Thursday, 4:30 PM
Housing authorities drop suit
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff
Three of the largest public housing authorities in Massachusetts, citing a pledge by Governor Deval Patrick to adequately fund public housing, said Tuesday they have dropped a lawsuit that accused the Romney administration of shortchanging the state’s nearly 250 local authorities by millions of dollars.
The authorities in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline signed an agreement with lawyers for the state to shelve the suit after the new administration proposed to increase operating money from $45 million to $60 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1 and to provide other funds, Stephen Young, a lawyer for the three authorities, told the Globe.
Young said Governor Mitt Romney was indifferent to financial woes that the authorities said forced residents to live in deteriorating, even squalid, conditions and prompted the closing of hundreds of substandard apartments. The new administration, Young said, seems committed to improving conditions in the nearly 50,000 public housing apartments statewide for poor, elderly, and disabled residents.
"I think it’s fair to say that with the Patrick administration coming into office, the attitude toward dealing with the outrageous condition in public housing changed immediately," said Young, whose clients filed the suit in November in Suffolk Superior Court.
Gregory P. Russ, executive director of the Cambridge Housing Authority, said Patrick sees the state’s 247 housing authorities "as a resource, not as a burden."
But Eric Fehrnstrom, a spokesman for Romney, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, responded that the former governor had to consider what the state could afford. "The people of Massachusetts have always been generous in providing housing, healthcare, and other human services, but it’s fair to say that Governor Romney never asked the taxpayers to be more generous than we could afford," he said.
