July 15, 2022

The Honorable Michael Rodrigues, Chair Senate Committee on Ways and Means _	The Honorable Aaron Michlewitz, Chair House Committee on Ways and Means _
The Honorable Cindy Friedman, Vice-Chair Senate Committee on Ways and Means _	The Honorable Ann-Margaret Ferrante, Vice-Chair House Committee on Ways and Means _
The Honorable Patrick O’Connor, Ranking Minority Senate Committee on Ways and Means _	The Honorable Todd Smola, Ranking Minority House Committee on Ways and Means _

+

Dear FY 2023 Budget Conference Committee:

Thank you for your work and your dedication to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. CEO Action for Racial Equity (CEOARE) is a Fellowship of over 100 companies¹ that mobilizes a community of business leaders with diverse talent and resources across multiple industries and geographies to advance public policy in four key areas — economic empowerment, education, healthcare, and public safety. Its mission is to identify, develop, and promote scalable and sustainable public policies and corporate engagement strategies that will address systemic racism and social injustice and improve societal well-being. As you complete your important work of finalizing the FY 2023 budget, we write to share our views on key investments that can help improve racial equity in Massachusetts.

The Fellowship mobilizes the larger collective business community – across all industries and regions – to facilitate change at the local, state, and federal level. CEOARE’s issue agenda focuses on eight policy solution areas that disproportionately and systemically impact Black Americans – from cities to rural communities, offices to classrooms, and healthcare networks to criminal justice systems. These policy solutions are:

• Equity in Early Childhood Education (ECE)
• Declaring Racism as a Public Health Crisis
• A Path Toward Greater Food Equity
• Advancing a National Police Misconduct Registry
• Closing the Digital Divide
• Decriminalizing Poverty by Reforming Justice System Fines, Fees, and Cash Bail
• Expanding Economic Opportunity Through Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs)
• Supporting Steps Towards Permanent Expansion of Equitable Telehealth Coverage

We applaud the General Court’s work moving forward a proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2023 that marks the General Court’s commitment to investing in the future, protects core services for the most vulnerable, promotes growth and opportunity, and supports the Commonwealth’s diverse communities.

We are writing to express our support for the General Court’s proposed investments in the FY 2023 budget bill as avenues to support racial equity and remove the barriers for the over 628,000 members of the Commonwealth’s Black community² to thrive. These appropriations complement our policy areas of focus to advance racial equity.

SECTION 2

EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF EDUCATION

Department of Early Education and Care

CEOARE applauds the significant investments the General Court has made for early childhood education and childcare. Both the House and Senate budgets contain investments that demonstrate a commitment to supporting Massachusetts hard-working families and their children, as well as the dedicated early childhood and childcare providers. These investments are fundamental to building a more equitable system for providing access to high-quality, affordable care, especially for the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable and underserved populations.

Line item 3000-1045: In particular, we applaud the Senate’s funding of $250M for the Commonwealth Cares for Children Stabilization Grants. These grants served the critical role of supporting the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable families by providing foundational funding to early education and care providers for their day-to-day operational and workforce costs, enabling providers to keep their doors open during the pandemic. More importantly, the equity adjustment embedded in the Commonwealth Cares for Children Stabilization Grants funding formula used to distribute the grants enables the Commonwealth to begin to address disparities in access to affordable, high quality early education and care by allocating additional funding for programs located in historically marginalized communities or providing services to significant numbers of low-income children. This important investment is in line with CEOARE’s recommended policy of advancing equity in early childhood education.

Even before the pandemic, over half of all people in Massachusetts lived in childcare “deserts” where there are more than three children in the community for each available spot at an ECE center or family daycare.³ According to the Special Legislative Commission report, since March 2020, 1,359 programs have closed. This represents approximately 17% of all programs and accounts for 23,395 slots for children.⁴

Without sustained funding, early education and care providers may be hesitant to commit to long-term programmatic improvements or may close programs altogether, which would disproportionally impact low-income families and families of color who are more likely to have used programs that closed during the pandemic.

We respectfully request the Conference Committee maintain investments contained in both the House and Senate budgets for early childhood education and childcare.

EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

Office of the Secretary

Line item 4512-2022: The House funded grants to support local and regional boards of health at $5M, but in the interest of more equitable health outcomes across Massachusetts, we respectfully ask that the Conference Committee fund these grants at the Senate level of $15M, which maintains the FY2022 funding level for the “Public Health Excellence Grant Program.” As noted in the 2021 Massachusetts Health Equity Task Force Final Report: “The fact that public health is the responsibility of 351 different cities and towns with varying resources and without clear guidance translates into a fragmented and inequitable response around the Commonwealth.”⁵ In order to successfully advance statewide health equity, there must be better funding and coordination for local public health departments⁶, especially imperative for Massachusetts’ communities of color, who too often are lowest in resources and highest in negative health outcomes.⁷ Structural racism represents a public health crisis for Black Americans across the United States, and we applaud the Senate’s investment in Massachusetts to eliminate public health disparities across the Commonwealth with sufficient funding and strategic planning.

Line item 4513-1112: We support the House and Senate funding of Mass in Motion via community grants in an amount not less than the amount expended in FY2022, building an equitable foundation for chronic disease prevention through school and workplace policy changes, grants for communities, and education centered on healthy eating and physical activity. This program is of particular importance to Black Americans, whose national mortality rate is generally higher than whites for chronic diseases⁸ — a result of longstanding inequities across the Social Determinants of Health⁹, including access to healthy foods and opportunities for safe physical activity. In Massachusetts specifically, the rates of heart failure, stroke hospitalization, and diabetes-related death are significantly higher for residents of color than for white residents.¹⁰

SECTION 3 LOCAL AID DISTRIBUTIONS

SECTION 3A. Chapter 6A of the General Laws

Section 18AA: We applaud the House’s adoption of the amendment by Rep. Jay D. Livingston and the Senate’s adoption of the amendment by Senator Sal N. DiDomenico to require state agencies to develop a Common Application for needs-based benefits and services in Massachusetts, creating more equitable access for Massachusetts’ most vulnerable residents by streamlining enrollment processes.

OFFICE OF THE STATE AUDITOR

Police Reform Commissions

Line item 0800-0000: CEOARE applauds the appropriation of $5.0M in both the House and Senate budgets to the Peace Officer Standards & Training (POST) Commission (Line item 0800-0000). The Commission, as outlined in “An Act Relative to Justice, Equity and Accountability in Law Enforcement in the Commonwealth” of the 191st session29, plays an instrumental role in ensuring peace officer reform, including implementing a publicly available and searchable database containing records for law enforcement officers. We believe implementation of this database will reduce racial bias and opportunities for officer misconduct in Massachusetts.

CEO Action for Racial Equity is non-partisan and is committed to working with policymakers to enact policies that bring equity, transparency, and accountability to our communities. As the Conference Committee works to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate FY 2023 Budgets, we respectfully urge you to consider the recommendations outlined in this letter be included in the Committee’s final compromise bill. We believe adequately funding these investments will support a more equitable Massachusetts.

We welcome the opportunity to discuss these requests. Please contact Alan Pisano at alan.d.pisano@ceoactionracialequity.com if you have any questions or require additional information.

Thank you for your leadership.

Sincerely,
CEO Action for Racial Equity

Citations

---

[1] Link to more about CEO Action for Racial Equity: https://ceoactionracialequity.com/our-story/

[2] U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Massachusetts, available at https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MA/RHI225220.

[3] Rasheed Malik, Katie Hamm, Leila Schochet, Cristina Novoa, Simon Workman, and Steven Jessen-Howard. “America’s Child Care Deserts in 2018.” Center for American Progress. 2018. pgs. 3-4

[4] Massachusetts Special Legislative Early Education and Care Economic Review Commission Final Report (April 2022). https://malegislature.gov/Bills/192/SD3102/Bills.

[5[ Health Equity Task Force, “Health Equity Task Force Final Report: A Blueprint for Health Equity,” (July 1, 2021): 24, https://malegislature.gov/Commissions/Detail/512/Documents.

[6] Office of the Attorney General: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “Building Toward Racial Justice and Equity in Health: A Call to Action” (November 18, 2020): 1& 4, https://www.mass.gov/info-details/building-toward-racial-justice-and-equity-in-health-a-call-to-action.

[7] Office of the Attorney General: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “Building Toward Racial Justice and Equity in Health: A Call to Action” (November 18, 2020): 1& 4, https://www.mass.gov/info-details/building-toward-racial-justice-and-equity-in-health-a-call-to-action.

[8] “Profile: Black/African Americans,” Office of Minority Health, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, last modified October 12, 2021, https://www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=3&lvlid=61.

[9] “Health Equity Research,” Ending Structural Racism, National Institutes of Health, last modified August 13, 2021, https://www.nih.gov/ending-structural-racism/health-equity-research

[10] Massachusetts Department of Public Health, ”Massachusetts State Health Assessment,” October 2017, available at https://www.mass.gov/service-details/2017-state-health-assessment.