Healey administration conceals key information about state shelter system even as it triples spending

The contract, one of many The Boston Globe requested last spring to examine how the state is spending about $1 billion a year on emergency shelters, was provided in July with the name of the vendor blacked out. The secrecy is extreme even in Massachusetts, a state with a poor track record of providing government records for public scrutiny.

Governor Maura Healey’s administration has broken with government accountability norms by withholding key information about some contractors and has shuttered the shelters from public view, even as the state tripled its spending on migrant and homeless family services. Without transparency, it is difficult if not impossible for watchdogs to ensure that taxpayer money isn’t wasted and to verify that vulnerable families are safely housed and getting appropriate care.

Reporters and photographers have only been allowed at shelters on select occasions. Contracts bar vendors from speaking directly to the media about the shelter program, requiring that all inquiries go through state agencies. Providers who run the shelters have notified the state of 600 serious incidents since January 2023, many of them troubling enough that police, fire, and medical services had to respond. Those reports have not been made public to date, however. Shelter families and staff have also submitted 40 complaints since January 2023 to a hotline operated by the state housing agency; their content is mostly unknown since lawyers for the agency redacted most details before sharing them with the Globe.

Accommodating thousands of homeless families on an emergency basis — as the state has been doing to comply with its unique right-to-shelter law — is a challenge, but one that requires transparency and oversight to protect both taxpayers and families seeking help, said Mary Connaughton, director of government transparency and chief operating officer for the Pioneer Institute, a free-market think tank.

“The contracts should be available. They should be public,” Connaughton said. While she said it might be reasonable to redact addresses to protect people’s privacy, good governance demands transparency about which contractors are chosen and the basis for choosing them. “Showing how the decision-making is done is really important,” Connaughton said.

As the pandemic demonstrated, money aimed at offering relief can be misspent or exploited when the government moves quickly without sufficient oversight. The US Justice Department has charged more than 3,500 people with pandemic-related fraud crimes.

The cities of Chicago and New York, faced with similar surges in migrants and expanded shelter services, are providing more information to the public, the Globe found. A Chicago city official provided the Globe with the addresses of all its shelters within two hours, and a city website lists all the shelter program’s vendors and the amounts of their invoices. The New York City comptroller has a website that summarizes the contracts, links to a more detailed spreadsheet of vendors and costs, and includes extensive and critical audit reports about the program.

Officials with the Healey administration said they have offered “unprecedented levels of transparency into the shelter system,” while protecting families in shelters. They point to its online dashboard showing the number of families in shelters, biweekly legislative updates on total costs and the number of families in each city and town, and briefings with local and federal officials, providers, and advocates.

“State agencies adhere to the public records law and have provided massive volumes of public records related to the [Emergency Assistance] system,” Karissa Hand, a Healey spokesperson, said in a statement. “In some cases, records have been partially redacted or withheld under allowable exemptions to protect the safety and privacy of vulnerable families and providers, who have already been the subject of hate and harassment.”

The Healey administration has usually provided aggregated and summarized information rather than releasing shelter-specific data that watchdogs could use to independently assess expenditures and problems.

The state’s argument for withholding certain information about the shelter system largely focuses on concealing locations to protect the privacy of the 7,306 families who are staying in state-rented hotel rooms and other shelters across Massachusetts.

Until recently, the state’s right-to-shelter law, guaranteeing pregnant people and families with children emergency housing, has been interpreted to include those newly arrived from other countries. Though many people in liberal Massachusetts have been supportive of immigrants, the expanding shelter program has fueled taxpayer skepticism and outright opposition in some towns hosting shelters.

The shelters have also drawn the attention of hate groups; in the summer of 2023, neo-Nazis protested outside several hotels they had identified as migrant shelters, lighting flares, posting video of residents and staff without their consent on social media, and shouting anti-immigrant slogans, according to a civil rights violations complaint filed against the Nationalist Social Club in December by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell.

In May, a masked group holding a “Repel the invaders” sign protested in front of an armory that had been converted into a shelter in Lexington, a local publication reported.

“Hate groups have repeatedly located shelters and used this information to threaten, intimidate, and terrorize shelter residents and staff,” Hand said.

The state’s effort to protect people in the shelters has also had the effect of protecting the administration from public scrutiny, some citizens complain.

“It’s just a shroud of secrecy around this thing,” said Norfolk resident Paul Burns.

In early June, when the state announced plans to use the former Bay State Correctional Center in his town as an “overflow” shelter, Burns filed a public records request seeking four items: the vendors and costs involved with painting, upgrading, and retrofitting the former prison; the plan for making improvements; the anticipated monthly costs of operating the prison as a shelter; and the email addresses of three state employees. The state initially denied him everything but the employees’ email addresses. He also received a list of vendors, without contract costs or any explanation of what services they provided.

Some documents were withheld because they “contain recommendations on legal and policy matters in an ongoing deliberative process,” according to copies of the correspondence that Burns shared with the Globe. Others were “sufficiently related to the safety and security of the Bay State Correctional Center which in my reasonable judgment would jeopardize public safety if disclosed,” wrote Carlos E. Loredo, associate counsel for the Executive Office for Administration and Finance.

Burns successfully appealed to the state Supervisor of Records, who ordered the state to provide him with a response within 10 days. The state’s response only further argued that Burns’s request was dangerous. One report, Loredo wrote, included photos showing the layout of the prison that would provide “useful information for anyone looking to harm resident families.”

Burns was outraged and offended. Was the Healey administration suggesting it could not publicly reveal its construction plans without inviting a terrorist attack? If the public accepted that decisions were always deliberative, couldn’t any public records request be denied?

