *Don't have time for the full report? Listen to The Ledger Files episode on Spotify.* --- Mass Daily “News” says it reports the news. A new report from the New England Ledger found something very different. We read every single thing Mass Daily "News" published for a year so that you wouldn't have to. All 1,333 stories, from last July to this July. We were looking for a pattern. We found a machine. ## The Two City Councilors Who Can Do No Wrong Start with Boston City Councilors Ed Flynn and Erin Murphy. Over twelve months, their names anchored eight headlines. Seven of the eight made them the hero. One was routine paperwork. Zero made them look bad. Not one. In a full year. Think about what that means at a site that runs on scandal. This is an outlet that finds dirt for a living. It found dirt on everybody in Boston politics. It could not find a single thing on these two. Look at the verbs it hands them. They "call out." They "demand." They "slam." They "stand with." Every one of those words needs something to point at, and the something is always somebody else. Crime is bad, and Flynn is fighting it. The police are short-staffed, and Murphy is fighting for them. The city is failing, and these two are the ones trying to fix it. Flynn showed up in 59 stories. The typical councilor got 15. ## Then There's Everybody Else Sixteen headlines named other Boston city councilors. Sixteen of sixteen made them the bad guy. Not most. All of them. Obstruction, misconduct, hypocrisy, scandal, bad company, or plain mockery. Every time one of them got their name at the top of a story, it was because they had supposedly done something wrong. And two of those headlines were about Councilor Sharon Durkan's weight and her looks. Not her votes. Not her spending. Her body. The difference is hard to ignore. Flynn and Murphy were shown as fighters in six of seven headlines. Progressive Council members received adverse treatment in 16 out of 16 headlines. Our statistician ran the odds on a split like that happening by chance. It comes out to about 7 in 100,000. Read that again. Then tell us if "News" is the right term to use for them. ## A Mayor, A Governor, And Congress Now go up the ladder. We pulled a fixed sample of forty headlines about Mayor Michelle Wu, Governor Maura Healey, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and Senator Ed Markey. Ten each. Twenty-six were hostile. That is 65 percent. Healey came out worst at 80 percent. Wu at 70\. Markey 60\. Pressley 50. Wu got named in 346 stories. More than anybody else in the state, by roughly double. And the headlines tell you what to think before you get to the story. "OUTRAGE." "Bike-lane mayor strikes again." "Taxpayers blink." You have already been handed the verdict, and most people never click past it. That is the whole point of putting it up there. These leaders do not have to be perfect. They should face fair questions like anyone else. But fair reporting does not begin by choosing who will be the hero and who will be the villain. ## Race Stories Follow An Old Script Race showed up at the top of 33 stories this year. Not buried in paragraph nine. In the headline, where you actually see it. Twenty-nine of those 33 were hostile. That is 87.9 percent. In a year, in a majority-minority city. Every single one of those stories was read and the decision written down. Forty were pulled, seven thrown out as incidental, 33 counted. Anybody who thinks we got one wrong can look it up and do the math themselves. That is more than this outlet does for its own headlines. And look at the words they put up top. "Woke." "Racial quota." "BIPOC bonus." "White kids." "Reparations." Those are lifted straight out of their headlines. Meanwhile this is the same outlet that tells you that race-conscious policy is unfair to white people. That is the whole trick. Most people never click. They scroll, read eight words, move on. It helps repeat an old and racist idea. It makes Black and Latino neighborhoods look like problems that must be controlled. It gives readers crime, fear, and conflict while hiding daily life, success, joy, and leadership. These are old conservative myths. Mass Daily “News” gives them a local face. ## Stories Move Through A Right-Wing Media Loop This is the part that explains everything else. Mass Daily "News" linked *Boston Herald* pages from 54 of its stories. Thirty-eight of those went up the same day or the day after the *Herald* published. But the headlines barely match. About 11 percent overlap. Read that again. The *Herald* does the reporting. Mass Daily "News" takes it, keeps the facts, and puts a new angle on it. That is the business model, sitting right there in the link data. And on the way in, it looks respectable. Mainstream and local outlets account for 263 of its outbound links. Conservative sites, 122. Then look at where it goes. The Howie Carr and Grace Curley site posted 45 separate items naming or linking it. *Fox News* credited it by name. Townhall cited it. Gateway Pundit quoted it. Lucianne republished a whole story the same day it ran, byline and all. Its pages carry posts from Libs of TikTok, Breitbart, End Wokeness, and the Massachusetts GOP. Progressive or public-interest outlets picked it up zero times. Not a few times. Zero. It reads everybody's work. Only one side reads it back. Reporting made for the whole city goes in one end and comes out the other end sorted for one audience. ## This Is Not Just Bad Reporting News outlets make choices every day. They choose which stories to cover. They choose who gets quoted. They choose who looks brave. They choose who looks dangerous. Over one year, the choices made by Mass Daily “News” formed a clear pattern. - *Flynn and Murphy were treated like fighters.* - *Progressives were tied to failure and scandal.* - *Women, LGBTQ+ leaders, and leaders of color faced harsher frames.