Don’t worry, be happy. Nibi the beaver is safe.
I mean that sincerely. I am happy that, thanks to Governor Maura Healey, Nibi will be able to stay at the Newhouse Wildlife Rescue in Chelmsford and won’t be released into the wild, where her rescuers say she probably would not survive. And I don’t begrudge Healey the cheery headlines that come from doing something popular, especially when it involves an animal.
But Nibi’s story does provide an opening to consider what’s popular and easy to do and what’s not — and where that distinction leaves Healey, which is usually somewhere in the middle.
The now-famous beaver was rescued two years ago after she was found orphaned on the side of a road in Sturbridge. After being nursed back to health, Nibi ended up liking people more than beavers. When the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (or MassWildlife) ordered her released back into the wild, more than 22,000 people signed a petition to protect her.
As Jane Newhouse, president and founder of Newhouse Wildlife Rescue, told The New York Times, “I’m blown away by the amount of people who cried out for Nibi, who cried out [to] have this rectified, and the amount of empathy that people had.” Hearing those cries, Healey intervened and the rest is now Massachusetts political history. Nibi will remain at the shelter as “an educational beaver.”
If only less popular causes could be resolved as quickly and decisively.
Take the migrant shelter issue. When it comes to public sentiment, Massachusetts voters are very much divided on how much Nibi-like empathy migrants should receive. In a poll conducted in March for GBH/CommonWealth Beacon by MassINC Polling Group, 79 percent of respondents said they supported the Massachusetts “right-to-shelter law” — when the word “migrant” was absent from the polling question. When the poll asked how respondents felt about the state providing emergency shelter specifically to migrants, 47 percent opposed it and 45 percent said they strongly or somewhat supported it.
No surprise then that when it comes to sheltering migrants, Healey has tried to come down somewhere in the middle by limiting the amount of time that families can stay in shelters. But as Joe Battenfeld wrote in the Boston Herald, by doing that, she has not directly taken on the state’s right-to-shelter law, which requires the state to provide shelter to families and pregnant women. With her revised policy, Healey is violating the spirit of the law without calling for its demise. Meanwhile, it’s hard to tell exactly how strictly the state is enforcing the new shelter policy limits. While Healey doesn’t push as passionately for migrant rights as she did when she was attorney general and Donald Trump was president, she doesn’t want a visible migrant problem on Massachusetts streets.
Healey has faced other tough issues, such as the financial collapse of Steward Health Care. As a result, six former Steward hospitals were transferred to new owners. But Carney Hospital in Dorchester and Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer closed after no qualified bidders were identified. Healey’s acceptance of that outcome was highly unpopular in the communities that lost a hospital. At the same time, how much the state will end up paying to clean up the Steward mess is also an issue. As the Globe has reported, the administration has already paid $72 million to help Steward meet its payroll and is planning to pay the new operators hundreds of millions of dollars over the next three years. That’s a big price tag. But the alternative to doing that was the complete collapse of a hospital network, and that was untenable. So a middle ground of saving some, but not all, hospitals became Healey’s best answer.
Charlie Baker, Healey’s predecessor, made a career out of finding safe, middle ground, and Healey has been trying to follow in his footsteps. But these are different times, with more complex and polarizing issues. The middle ground is harder to locate. Besides, sometimes you should be willing to take up unpopular causes and stand up to powerful forces. That’s the case with the Massachusetts State Police and the various scandals that seriously undercut that agency’s credibility. The most recent and the most troubling involves the death of Enrique Delgado-Garcia, a State Police recruit who died following a training class that involved boxing. It took 10 days for state officials to appoint a special investigator to look into the matter — much longer than it took to decide what to do about Nibi.
After receiving a letter from MassWildlife saying it was planning to take Nibi away, the rescue center filed for an emergency injunction. Before that could happen, Healey declared at a press conference, “There was talk about releasing Nibi into the wild and I heard about that and said, ‘No, we’re going to pause on that and evaluate what’s best for Nibi.’ ”
If only that standard could be applied to every decision — and if only the final result could make everyone as happy.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.