Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey is touting a multi-billion investment plan targeting higher education.
On the heels of her State of the Commonwealth address and ahead of her $62 billion budget proposal, Healey unveiled a plan to invest at least $2.5 billion into the state’s public universities and colleges, including its community colleges.
“What we're announcing today is going to help a whole host of people - it's going to help your families, it's going to help your parents, it's going to help our workforce and our employers, it's going to help our workers by creating tens of thousands of great jobs around the state, and it's going to allow us to make the kind of investments that will make Massachusetts more competitive, to continue Massachusetts’s leadership on so many fronts,” Healey said while at Bridgewater State University Tuesday.
The proposal was filed as “An Act to Build Resilient Infrastructure to Generate Higher Education Transformation,” or the “BRIGHT Act.”
The bond bill would “leverage a portion of the Fair Share tax revenue to unlock significant new capital investments” in higher education, according to the governor’s filing to the legislature.
Authorized funds would cover projects within the University of Massachusetts system, other state colleges and universities and community colleges - tackling campus modernization, “major capital projects,” and deferred maintenance, among other goals.
“What we’re dealing with is the fact that a lot of our public universities and colleges haven't really been invested in in a major way since the time many of them were built, which is before I was born which is a pretty long time ago,” Healey joked. “And that's a problem that spanned probably most of our lifetimes here. It's just not the way to give our residents the education that they deserve, it's not the way to power this modern economy that we are in.”
The bill bears some resemblance to another multi-billion dollar proposal put forward by the Healey administration – an $8 billion spending proposal to tackle transportation, including road, rail and bridge infrastructure.
As explained out by Secretary of Administration and Finance Matthew Gorzkowicz, dollars from the state’s millionaire’s tax are at the heart of both proposals, fueling spending plans that would play out over the span of a decade.
“The Fair Share surtax revenue has performed well, generating over $2.4 billion in FY24 for transportation and education - constitutionally dedicated to those purposes,” he said. “Our forecast [indicates] similar collections in FY25 and ’26, but our plan entails doing much more than just spending these Fair Share dollars. The governor's H1 budget, which we will file [Wednesday], will recommend appropriating $125 million of Fair Share revenue annually to support the issuance of special obligation bonds, unlocking approximately $2.5 billion in new borrowing over the next 10 years.”
Healey and Gorzkowicz say the plan was informed by a legislatively-created “Higher Education Capital Working Group” and its findings, outlined in a recently-released final report.
Among its conclusions, the group reported the state’s higher education system faces a “critical set of capital challenges that threaten its ability to meet the evolving needs of students and the workforce.”
That includes “outdated infrastructure, a backlog of deferred maintenance, and the pressing demands of decarbonization.”
“Given the constraints of our capital plan, major capital projects for higher ed have not kept pace with the growing deferred maintenance needs and the goals of campus decarbonization plans,” Gorzkowicz continued. “We have been losing ground on both fronts. So, it's not an exaggeration to say that our proposal will mark a turning point for higher education in Massachusetts, ensuring we finally have dedicated resources at a scale large enough to allow us to start tackling the growing challenges we're facing.”
The plan would likely play into a “multifaceted approach” to secure needed funding, touched on in the report.
The report also claims the estimated total capital needs across Massachusetts' institutions of higher education total nearly $25 billion, including $5.5 billion to cover deferred maintenance, $7.2 billion for decarbonization efforts, and $12.14 billion for "programmic modernization."
Speaking with WAMC Friday, Hampden, Hampshire and Worcester State Senator Jake Oliveira says he's very interested in the bill, having advocated for higher ed investments for years, even before joining the legislature.
The Democrat says his alma mater, Framingham State University, as well as Springfield Technical Community College, play significant roles in the state's education system - and that any boost in funding for deferred maintenance and beyond would go a long way.
“Framingham State is 185-86 years old this year. Several of the buildings on that campus haven't been touched in several decades. We need to invest in our public universities and our community colleges,” he said. “We're seeing double digit increases in enrollment in our community colleges - we need to match the facilities for 21st [century] learning. Springfield Technical Community College, right in the city of Springfield, those buildings on that campus actually have to meet a different standard than other community colleges and can sometimes cost twice as much for renovations because it's a National Historic Site."
According to Healey’s office, if passed by the legislature, the governor’s proposal would create “approximately 15,000 construction-related jobs,” while paving the way for new facilities that include labs, classrooms and training centers.
