The Codcast

New pot czar a breath of fresh air by CommonWealth Beacon

With last year’s election of Donald Trump, complete with his campaign talk about about bad hombres and Mexican rapists, it’s hard to feel too optimistic about the prospects for comprehensive — and reasoned — immigration reform. Trump adds a loud exclamation mark to what had already become a starkly partisan divide on the issue.

But Ali Noorani — the guest on this week’s Codcast — says a solution to the immigration debate isn’t just a matter of the political dynamics in Washington. (Noorani may be familiar to folks in Massachusetts because he spent a decade in Boston serving as director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition.)

After this month’s white nationalist rally in Virginia, statues of Confederate leaders are falling across the South. Protests by white supremacists against the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville has set in motion a rush to rid town greens and parks of icons to the Confederate cause.

The context in which many of the Confederate statues were erected is an important part of the debate, says Boston University historian Nina Silber on this week’s Codcast. Many were put up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and sent a “message of white supremacy” as Southern states were consolidating the Jim Crow system of segregation as part of the backlash to Reconstruction.

Riding the T sometimes feels like a step back in time. Red Line cars that are 40 years old. Payment systems that are slow and inefficient. Underground stations that leak whenever it rains.

But David Block-Schachter, the MBTA’s chief technology officer, says the transit authority is changing. In an interview for The Codcast with Josh Fairchild and James Aloisi of TransitMatters, Block-Schachter, who doesn’t own a car or a driver’s license, provides a glimpse of what technology can do for the T.

What Gov. Charlie Baker calls a common-sense approach to dealing with federal immigration officials, Carol Rose of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts dismisses as fraternizing with the “Trump deportation machine.”

Rose calls Baker “well-intentioned,” which is fairly mild since many of her political allies on the immigration issue are calling him racist or worse. But Rose makes clear she believes there is no middle ground in the fight over state cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, officials.

While “not in my backyard” has become the default response to development proposals in many communities, in a few places NIMBY is starting to meet its match. YIMBY — which stands for “yes in my backyard” — is a fledgling national movement, concentrated largely in already densely populated and high-cost urban areas, that is pushing a very different message: We want to see more housing, more density, and a tempering of the run-up of housing prices in our community to make it more accessible to all, say YIMBY activists.

The Boston area has several YIMBY groups — in Somerville, Cambridge, Newton, and Jamaica Plain. Eric Herot and Meg Wood of JP YIMBY join the Codcast this week to preach a bit of the community-based, pro-growth gospel. They’re not out to carry water for developers, but Herot and Wood often support their projects because they say neighborhoods like theirs will benefit from more housing. The tensions that can set off are clear.

On this week’s Codcast, Paul Levy, the former CEO of Beth Israel describes Partners as a regulated monopoly. He is skeptical that a merger of the BI, Lahey, and several other hospitals will steal a lot of business away from Partners or produce dramatic savings that will be passed along to patients in the former of lower insurance rates.

Stephen Lisauskas, a vice president at Waste Zero, a North Andover company that advises municipalities on ways to reduce their trash disposal costs, says cities and towns can fairly easily boost recycling and reduce trash generation. He worries that inertia on Beacon Hill and out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitudes toward trash among residents of the state are likely to discourage recycling and lead to a boost in expensive trash exports. Massachusetts and the rest of the states in the northeast already have the highest trash disposal costs in the country.

After a dumbfounding outburst by House Speaker Robert DeLeo on Wednesday evening, it appears the House and Senate are finally getting down to business. A fiscal 2018 budget is slated for a vote on Friday and the House and Senate lawmakers trying to broker a deal between the branches on marijuana legislation are finally getting back to work.

In this week’s Codcast, CommonWealth’s Michael Jonas, Jack Sullivan, and Bruce Mohl analyze the legislative maneuverings of the last week, particularly around pot. Why did DeLeo issue a statement denouncing those who would link the budget and pot negotiations for political leverage, and then say the negotiations were never linked by the House? Even though his comment appeared to point the finger at the Senate, it turns out there was no evidence anyone, let alone any senators, had engaged in political machinations. The speaker’s spokesman said DeLeo made the statement solely in response to press queries.

The health care debate is coming to a head in Washington, where the moment of truth has arrived for Republicans who have vowed for seven years to “repeal and replace” Obamacare the first chance they get. On Beacon Hill, state leaders are wrestling with how to restrain Medicaid costs without cutting people off coverage.

No one understands these issues as well as John McDonough, who joined Bruce Mohl and me for this week’s Codcast. McDonough is a professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, but his policy studies today are informed by decades he spent as a policy practitioner.