Government & Politics

An Appeals Court judge on Tuesday rejected suspended Cannabis Control Chairwoman Shannon O'Brien's petition, once again clearing the way for Treasurer Deborah Goldberg to schedule the meeting that could lead to O'Brien's firing.

A letter of interest submitted by Synergy and included as part of the agenda packet for Tuesday’s City Council meeting says a plan to convert office space to housing of this magnitude has not been previously attempted in Massachusetts. 

With tax revenues running $769 million behind projections after December, the Healey administration last month slashed the year-end revenue estimate by $1 billion.

A six-unit apartment building on the shore of Indian Lake in Worcester has sold for $1.25 million, five years after it was sold for $720,000.

Major swaths of the state's health care system are now considered "high risk," with the crisis largely fueled by a major backlog of patients waiting to be discharged from hospitals, the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association said Monday.

Massachusetts will receive $8 million to address the opioid crisis as part of a $350 million national settlement with Publicis Health.

An attorney for suspended Cannabis Control Commission Chair Shannon O'Brien said Thursday he is not aware of any federal investigation into his client and has not seen the subpoena that the Boston Globe reported Thursday had been sent to state officials in the fall by federal prosecutors seeking information on O'Brien.

Worcester joined a growing list of municipalities no longer collecting community impact fees from cannabis businesses in January 2023, after collecting nearly $5.2 million in those fees from fiscal 2019 to 2023.

Though the name of the client and the cancer treatment it produces is confidential, Rentschler Biopharma's Tom Roberts says this is just the first in a new wave of business in Milford for the 150-year-old company. 

The state's retailers sold 232,894 pounds worth of cannabis flower to recreational consumers in 2023, about the weight of the average blue whale.