A member of former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s cabinet is seeking the Republican nomination to potentially face Democratic Governor Maura Healey. Mike Kennealy formally declared his candidacy earlier this month. The former Secretary of Housing and Economic Development spoke with WAMC about his candidacy, housing, emergency shelter policies, and his thoughts on the Trump administration as federal funds and support for Massachusetts come under attack.
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MIKE KENNEALY: I thought, coming out of the Baker administration, I would sort of see what was happening around Massachusetts - government and politics and policy - and then make a decision on a potential run. And from my standpoint, I love Massachusetts, I love public service - I've been doing public service in one form or another for a dozen years now in the state, and for me, this job is all about serving the people of Massachusetts.
As I look across what's happened over the last number of years, I see three areas we simply have to address a lot more strategically and forcefully. One is an affordability crisis; we need a state that everybody here can afford, some people literally can't afford to live here anymore. We need a great future for everybody - that speaks to education, of the quality of our economic opportunities here. And the third is we need government we can believe in. We don't have that today, we don't have a state government that's effective, responsible and accountable and so, on those three dimensions, I think we need a real change in leadership and those are three areas that I've succeeded at addressing over the course of my career.
I spent 19 years in the private equity business, helping to build jobs, create jobs and build companies. I spent the last dozen years in public service - two years on a turnaround of the Lawrence Public Schools, eight years in state government, of which four years was in Governor Baker's cabinet, last couple years doing nonprofit work at Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston so, over the long course of my career, I've had exposure to and a track record of success in what I think are our three biggest priorities, and that motivates me to jump into the race and serve the people of Massachusetts in this capacity.
WAMC: You are no stranger to Beacon Hill, having served under former Governor Charlie Baker as Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, that was time that featured policies like the MBTA Communities Act coming into being, as well as handling the pandemic. While you were serving in the administration, what needs in Western Massachusetts in particular had your attention, and how did you respond?
KENNEALY: I know we spent a lot of time in Western Mass. I'll tell you the great joy of my job as secretary was traveling to Commonwealth, and my personal experience was visiting over 150 cities and towns, in getting work done in those places and so - we always said our mandate was “Pittsfield to Provincetown.” That's exactly what we did.
We spent a lot of time out there. I'm thinking back to a couple developments, in particular, the Eagle Mill (re)development, way out in Western Mass., the Berkshire Innovation Center … a lot of investments in and around Springfield. We did a lot in Western Mass. and a lot all over the state, and we're proud of that work.
As governor, you have to look out for the whole state, and that was the approach Governor Baker, Lieutenant Governor Polito took and the approach they encouraged all their cabinet secretaries to take. I'm proud of the travels and work we did all around the state, and we'll continue that mode of working when I'm governor.
WAMC: For the past two years, we've seen the first term of current-Governor Maura Healey, play out, as well as your former role technically be split into two secretary positions … what have been the highs and lows of this administration so far?
KENNEALY: I think the high has been around improvements to public transit. I think they've made some good progress with respect to the T, I think the general manager is doing a good job - that's someone that I would look to reappoint in that role. So, there's been some progress there.
On all the dimensions I mentioned, in terms of where I think the state needs to go and where to focus - I think they've not done a good job. With respect to affordability, the key components there being housing, energy and taxes - their housing policy and outlook is very different than ours, that has been detrimental to housing production. Energy costs are out of control - this administration doesn't have an energy policy, they have a climate policy which is making energy more expensive. And on taxes, it's been a seemingly endless succession of new tax proposals.
With respect to affordability, there have been examples where they made the situation worse or just not done enough to address it. On the issue of opportunity, this administration likes to talk about the fact that we're #1 on the national assessments for public education, which … that's true. However, our performance as a state peaked about a dozen years ago - both in math and reading - and we're simply not doing enough to make sure that our young people are ready to compete in a global economy.
And on the third point … government we can believe in, this administration, and I include the leadership in Beacon Hill as well, are resisting every attempt by the auditor to fulfill the will of the people - 72 percent of voters – and conduct an audit of the legislature. It's a governor that said she'd have the most transparent gubernatorial administration in history and make her office subject to the public records laws - that has not happened, and it's an administration that has badly mismanaged the migrant crisis, and I think to have a government we can believe in, it’s got to be one that's fiscally responsible, that's accountable, that's transparent, that can show that it can manage a crisis and the migrant crisis - happy to talk more about that one - has been an abysmal failure of crisis management.
WAMC: We see the Healey administration, as well as your half-successor, Housing Secretary Ed Augustus, trying to implement policy and funding to address what's being called a housing crisis. We see the figure 222,000 units being needed floating about. We've also seen a multi-billion dollar housing bond bill and ADU reform. It's a situation that didn't happen overnight - one could argue policies set in motion decades ago also played a role in this - but was this something you found yourself confronting during the Baker years and how would you confront it as Governor?
KENNEALY: We absolutely confronted it, and we were very open about the fact, during the Baker administration - we called it a housing crisis - and we've been in a 30-year-plus fall-off in housing production in Massachusetts.
The laws of supply-and-demand are what they are - if you have more demand, which we do, and falling production, you're going to have what we have now, which are rising and very high prices, so yeah, we are very open to calling this a housing crisis. And we did, in my view - I took the most important steps one could take to address it, which is zoning reform - not MBTA Communities, which is not our idea, but rather the Housing Choice legislation, which created an easier path at the local level to rezone properties for housing.
Our view of the problem was we have to produce a lot more housing, but given our long tradition of local control in Massachusetts, it's got to be housing that our communities actually want and so, that was our view - work relentlessly with cities and towns to help them achieve the housing production they wanted and create an easier path to do so, and I think over time, that's going to prove very effective in terms of driving more housing production.
