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Visiting Adams for Greylock Glen groundbreaking, Baker continues to dodge responsibility for Holyoke Soldiers’ Home catastrophe

Two white men in suits shake hands in a fancy office while a white woman in a dress applauds, smiling
Executive Office of Health and Human Services for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
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https://twitter.com/MassHHS/status/750807607984685056/
Former Holyoke Soldiers' Home Superintendent Bennett Walsh (left), Secretary of Health and Human Services of Massachusetts Marylou Sudders (center), and Governor Charlie Baker (right).

While visiting Berkshire County on Tuesday, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker continued to make misleading statements about the 2020 Holyoke Soldiers’ Home COVID-19 outbreak that killed around 80 veterans.

The Republican was in Adams for the ceremonial groundbreaking of the Greylock Glen Outdoor Recreation and Nature Center, a project decades in the making that the two-term governor helped secure funding for.

“I’m very glad to be here, I'm really glad this project is getting done," said Baker. "I will definitely come back as a private citizen to see it when it's completed. And I'm going to bring my wife and any of my kids who still happen to live in Massachusetts at the time to enjoy this truly glorious and beautiful sight.”

Baker is in his final months as governor after declining to seek a third term. After his remarks, he took questions from local media, including one about his assessment of the Berkshire Flyer pilot program. The Amtrak service from New York City to Pittsfield launched this summer after years of advocacy from Western Massachusetts State Senator Adam Hinds.

Baker said he’s only heard positive things about the trial-run and that he’d like to see more private-public partnerships address longstanding calls for expanded East-West rail in the commonwealth.

“I did take a long ride with the chairman and CEO of Amtrak from Boston up to Springfield, two-and-a-half-hour ride to basically look at all the track and all of the issues associated with getting from there to Springfield, and talking to them about how they can work with us to sort of extend and expand on some of the work that needs to be done using bipartisan infrastructure law money, both state money and money that was given to Amtrak in that bill," said the governor. "And then figure out how to make service more what I would describe as reliable. And in some cases, if you do a lot of the track work, you can also make it faster to get from one end of Massachusetts to the other. But that's, you know, if I had a third term, I'd be able to spend a ton of time on that in a third term. That stuff will take a while to get done. But I do believe we can get enough of the sort of bones of it in place over the course of the fall that I think there's a pretty good future there for east-west traffic generally.”

He also discussed the state’s preparations for the new school year, with students, teachers, and staff still recovering from the massive disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Last year and this year, we ran pretty extensive summer school programming, which is more enrichment programming than anything else," said Baker. "And many hundreds of communities in Massachusetts participated in it.”

When Baker last visited Greylock Glen in July of 2021, WAMC pressed him on a damning Boston Globe report on his role in the 2020 Holyoke Soldiers’ Home COVID-19 outbreak that took the lives of around 80 veterans.

The Globe’s reporting showed that Baker was intimately involved in bringing on the well-connected and underqualified Bennett Walsh – who has received the lion’s share of the blame for the tragedy, which he disputes – to serve as superintendent of the Home. Back in 2021, Baker offered a wholly inaccurate explanation to WAMC:

“Under state law, Bennett Walsh was hired by the board at Holyoke Soldiers’ Home," he said. "The chair of that board was an appointee of the previous administration. And the board, majority of the board members were appointees of the previous administration.”

The Globe’s report made it clear that Baker had in fact named three of the trustees involved in hiring Walsh, including the board chair.

In April of this year, Massachusetts Inspector General Glenn Cunha underscored the Globe’s reporting with a 91-page report on the outbreak that made Baker’s involvement in Walsh’s hiring explicit.

Like in 2021, Baker again distanced himself when pressed by WAMC.

“Well, the board at the soldiers home made clear that no one from our administration interfered with their process that they went through when they hired him," said the governor. "He did get the most points in the Inspector General's report to get the job based on the work of the board. And the court decision that took place after our administration fired Bennett Walsh where the court basically ruled that we did not have the authority to fire him was a pretty clear indication that there was concern and conflict with the legislation that was in place in the first place. And one of the things I'm most appreciative of in the bill that was ultimately passed by the legislature and we signed is it cleaned up all of the ambiguity that existed around process and decision making in the previous bill.”

WAMC pointed out to Baker that the inspector general’s report unambiguously places the responsibility for hiring Walsh on Baker and his administration. The first bullet point of the investigative findings states that “[Executive Office of Health and Human Services] Secretary [Marylou] Sudders and Governor Baker made the final selection of Bennett Walsh to lead the Soldiers’ Home.” It goes on to say that “although the law requires that the Board appoint the Home’s superintendent, EHS staff led much of the hiring process, Secretary Sudders met with only one of the three top candidates, and Governor Baker made the actual appointment. This both supplanted the Board’s role and did not comply with state law. The Board allowed this process to move forward even though the trustees recognized their authority to appoint the superintendent.”

When WAMC cited the report to Baker, the governor – who had just cited the very same document – claimed ignorance before abruptly leaving the gaggle for a waiting SUV.

“I can't speak to that, because I'm not familiar with it," he said. "There were two separate statutes that created a lot of the conflict. And the conflict was significant enough that we were not permitted to fire him despite everything that happened there. That had to be a decision that was made and was made eventually by the board. The legislature incorporated this into their reports and actually referenced it specifically when they filed their legislation which we signed which cleaned this up. Thanks, everybody.”

Josh Landes has been WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief since February 2018, following stints at WBGO Newark and WFMU East Orange. A passionate advocate for Western Massachusetts, Landes was raised in Pittsfield and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, receiving his bachelor's in Ethnomusicology and Radio Production. His free time is spent with his cat Harry, experimental electronic music, and exploring the woods.
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