Facts Not Widely Discussed About Gov Baker

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker enjoys high favorability as he seeks a second term in November.

However most Massachusetts voters are not considering many serious issues with Baker’s record.

Charlie Baker has attempted to pass a number of proposals that would have been bad for the poor and immigrants in our state. Baker has…

• Has made 4 attempts to remove 140,000 working poor from Medicaid and move them to more expensive commercial plans, where they would have fewer benefits. Each time he has been resisted by the legislature but if he had succeeded, he would have made Massachusetts the first state to cut back on the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act.
• Filed legislation that would grant law enforcement the right to hold immigrants although the Supreme Judicial court ruled against this.
• Vetoed the “Lift the Cap” legislation which would end penalizing poor families with more children. This leaves poor families with less public assistance.

Baker has taken stands at odds with our state’s progressive values. He:

• Said that individual states should be able to fly a Confederate flag. He retracted the statement after a huge public outcry.
• Planned to send the National Guard to defend Donald Trump’s wall but changed his mind after another huge public outcry.
• Filed legislation that would reverse many of the reforms passed this spring by the legislature to reform criminal justice.  The goal of these reforms is to reduce recidivism and move towards more rehabilitation and less incarceration.  Governor Baker’s bill, offering legislation to restore mandatory minimums AND the death penalty, would move us backwards.
• Made a proposal that through which 250,000 state workers would have had to change health plans when the Baker administration tried to cut their health care choices.  After public outcry, he reversed himself.
• Favors lifting the ban on charter schools – a stand that was roundly rejected by Massachusetts’ voters, who saw it as a threat to public education funding
• Has openly endorsed and fundraised for Rep. Jim Lyons who opposes choice, gay marriage, immigration and favors conversion therapy.
• Endorsed Geoff Diehl, who led the Trump campaign in Massachusetts and certainly would have voted for Brett Kavanaugh

As a fiscal conservative, he underfunds needed services to keep expenses down. 

• The federal government warned that the commonwealth required 10 gas line and utility inspectors; he employed only two in the face of gas leaks throughout the state and National Grid’s 1,250 employee lockout.
• Charlie has level-funded the commonwealth’s Regional Transit Authority causing serious cuts in service to people in rural and underserved communities and creating hardships for poor, elderly and disabled residents.
• Charlie has made significant cuts to elementary and secondary education.
• From March 2017 Boston Globe: “Over the past decade, the state Department of Environmental Protection’s enforcement of air and water quality rules has fallen off sharply, as the agency’s workforce shrunk by nearly a third, according to a Globe review of state records. Enforcement actions for serious violations have dropped by more than half, statistics show, as inspections also declined. Fines collected from violators plummeted during the same period by nearly 75 percent. For example, [DEP] had to cut back on the labor-intensive work of testing rivers for the illegal dumping of sewage and fecal matter, he said.”

Corporate connections seem to influence his decision-making in ways that run counter to the public interest.. 

• Charlie’s MBTA board forgave Keolis’s bad service fines
• Charlie awarded Eversource the job of restoring power to the Merrimack Valley; then Eversource executives contributed more than $13,000 to Charlie’s campaign.
• He supports taxing ratepayers to pay for $6B in Fracked Gas pipelines AG Healey says we don’t need, which would be obsolete by the time they were built, and which increase climate change. 

As a general proposition, he is weak on environmental protection. In June 2018, a coalition of environmental groups gave Baker a C grade. 

• Baker proposed legislation to slash reimbursement rates for businesses, municipalities and low-income housing developments that install solar panels–it was literally the conservative legislative thinktank ALEC’s solar bill. Eversource and Associated Industries of Mass supported the bill. Mass lost 3K solar jobs in 2017. The solar companies have not recovered, due to anti-solar policies.
• He has done very little to cut emissions. Our Supreme Judicial Court found the Baker Administration not in compliance with Global Warming Solutions Act (Mass climate change law)
• Baker opposed Cape Wind. The 2016 bill mandating 1600 MW offshore wind was due to the legislature, not Baker.