I do not appreciate two areas of this administration's focus. One is on making MBTA Communities as contentious as it's become - we view that as a tool in the toolbox for municipal leaders and people at the local level to get housing done, but they have doubled-down on threats and mandates and lawsuits, and that's created a very different dialogue with the cities and towns on housing.
The other has been, frankly, a trumpeting of a $5.3 billion housing bond bill. Beacon Hill is never going to actually spend $5 billion on housing, that is bond authorization – a fraction of which will actually get spent. I think the more they talk about a number that isn't a real number, it distracts from what you actually need to do to get housing produced, which is work with people at the local level in a very strategic way to get it done versus trumpeting a headline number for a bond bill or poisoning the relationship with our cities and towns.
WAMC: We're speaking a day after the Healey administration touted the number of families in emergency shelters dropping below 5,000 for the first time in two years. It's attributing it, in part, to policy changes made amid an influx of migrant families and other factors. We've also seen lawmakers, especially Republicans, call for major changes to the state's emergency shelter laws. Healey appears to be open to it but - how would you address this matter?
KENNEALY: Well, I tell you, I would have addressed it first of all … which is consistent with the guidance they gave to the incoming (Healey) administration, which is to say “Look, we're going to have an enormous problem in our hands, because we have three things at work…” - I'm going back to late-2022 now – “We have a humanitarian crisis in some countries to our south, we have, effectively, an open federal border, and we have our status, in Massachusetts, as the only one of the 50 states that’s right to shelter.”
And so, we started to see an influx of people at the end of our term in office, and you just knew it was going to play out the way it did. I think folks on Beacon Hill and the incoming administration didn't quite grasp the scope of the problem. It was a relatively small problem at the time, but … small problems on a negative trend don't go away, they become big problems, and that's what happened here.
The types of reforms being talked about now, about getting right to shelter back to its original intent, which is to house Massachusetts families that have become homeless - that has to happen. It should have happened a long time ago.
I think there also needs to be much more transparency and communication about this issue. The transparency has been awful, and we have now spent, I think it's over $3 billion total over the last number of years on this. It's actually hard to get the exact number, but this should have been addressed much more aggressively, addressing the root causes of the problem and also making reforms to the right to shelter much earlier on.
WAMC: Massachusetts is navigating a number of shifts in federal spending priorities following the return of President Donald Trump. Tariffs on Canada, one of the state's biggest trade partners, the Department of Education demanding DEI changes and clawing back “unspent” COVID dollars for schools. It's a departure from the previous administration, and in ways, even the first Trump administration. How large does that loom on you as your platform comes together and you make your pitch?
KENNEALY: Well, we are laser-focused on state policy and what that can do to drive better outcomes here in Massachusetts, and in terms of federal issues or issues outside Massachusetts, we take it case-by-case. But I think it would be a mistake for policymakers here to overly-focus on or blame what's happening at the federal level when the issues I mentioned around affordability, around education standards and achievement and around the quality of our government - those issues reside within Massachusetts, we have control over those issues.
There’s always going to be externalities and things that happen outside the borders of the state, but it is incumbent on policymakers now, and folks like myself that are would-be policy makers to have a laser focus on Massachusetts.
WAMC: A quick follow up question on that - in the time that we've been speaking, I'm seeing a push alerts saying ‘200 jobs affected at UMass Chan in Worcester due to Trump cuts,’ according to MassLive. I'm looking to see - how would you navigate some of these … cuts to various social services and grants directly to Massachusetts - higher education [in particular] being a very large sector in the Commonwealth…?
KENNEALY: How would I manage it? Look, we've got some of the finest higher educational institutions in the world and we view them as not only great at education, but also core parts of our economic development agenda, and so we'll always look to work with them and help them be partners to our administration.
So, we're watching the situation like everybody else, but we simply have got to keep our eye on the ball here and what's happening within Massachusetts.
WAMC: What was your reaction when news came of a Tufts student [Rümeysa Öztürk] being seized by ICE off of the street?
KENNEALY: I'll tell you how I feel generally about that issue, which is that if we have students on our campuses that are really causing mayhem and advocating violence, that are being incredibly disruptive to what's going on here, they have to go.
If it is some other example of behavior that is not that, I think you’ve got to be cautious about it. And so, if someone has written an op-ed or exercised speech we don't like, that, for me, does not rise to the level of, “Hey, that person has to go.”
I'm not familiar with every detail of that case - I'm giving you generalities - but we should not be shy about saying “If people are truly causing a problem here, on our campuses, in our country, those folks have got to go.”
WAMC: We're speaking as several others consider also running as a Republican to challenge Governor Healey. How would you describe your own party's reaction to your candidacy and the handful of names still mulling a gubernatorial run?
KENNEALY: I'm only here to talk about my own candidacy - not the would-be candidacy of others. I'm proud to talk about my track record in business, but, in particular, course, my 12 years, full-time, in public service to the Commonwealth. I think we're going to bring to this race an unmatched level of experience across business, local government, education, state government and the non-profit sector. So – I’ll make the case about my own candidacy all day long and let others make their own decisions.
In terms of response, I think the response has been quite good, because we are focused on the issues that are most on the minds of people in Massachusetts, and that's we're going to do from day one of the campaign to the final day - really focus on the issues and respond to the needs on the ground and the opportunities on the ground and develop strategies to address them. And so, I think any time, as a leader or as a candidate, we're out listening to the people and hear what's on their mind and articulating a point of view on how to serve the people, I think that's always met with a good response, as it should.
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Former Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Mike Kennealy speaking with WAMC on Thursday, April 17, discussing his run for the governor’s office. He is hoping to secure the Republican gubernatorial nomination to face incumbent Democratic Governor Maura Healey, who is seeking reelection next year.
