The governor of Massachusetts stopped in Springfield Tuesday to meet some of the city's youngest residents – and promote tax cuts that could be sizable for their parents.
With tax returns due April 15 in Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey and other officials held a special public awareness event, aimed at promoting tax credits for those with little ones.
About a dozen infants got to meet Healey at Educare Springfield, which offers full-day and year-round pre-K programs for infants and toddlers of low-income families and others.
“This is about saving you money - it's tax season and we have made a commitment to put money back in your pockets, to save families money,” Healey said to crowd of local officials after touring the school. “As you know, the deadline is April 15, and we want to make sure that everyone knows there are big opportunities for savings out there.”
One of the Healey administration's early accomplishments was signing a sizable tax cut package in 2023 – packing about a billion dollars’ worth of relief, including a Child & Family Tax Credit that lifted the cap on two dependents and raised the CFTC to now $440 per dependent, up from $180 originally and $310 in 2023.
That, and the Earned Income Tax Credit – also promoted by the governor Tuesday.
“The [EITC] just went up - we increased it from 30 percent to 40 percent of the federal credit, so now, if you combine those couple of things - if you've got two or three kids, you could be looking now, because of what we did, at a combined federal and state credit of close to $10,000,” Healey emphasized.
Also promoted: the “Senior Circuit Breaker Tax Credit,” increased to a maximum $2,730 for this year.
Getting the word out remains essential, the governor says, as does directly assisting folks in need of help with filing. Tax preparation volunteers are part of that effort, including organizations such as Springfield Partners for Community Action.
“Our volunteer income tax assistance alone generated over a thousand returns last year, which resulted in over $2.3 million being returned to residents here in the city of Springfield,” said Mickey Harris, a board member of Springfield Partners. “There are, indeed, 23 community action programs in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and we've collectively returned over $60 million in tax refunds to residents and that’s spread over 30,000 taxpayers.”
Tuesday’s event was held in a city with a median household income of $51,000 - about $27,000 less than the national average, according to the Census Bureau data spanning 2019-23.
Dawn DiStefano is president and CEO of Square One, which partners with Educare and Springfield Public Schools to run the facility. She tells WAMC the families Square One provides programming to stand to benefit greatly from the credits.
“Many of them have two to three jobs, and so, any extra makes a huge difference,” she said. “This is the money that they can use to put a down payment on a car, this is the money they can use to have a fun family activity - keeping families happy, keeping children involved, but it also can help families avoid past-due rent bills or utility bills that we know start to add up and so, that type of family stability, in our opinion, is what children need as the type of environment where they want to grow up.”
