Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s heavy-handed tactics are forcing beleaguered towns and cities in Massachusetts to waste money fighting the MBTA Communities Act in court instead of spending it on police, fire departments, parks and schools.
Some Massachusetts taxpayers are essentially getting double billed – paying for Campbell’s bloated salary, staff and court costs while also spending taxpayer funds for the local communities’ defense.
Campbell has chosen to fight cities and towns in court to defend the MBTA zoning law while ignoring the voter-approved law which allows Auditor Diana DiZoglio to audit the state Legislature.
So rather than challenge lawmakers, she lets them get off the hook, while wielding her cudgel against poor towns and cities that won’t comply with the elitist law.
Campbell’s answer for everything – whether it’s local Massachusetts towns or President Donald Trump – is to sue from her high perch at her Dartmouth home.
She rejects the people’s will in auditing the Legislature, even though she’s supposed to be the people’s lawyer. Campbell rarely appears in public, unless it’s on friendly public radio, and generally only answers by press release from her Duxbury estate.
We’ll sue you is the answer to everything. That brings in depositions, affidavits, hearings, town lawyers, and some towns will have to get expensive outside counsel.
Campbell has already filed suit against Trump dozens of times, spending millions of dollars, and is now taking aim at her own state’s financially-strapped towns.
A dozen communities are resisting the law, which seeks to create multifamily housing around MBTA stations. So Campbell is targeting them as adversaries – using her AG cudgel – rather than working with them to find a solution to the housing crisis.
The AG is pitching her own story as a former tenant who was nearly evicted from public housing to push the law.
“While I could not afford to own a home for most of my adult life, it remained a priority for my husband and me, and we eventually bought a house and broke the cycles of instability and poverty for myself and my boys,” she wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed.
She certainly did break the cycle. Campbell, with her $223,495 annual salary, can now afford to live in the cushy town of Dartmouth on Massachusetts’ South Coast, moving from Mattapan in 2025. They bought the house for $865,000, something most Massachusetts residents could not afford.
“The decision was not an easy one, but after significant prayer and meaningful discussion and reflection, we ultimately decided that it was the best decision for our family,” she wrote to supporters in Dec. 2024.
Her story about being nearly evicted has little to do with what towns are struggling with, but oh well.
Campbell has decided the state is the enemy and towns and cities must do whatever the state decides is best for them.
Why is Campbell being so heavy-handed in defending the law? Does it have anything to do with the fact that some of the “multi-family” housing units created by the MBTA Communities law will be going to newly-arrived migrants?
Campbell and Gov. Maura Healey have decided that migrants get first crack at drivers’ licenses and food and school assistance, making them a priority.
Will they get preference for affordable housing too?
Now that Healey has ended the practice of housing migrants in hotels, they need other places to live, and the creation of affordable units near T stations is one of the prime locations left in Massachusetts.