“At the end of the day, not only is this a significant impact to the town, but this is taxpayer money being spent,” Burns told the Globe. “I want to know what’s behind it.”

Loredo did not return a request for comment.

Burns later received two documents on the prison, with Loredo explaining that the policy decisions undergirding them were “no longer under deliberation.” He has still not received a breakdown of the shelter’s projected monthly costs, which the state claims are exempt because they “are in no way completed” and “subject to change.”

Like Massachusetts, both New York City and Chicago publish dashboards and updates on the number of asylum seekers living in shelters and the fiscal impacts. The New York comptroller has also published audit reports, available online, of the spending, including one pointing out that a lack of coordination led the city to overpay millions of dollars to staff asylum seeker services.

When it comes to releasing the addresses of shelters, the cities vary.

New York City has not been providing the addresses of shelters to the public to protect the privacy of individuals. The legal department of the city’s Department of Homeless Services said it would need until Oct. 11 to respond to a Globe request submitted in early July for shelter locations and any records related to inspections of these shelters.

In Massachusetts, the public records law presumes that all governmental records are public unless they are specifically exempt for reasons such as an ongoing police investigation or privacy. However, there are limits to the privacy exemption and the law requires that agencies withhold records only if an individual’s privacy concerns outweigh the public’s interest in the information. Often those exemptions can be interpreted broadly and citizens have very little recourse, earning the state a reputation as being among the worst in the nation for ensuring the public has access to government records, said Justin Silverman, the executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition.

“Where the state is spending its money is usually public records 101,” Silverman said.

The Globe has spent months trying to investigate the emergency assistance shelter system that exploded over the past two years, with the state renting out rooms in a total of 128 private hotels across Massachusetts to supplement shelter space and accommodate families with nowhere else to go. The state consolidated its hotel shelters to 66 locations as of July and is now operating several large-scale facilities, including the former Norfolk prison, as temporary respite centers, since Healey announced plans to dramatically scale back services.

Since May, the Globe’s attorneys have also been negotiating with the state for greater public access to records.

Massachusetts agencies have provided some information the Globe has requested. For example, the state housing agency shared social service providers’ contracts, with limited redactions to conceal the location of the hotels or the shelters where they were working with homeless families.

However, some of those organizations worked at several shelter sites, and in some cases, paid for the costs of the hotel rooms. With all hotel names and locations redacted, it is impossible to match the providers with hotels, to compare the costs of service provided, or to gauge whether vendors are adhering to their contracts.

For instance, the contracts require hotels and providers to follow all local, state, and federal health codes and say that state inspectors will visit regularly. In response to a Globe public records request, the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities released its completed inspection reports — on only 20 of the 128 hotels that had been used as shelters. The redactions of hotel names and addresses made it impossible to tell which state vendors were in violation of their contracts or had not yet been inspected. Even some photos of the violations were redacted.

The state has also made it more difficult to get information about the shelters over time. In April 2023, the state provided invoices to the Globe that showed the names and addresses of some hotel vendors. In July, housing officials redacted all identifying information on contracts that included hotels — even some they had already provided to the Globe unredacted. (That $16.3 million contract for 149 hotel rooms? After an exhaustive review and comparison of hundreds of pages of contract documents, the Globe can confirm that it is in Dedham.)

The Globe filed 21 public records requests and four appeals seeking information from state agencies. However, because the state would not identify the shelters, the Globe had to independently locate the hotels in order to seek more information about the buildings and their owners. The Globe filed 123 requests for public records at police, fire, building, and health departments in 50 communities where hotels have been used as shelters.

The state classifies any sort of “media involvement” in its shelter system a “serious incident” requiring that the provider file a report with the housing agency, as they would for police, fire, or ambulance calls, or if there was an accident that triggered a hospital admission.

The result has been uncommon security and suspicion by providers.

In May, a Globe reporter who tried to interview the owner of a motor lodge along Route 1 in Saugus was issued a “no trespass” order and told to stay off the property.

When a website reported that someone accused of raping a child had been transferred from a family shelter to one for individual homeless adults, the director of the South Middlesex Opportunity Council that runs the shelter declined to explain its policy for admitting someone accused of a sex crime. Instead, a spokesperson referred the Globe to Kevin Connor, the state housing spokesperson. He acknowledged that his agency is not in charge of eligibility at those adult shelters, many of which have a low threshold for enrollment and accept individuals kicked out of the state-run family shelter program.

When a Globe reporter reached out to Bob Clement, with Park Lodge Hotel Group, a broker that the state is paying to help find hotel rooms, he said he would be “happy to talk” but couldn’t. The state had explicitly asked vendors to refer their press inquiries to Connor, he said.

Only after hearing back from the state did Clement answer questions.

Even town officials have been rebuffed when they request information.

“They’re not being upfront. They’re hiding behind legal language,” said Kelly Dooner, a councilor in Taunton, where the city’s only hotel is serving as a homeless shelter.

Dooner requested records about how the state checks the criminal backgrounds of residents accepted into the shelter program in March, after the alleged rape of a teenager by a fellow migrant in a Rockland shelter. Dooner, a Republican who is running for state Senate, said she received no response from the state’s housing agency and appealed to the Supervisor of Records.

She still hasn’t received satisfactory answers and submitted similar questions to other agencies in the administration, Dooner said.

“These are very general questions we deserve answers to,” she said. “There’s truthfully no transparency.”

Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at Stephanie.Ebbert@globe.com. Deirdre Fernandes can be reached at deirdre.fernandes@globe.com. Follow her @fernandesglobe.