Massachusetts offered up $35M in offshore wind tax breaks. They’ve gone unclaimed for two straight years.

 

New from CommonWealth Beacon 'PERFECT STORM': A confluence of financial pressures are making it increasingly challenging for Massachusetts municipalities to avoid cuts to local schools and other services, according to a new report from the Massachusetts Municipal Association and the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University. One structural issue that has emerged in recent years is that state aid to local governments has not kept up with inflation, Chris Lisinski reports. OPINION:  MUST READ:  Massachusetts Auditor Diana DiZoglio's recent accusations against the state attorney general miss the mark, writes Jerold Duquette, a professor of political science at Central Connecticut State University, and Lawrence Friedman, who teaches constitutional law at New England Law. excerpt:  DiZoglio dismissed the views of these experts, claiming that they had been “cherry picked” by legislative leaders, and that, as the auditor, she was the most credible source of the relevant expertise. At the same time, she did not cite or produce any experts who agreed with her, and she apparently was not aware that her immediate predecessor, Suzanne Bump, opposed giving legislative audit authority to the state auditor’s office.  DiZoglio declined even to appear at the second hearing, held on April 2, 2025, before a Senate subcommittee tasked with exploring the constitutional implications of a legislative audit. Among the issues covered was, for example, the extent to which an audit could interfere with the separation of powers and the constitutional authority of each chamber of the Legislature to set its own rules.   Expert witnesses pointed out that the constitution expressly grants each chamber the power to make rules and control its own proceedings, and that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has held that this authority “is a continuous power absolute and beyond the challenge of any other tribunal.” The testimony made clear that an audit into any aspect of the ways in which either chamber of the Legislature chooses to conduct itself could in multiple ways intrude upon the settled constitutional authority of each to manage its own affairs.   At the end of the day, Campbell’s reluctance to run to court in support of the auditor makes sense: As she herself noted, based upon the limited details DiZoglio has shared about the audit she has planned, a judge likely “would laugh [her] out of court.”   The auditor is trapped in a legal box of her own making. This is, at least in part, because her goals and claims have from the start been more politically compelling than legally persuasive. She has consistently downplayed the legal and constitutional implication of the authority she sought.

Massachusetts offered up $35M in offshore wind tax breaks. They’ve gone unclaimed for two straight years.     October 9, 2025 By JORDAN WOLMAN

It was three short years ago that Massachusetts legislators enacted an ambitious package designed to boost offshore wind and other clean energy technologies.

The year was 2022. Joe Biden was in the White House, Democrats controlled the US Congress, and the economy started to emerge from its Covid slump, so officials on Beacon Hill were hopeful about the opportunity to bring home a sizable chunk of the economic bounty thought to be tied to offshore wind.

With the idea of turbines sprouting up off the coast and union workers assembling the parts necessary to deploy the technology, then-Gov. Charlie Baker signed legislation including $35 million in tax breaks for offshore wind companies to build a domestic supply chain in the Bay State.

The problem is there have been no takers.

For each of the past two years, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) ran formal solicitations offering the tax credits. For each of the past two years, MassCEC received no applications and made no awards, the agency confirmed to CommonWealth Beacon.

This latest revelation paints a picture of just how stark of a difference has emerged between Massachusetts’s offshore wind vision and the reality — even before President Trump took office and quickly cracked down on clean energy projects around the country. Since his second inauguration, the Trump administration has sought to revoke permits for offshore wind projects and rescind a designation for 3.5 million acres in federal waters that would have allowed for large-scale wind development. The uncertainty has made it difficult for wind developers and the commonwealth’s utilities to negotiate a price for wind power.

“What I blame are the supply chain disruptions that came out of the pandemic and then intensified in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” said Sen. Michael Barrett, a Democrat who co-chairs the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy and played a key role in crafting the 2022 climate law that authorized the tax breaks. “Those tax breaks would be working today and doing their intended work if offshore wind were a successful and ongoing thing. But everything depends on an ecosystem that is healthy in the present and is looking toward a predictable future.”

MassCEC’s solicitation included $35 million in tax credits over a five-year period for creating new permanent jobs and investing in offshore wind facilities to stimulate manufacturing and supply chain capacity in the industry.