* - *Black and Latino communities were often shown through official voices, crime, crisis, and fear.* - *Right-wing outlets supplied and spread the same stories.* Mass Daily “News” may call this journalism. The record looks more like a propaganda machine. [RIGGED: Inside the Mass Daily News Propaganda MachineThe report details the foundry that takes local news and repackages them for right-wing outrage.RIGGED\_Inside-the-Mass-Daily\_News\_Propaganda-Machine-Investigation\_CLEAN.pdf4 MBdownload-circle](https://www.newenglandledger.com/content/files/2026/08/RIGGED%5FInside-the-Mass-Daily%5FNews%5FPropaganda-Machine-Investigation%5FCLEAN.pdf "Download") ### Trump’s HUD Lost in Court, Then Put Massachusetts’ Homeless Funding Back on the Chopping Block URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/housing-heist-trumps-hud-lost-in-court-then-put-massachusetts-homeless-funding-back-on-the-chopping-block/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T15:09:06.000Z Massachusetts, if this feels like a rerun, that is because it is. The Trump administration tried to force sweeping changes onto federal homelessness programs. A court told it no. Now, the state says, the administration is running the exact same play a second time and betting nobody notices. Attorney General Andrea Campbell has joined 22 other states in a July lawsuit over new HUD rules for the Continuum of Care program, one of the biggest funding streams in the country for permanent supportive housing and homelessness services. The fight is over a proposed cap on how much renewal money a community can steer toward permanent housing. HUD's argument, to be fair to it, is a real position: the program leans too hard on permanent placements and should push more toward transitional housing, services, and "self-sufficiency." The agency notes its [2026 competition](https://www.hud.gov/hud-partners/coc-program-competition?ref=newenglandledger.com) puts more than $4 billion on the table nationally. The states say that cap is arbitrary, blows up programs that already work, and breaks federal law. Those are allegations in a pending case, not a verdict. Fine. Hold that thought. Now the part that is not theoretical, the money. Boston pulled in roughly $48 million in Continuum of Care funding in 2025, propping up 19 nonprofits and more than 2,000 households that had climbed out of homelessness. When HUD floated these same restrictions last year, [Boston estimated](https://www.boston.gov/news/boston-joins-local-governments-and-nonprofits-challenge-new-federal-restrictions-housing?ref=newenglandledger.com) that $29 million in permanent-supportive-housing projects could vanish, putting more than 1,100 people at risk. Statewide, the picture is bigger: nearly $125 million in the 2023 federal round, including about $47.7 million for Boston, $9.6 million for Worcester County, $7.5 million for Springfield and Hampden County, and $6.4 million for Cambridge. Here is why swapping permanent housing for "transitional" is not the tidy trade HUD makes it sound like. Permanent supportive housing exists for people who cannot reliably stay housed without ongoing help, folks with disabilities, people trapped in chronic homelessness. Move them into temporary programs and you have not conjured up permanent apartments for them to land in when the clock runs out. You have just set a timer on their housing. And this is the same road HUD already got stopped on. A federal court has blocked related conditions before, and Massachusetts announced another win in June protecting billions in homelessness funding. Campbell's [new complaint](https://www.mass.gov/doc/hud-coc-20-complaint/download?ref=newenglandledger.com) alleges that HUD's June 1 funding notice is an attempt to smuggle back in the very permanent-housing restriction the courts already rejected. Lose, rewrite, resubmit. Repeat. Let's be square about it. Washington is allowed to argue that federal programs need an overhaul. But if it is going to yank the floor out, it owes real answers: How do current tenants stay housed? Can local providers survive a sudden funding cliff? And how exactly does "transitional" housing work in a state with a brutal shortage of affordable apartments to transition into? So far, those answers are missing. This is not a paperwork spat over federal rules. If this experiment fails, it is not the policymakers who end up on the street. It is the people they were funded to keep off it. Massachusetts, the case is live and the funding notice is real. Contact your congressional delegation and back the AG's challenge, because the people this cut would displace do not get a do-over. ### Worcester Warned Residents Off the Lake but Skipped the Part About What Failed URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/a-lake-full-of-questions-worcester-warned-residents-off-the-lake-but-skipped-the-part-about-what-failed/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T15:11:41.000Z Worcester, wake up and smell it, because this one is literal. At roughly 5:20 on Friday morning, an underground sewer pipe near 23 Southwest Cutoff gave out and dumped an estimated 15,000 gallons of untreated wastewater onto the road. That is not a typo. Fifteen thousand gallons of raw sewage, and it did not just sit there. It poured into the storm drains, ran into O'Hara Brook, and made a beeline for Lake Quinsigamond near Whitla Drive and Ideal Road, [as reported by the Worcester Guardian](https://theworcesterguardian.org/f/sewer-overflow-sends-untreated-wastewater-toward-lake-quinsigamond-swimming-fishing-restricted/?ref=newenglandledger.com). Give the crews their due. They shut the discharge off by about 7:23 a.m. and got the system back to normal. The city warned residents out of the water, dropped a swimming and fishing ban on the affected stretch of the lake over possible spikes in E. coli, and started daily