A pair of state agencies involved in the emergency shelter system loaded millions of dollars onto taxpayer-funded credit cards last fiscal year to pay for hotel bills and catering services, according to state data reviewed by the Herald.

Gov. Maura Healey’s administration’s spending on emergency shelters has been mostly documented — more than $819 million was shuttled to the state-run system through June of Fiscal Year 2024, and officials project more than $1 billion will be spent in each of the next few years.

But the payments on the procurement cards add one more level of depth to the way state officials have handled massive expenses, including those related to the shelter system serving local families and migrants. The charges are part of a trove of information that has revealed Healey’s administration spending habits.

State data shows the Executive Offices of Health and Human Services and Housing and Livable Communities used procurement cards last fiscal year for large purchases — many stretching up to tens of thousands of dollars — from a series of hotel chains across Massachusetts.

In a statement to the Herald, both agencies acknowledged that procurement cards were used to pay for shelter-related services like hotel stays for families. The health agency racked up more than $2.6 million and the housing department spent over $175,000 on emergency shelter needs, according to the Healey administration.

The offices declined to say if specific hotel or catering charges listed in data obtained through a public records request were connected to emergency shelters. But many of the hotel payments in the dataset line up with locations that are known to have served as shelters.

In one instance, the Executive Office of Health and Human Services used one or multiple procurement cards to spend more than $184,000 between August and September 2023 at a Red Roof Inn in Sutton, which has previously been identified as an emergency shelter.

Through more than 100 separate payments between mid-August and late September 2023, the agency also shelled out over $499,000 on various hotels in Woburn, including a Red Roof Inn, Comfort Inn, and Crowne Plaza, according to state records.

Previous Herald reporting identified the Comfort Inn in Woburn as an emergency shelter. A federal team sent to Massachusetts last fall to take stock of the influx of migrants met with former Woburn Mayor Scott Galvin and toured the hotel, which at the time was playing host to 25 migrant families.

Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance spokesperson Paul Craney said the big payments to various hotel chains appear to be “acts of desperation to try to pay vendors very quickly.”

“There doesn’t seem to be very good protocols for how to deal with the housing component of the migrant situation,” he told the Herald. “Employees are using these credit cards, carrying very large balances as opposed to a very streamlined and transparent process that the government and the public can easily understand and digest.”

A spokesperson for the state’s housing department said the Healey administration booked and paid for some hotel rooms for families in need of shelter using taxpayer-funded credit cards, or procurement cards.

This allowed the administration to move quickly to house a rapidly increasing number of families, including a surge of migrants arriving from other countries, according to the spokesperson.

The Healey administration eventually shifted from individual hotel payments to long-term contracts, which allowed the state to consolidate hotel expenses and add non-profit service providers, according to the spokesperson.

“When booking hotel rooms to meet a quick and unprecedented demand for shelter, HLC and HHS negotiated for the best available rates to ensure that taxpayer dollars were used responsibly and to meet the sudden need for food and shelter as people sought refuge in Massachusetts,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

In some cases, state contracts with hotels have shown the Healey administration agreed to pay nearly $300 a night to house local families and migrants, the Herald has previously reported.

Sen. Ryan Fattman, a Sutton Republican, criticized what he said is a lack of transparency around state spending on the emergency shelter system, including through contracts and procurement cards.

“In addition to being unsustainable, we really don’t understand who’s getting these contracts, how the money is being spent exactly. There’s a lot of nebulousness when it comes to this program, and I think that’s concerning to just about everybody,” he said.

The health and human services agency also made around 100 different procurement card payments totaling roughly $211,000 to a Comfort Inn in Plainville between September and October 2023, according to state records.

In a statement released in September 2023, the then chair of the town’s Select Board, Jeffrey Johnson, said officials were notified of Healey’s plan to place unsheltered migrant families at local hotels, of which there are only two in town — a Comfort Inn and a Best Stay Inn.

“Neither our town nor any of the others ‘volunteered’ for this assignment,” Johnson wrote in the statement.

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