The intent, Barrett said, was for the tax breaks to incentivize smaller businesses to engage in offshore wind research and manufacturing of component parts like sensors and cables to support the larger offshore wind developers.

But when the industry’s foundation – the big developers with leases to sites in the Atlantic –began to crack, the ensuing economic boom didn’t materialize as projected, rendering the tax breaks ineffective.

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More Context Healey convenes solar leaders in search of energy answers (September 2025) Could Canadian offshore wind help Mass. meet climate goals? (July 2025) Healey again puts offshore wind on back burner (June 2025)

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What We're Reading MISSING CHILDREN: Roughly 600 children in Massachusetts state care go missing in a typical year. (The Boston Globe – paywall)   THIS IS FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE NEWSLETTER:  Write to us at startingpoint@globe.com. To subscribe, sign up here. TODAY’S STARTING POINT The Gloucester gravesite of G Araujo, 17, who died in 2018 after running away from a state group home for teens in crisis. ERIN CLARK/GLOBE STAFF In 2018, G Araujo, a 17-year-old from Gloucester, ran away from the home in Bradford where she’d been living with a group of other Massachusetts teenagers under the care of the state’s child welfare system. She died of an accidental overdose two days later. G, born Gustavo, is among the hundreds of children in the custody of Massachusetts’ Department of Children and Families who go missing every year — many of them Black or Hispanic teenagers. Some return hours or days later. Others end up victims of sex trafficking or are never found. The Globe has just published a story about the persistent problem of teens running away from state-overseen homes. Reading it raised some bigger questions about how that system works (or doesn’t), so I asked reporters Tricia L. Nadolny and Jason Laughlin to tell me more. Ian: Your article notes that G’s story has never been reported publicly. How did you find out what happened to her? Tricia: Because of privacy concerns, DCF doesn’t provide information about what happens in group homes like the one G lived in — even to the point where if a kid dies there might be no public accounting. We found out about G’s case through a different agency that licenses group homes. We asked for inspection reports where homes were cited for violating policy, and in that trove was a document about a resident who ran away and died. We didn’t have a name, but I requested the police report and used death records to confirm her identity. Some people close to G didn’t even know she’d been state care. It just shows how hard it is to understand what’s happening in the system. How did G end up in a group home, and what circumstances are kids who enter the system usually coming from? Tricia: G was with a foster family. The foster parents grew concerned after she started missing curfew and thought she needed more supervision. She was upset to be moving to the Bradford group home. Jason: Putting G’s case to the side, many kids end up in the system because of abuse or neglect. Neglect could include things like poor medical care or lack of supervision. If there’s enough of a pattern, DCF can seek to remove a child from their parents. How did you get a sense of how many kids run away? Jason: Our colleague Scooty Nickerson analyzed federal and state data that let us make conclusions about the system beyond the personal stories Tricia and I gathered. He helped us show not only how many teens go missing, but also for how long and how many seem to be sex-trafficking victims. Does the runaway problem suggest that DCF’s group home system is just broken? Jason: About a third of teens in DCF’s care end up in residential facilities. Some advocates say there should be far less reliance on them. There are a lot of really good people at DCF. But as I reported in a previous story, within group homes there’s sometimes abuse, inappropriate behavior, rules that aren’t followed, and incompetence. You can understand why a teen might want to get away from that. But most kids in the DCF system end up in foster homes, adopted, or with family. So it’s not that this is just a rotten system through and through. As reporters, how do you approach talking to people who have experienced trauma? Tricia:  We start from a place of just wanting to listen. People who’ve been through trauma often feel like they’ve lost control. These kids didn’t have control over who they were living with, what they could do, what their schedules were. Letting them, now as adults, tell their stories I hope gives them that control back and helps them feel like what happened to them could lead to positive change in the system. EDUCATION: Pittsfield schools are still lagging in state accountability scores, but signs of improvement are emerging. (The Berkshire Eagle – paywall) COURTS: A state-imposed hiring freeze is causing chaos in the courts. (The Boston Globe – paywall)   IN MEMORY: Joan Kennedy, the former wife of Sen. Edward Kennedy, has died at 89. (GBH News)

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