To the editor:
Massachusetts stands at a crossroads, its roads buckling, bridges creaking, and transit systems wheezing under decades of neglect. Gov. Maura Healey, now in her third year, has staked her legacy on an ambitious infrastructure overhaul—an $8 billion transportation plan unveiled with fanfare on March 18, 2025, in Lenox, promising to stitch together a fractured state. Yet beneath the glossy rhetoric of “transformation” lies a policy edifice riddled with fissures: underfunded, unevenly applied, and perilously tethered to fleeting federal largesse. From rural culverts to urban tunnels, Healey’s vision is less a blueprint for progress than a mirage of competence—a shimmering promise that evaporates under scrutiny. This is not a partisan lament but a centrist plea: Massachusetts deserves better than a governor who excels at optics yet falters at execution.
Healey’s latest gambit—a $200 million infusion for rural roads, bridges, and culverts—sounds noble. Touring Lenox on March 18, she vowed to rebalance the state’s Chapter 90 funding formula, shifting from population to mileage to aid western Massachusetts’ sprawling, oft-ignored networks. Conway, a town of 1,900 souls, could see its road budget soar by 90 percent, per MassDOT estimates—a lifeline for a flood-prone hamlets battered by 2023’s $1.2 billion deluge. But this rural renaissance comes at a cost. Boston, home to 675,000 and a $10 billion infrastructure deficit, faces a potential 20 to 30 percent cut in its share, leaving its ancient water mains—leaking 50 million gallons daily—and MBTA tunnels to fend for themselves. Healey’s pivot pits town against city in a zero-sum game, a false dichotomy that ignores the interdependence of Massachusetts’ economic fabric. A crumbling urban core cannot sustain a thriving periphery, nor can rural vitality endure without metropolitan arteries.
This rural-urban rift is no accident but a symptom of Healey’s broader deficiency: a refusal to grapple with fiscal reality. She insists her $8 billion plan—spanning MBTA fixes, East-West Rail, and rural upgrades—requires no tax hikes, leaning instead on $8.6 billion in federal funds secured since 2023. The $472 million North Station Draw One Bridge repair, completed in 2024, exemplifies this strategy’s early wins. Yet as of March 19, 2025, storm clouds gather: Federal cuts under a resurgent Trump administration—already slashing $12.2 million from school food programs—threaten to dry up this well. Healey’s March 18 rebuke of “punitive slashing” rings hollow when her entire agenda hinges on Washington’s whims. Massachusetts’ $56 billion fiscal 2025 budget, strained by housing and migrant crises, offers no cushion. If federal spigots close, her no-tax pledge—a cornerstone of her 2022 campaign—will force either crippling debt (already six percent of the budget) or a retreat from promises. This is not leadership but legerdemain, a sleight of hand that bets the state’s future on a fiscal fairy tale.
The MBTA, that beleaguered beast of Boston’s daily grind, exposes Healey’s penchant for half measures. Her administration touts $1.4 billion in investments and 1,000 new hires, claiming the Track Improvement Program finished “ahead of schedule” in 2024. Riders, however, still endure delays—Red Line slow zones persist as of March 17, per MBTA alerts—and a $25 billion repair backlog looms. The $1.4 billion covers 90 percent of operating deficits but barely dents capital needs; replacing 1970s train cars alone costs $1.5 billion, unfunded as of now. Healey’s plan, heralded in her “Transforming Transportation Road Show,” ignores structural rot: A 2022 audit revealed $1.2 billion in overtime waste, yet she sidesteps union reform. Compare this to New York’s MTA, where Gov. Kathy Hochul has slashed costs by 10 percent through contract renegotiations. Healey’s aversion to hard choices leaves Massachusetts with a transit system that limps, not leaps—a disservice to the 1.2 million daily riders who deserve reliability, not rhetoric.
Energy policy, the silent saboteur of Healey’s infrastructure dreams, compounds her missteps. Her $4 billion Mass Leads Act, signed in November 2024, weds infrastructure to climatetech—think culvert upgrades for flood resilience and wind ports for green jobs. Laudable in theory, it stumbles in practice, haunted by her past. As attorney general, Healey bragged of killing two natural gas pipelines in 2022, a move that slashed supply by 10 percent, per ISO New England. Today, electric rates hit 28 cents per kilowatt-hour—75 percent above the national average—driving heating bills to $300 monthly for rural homes this winter. Her March 19 offer of a $50 credit, a pittance against this tide, smacks of tone-deafness. Businesses flee—Raytheon eyes a 5,000-job exodus—while wind projects, promised as saviors, deliver just five percent of capacity due to global supply snarls. Healey’s green zeal has painted Massachusetts into a corner: Infrastructure that demands cheap power to build and maintain now chokes on her own energy legacy.
Implementation, the unglamorous linchpin of policy, reveals Healey’s Achilles’ heel. Her March 10, 2025, executive order mandating Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) for projects over $35 million—like the I-90 Allston rebuild—ensures union jobs but inflates costs by 20 percent, per BLS data, amid a 4.2 percent construction unemployment rate. Labor shortages could delay projects by a year, adding $100 million to a $500 million job. Permitting, despite Mass Leads reforms, drags on—culvert upgrades take 12 to 18 months, per state logs—leaving rural towns vulnerable as storms intensify. Healey’s $200 million rural pledge, ambitious on paper, may fund just 200 of 5,000 culverts, a drop in the bucket against 2023’s flood scars. This is not transformation but triage, a patchwork of good intentions undone by logistical inertia.
Controversies swirl, each a thread in Healey’s unraveling tapestry. Her Lenox tour reeks of 2026 vote-grubbing—Berkshire County’s 130,000 Democrats, long neglected, get a $200 million carrot while urban voters stew. Her March 19 closure of a Canton hospital, axing care for 40 special-needs kids to save $50 million, jars against her infrastructure largesse—roads over lives, critics cry. And her pipeline past festers: X users like @MassFiscal (March 8) brand her a hypocrite, hiking costs she now offsets with crumbs. These are not mere PR stumbles but symptoms of a governor who prioritizes image over substance, leaving Massachusetts to pay the price.
From a centrist perch, Healey’s failures are neither liberal folly nor conservative caricature but a betrayal of pragmatic governance. She could have paired rural aid with urban renewal, taxing fairly to fund both rather than gambling on federal whims. She might have reformed the MBTA’s bloat, not just its tracks, and balanced green ideals with energy realism. Instead, she offers a divided Commonwealth a fragmented fix—rural gains at urban expense, transit Band-Aids over surgery, and climate dreams atop an energy nightmare. Extrapolate this trajectory: By 2030, a $3 billion MBTA overrun, a $2 billion flood bill, and a 10,000-job exodus could define her tenure, not the “transformation” she peddles.
Massachusetts demands a leader who bridges divides, not widens them—who builds for all, not some. Healey’s infrastructure mirage, dazzling from afar, dissolves on approach, revealing a state left wanting. It is time for accountability, not applause—a reckoning to ensure our roads, rails, and resilience are more than campaign props. The center cannot hold under such hollow stewardship; the Commonwealth deserves a sturdier foundation.
Ronald Beaty
West Barnstable, Mass.
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