testing that holds until the water is safe. Under Massachusetts rules they are required to sound that alarm, and they did. Here is where the applause stops. Stopping a leak is not the same as explaining one, and on the explaining part, Worcester has gone quiet. As of the city's own announcement, officials had not said what actually failed. Was the pipe old? Clogged? Overwhelmed? Neglected? Pick one, because right now the public gets none of them. They also would not say when that stretch of pipe was last inspected, whether it had failed before, or what is being fixed so it does not fail again. That silence is not a small thing, because this is not a small lake. Lake Quinsigamond is where Worcester swims, fishes, and rows. The city's own 2025 water-quality report [rated it "Good"](https://www.worcesterma.gov/sustainability-resilience/document-center/water-quality-report-2025-lake-quinsigamond.pdf?ref=newenglandledger.com) for fecal bacteria, and even then Lake Park Beach had to close for seven days after bacteria spiked. The same report says the quiet part out loud: contact with fecal contamination can make you sick. Let's be fair and clear-eyed, because that is how this works. Nobody is calling this a cover-up. Nobody is slapping the word "mismanagement" on it without proof. A pipe can fail for a dozen honest reasons. But "we do not know yet" is an answer with a shelf life, and the clock is running. Thousands of gallons of raw sewage moved through public infrastructure toward a public lake. Residents are owed a real incident report: what caused it, when the pipe was last checked, what got repaired, and how likely a repeat is. A swimming advisory is a warning. It is not an explanation. So Worcester, ask for the paperwork. Call the Department of Public Works and your city councilor and demand the incident report in writing. The city contained the pipe. It has not yet contained the silence. ### MAR-A-LAGO-MINOGUE FOR MA GOVERNOR??? He’s Given Close to $1M to Trump and Vance. Now He Wants to be Guv. URL: https://www.newenglandledger.com/maralago-minogue/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T14:49:49.000Z Massachusetts, meet Mike Minogue. He wants to be your next governor. Before you decide, look at where his money went. On October 3, 2024, Minogue signed his name to a $100,000 check made out to the Trump 47 Committee, Donald Trump's own fundraising operation. This is not rumor or spin. It is a dated, itemized line on a federal filing: Michael R. Minogue, CEO, South Hamilton, Massachusetts, one hundred thousand dollars, straight to Trump. And that check was no accident of a single bad night. Minogue has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into national Republican causes, including the RNC and a super PAC that helped power Trump's 2024 win. He threw a Gloucester fundraiser for JD Vance and handed nearly $1 million to Republicans in a single year. Then he cut himself the biggest check of all, a record-setting $12.5 million of his own money poured into his campaign, to buy the slick ads now introducing him to you on his terms. So here is the uncomfortable math. The man asking to run Massachusetts personally helped bankroll the administration that has spent the past year trying to gut it. That is not a talking point. It is a receipt. The Trump administration cut an estimated $2.6 billion in terminated NIH and National Science Foundation grants for research at Massachusetts universities, hospitals, and research institutions. The fallout stopped at least 18 clinical trials in Massachusetts and hit roughly 13,000 patients, on conditions like colon cancer, strokes, and pregnancy complications. Massachusetts is the medical research capital of the country, and the federal research dollars Trump went after prop up more than 81,000 jobs here and over $16 billion in economic activity. Read that again. Trump aimed straight at the engine that pays Massachusetts salaries and saves Massachusetts lives. Our own attorney general had to sue to stop it. It took lawsuits and a bipartisan act of Congress to claw most of the money back after months of chaos. Chaos that Mike Minogue helped pay to unleash, with his name on the check. Now he wants that same politics on Beacon Hill. His pitch is lower taxes, less spending, less regulation. Sounds tidy. But ask what actually gets cut when a Trump-funding CEO starts slashing in the bluest research state in the country. The surtax dollars keeping our universities afloat? The state programs backfilling the very labs Washington just tried to defund? He praised the agenda that did the damage. Ask yourself why he would suddenly shield you from it. Here is the part that should stick. Massachusetts used to grow a certain kind of Republican, Weld, Romney, Baker, moderates who openly bucked Trump. Minogue is not that. He runs to their right, in a state where Trump is deeply unpopular, and he did it with his checkbook wide open for the president most voters here rejected. To be fair, Minogue will tell you a genuine story: Army Ranger, Bronze Star, a CEO who built a Massachusetts medical-device company, a foundation that gives to veterans and kids. Good for him. None of it erases the $100,000, or the agenda that money bought. So the November question is simple. When the next order comes down from Washington to cut, to defund, to fall in line, do you want a governor who will fight it, or the man whose signature is already on the check that started it? Massachusetts, the receipt is public now. Read it before you vote. And when you want to know where a candidate really stands, follow the money, not the ad. --- ## **Documents** [Minogue DonationFederal Elections Commission record of Minogue donation to Trump's PAC202412059731346884\_000453.pdf48 KBdownload-circle](https://www.newenglandledger.com/content/files/2026/07/202412059731346884%5F000453.pdf "Download")