Massachusetts Democrats slammed Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Kennealy for what they argued was his failure to reform the state’s right-to-shelter law or put in place security checks during his tenure as housing and economic development secretary under former Gov. Charlie Baker.

The criticism leveled at the 57-year-old from Lexington came a day after he told the Herald that he personally warned Gov. Maura Healey about rising demand for emergency shelter during a November 2022 transition meeting between the Healey and Baker administrations.

But Massachusetts Democratic Party Chair Steve Kerrigan said Kennealy dropped the ball on shelter reforms when he was in charge of the state agency that largely oversaw the program.

“Mike Kennealy managed the shelter system for four years, and he should explain why he refused to conduct CORI criminal background checks on people, did not impose a residency requirement, and allowed people to stay in the shelter system for as much as eight years. And he never once proposed a change to the right to shelter law,” Kerrigan said in a statement Thursday.

Logan Trupiano, a spokesperson for Kennealy, said Kerrigan “has it confused,” and it was Helaey who “ignored” calls to amend the right-to-shelter law.

“Steve should read the 1,000 ‘serious incident reports’ that Healey either actively hid from the public or was entirely oblivious to. This spin would be laughable if her mishandling of the crisis weren’t so grossly negligent,” Trupiano said in a statement that referred to a series of reports released earlier this year.

In an interview this week, Kennealy said he met in person with Healey and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll in 2022 to discuss pressing issues his executive agency was dealing with, including the spike in shelter demand. But he said “nothing really happened” after he spoke with the two incoming elected officials.

“Her claim that no one could have seen this crisis coming, I think, is absurd. I mean, I warned her directly,” Kennealy previously said in a phone call. “The warning signs were everywhere. I think, for whatever reason, they chose to ignore them.”

Those familiar with Healey’s transition into the Governor’s Office have refuted Kennealy’s account of the meeting, telling the Herald he only focused on the need for cash to expand shelter capacity and did not offer advice on policy to reform the program.

Before an unrelated event Thursday afternoon, Healey did not address her conversation with Kennealy when pressed by the Herald.

“I can speak to what I inherited when I took office. When we took office, I inherited a shelter system that was in crisis, that wasn’t equipped to handle the growing surge. I took reforms. I took action, including reforming the right-to-shelter law, establishing residency requirements and wait times, and also instituting criminal background checks,” she said.

Kennealy was the head of the former Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, the agency that oversaw emergency shelter assistance shelters set up under the state’s right-to-shelter law. Healey split the agency into two during his first year in office.

The decades-old statute requires state officials to provide temporary housing to homeless families with children and pregnant women, though Healey and other Beacon Hill Democrats have put in place myriad restrictions on who can access the system.

Demand for immediate shelter started to spike in August 2022 as migrants from Venezuela, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Haiti started to arrive in Massachusetts.

Baker, who was serving his final months as governor, repeatedly warned state lawmakers that cash was running out to keep expanding emergency assistance shelter capacity. Legislators did not act on a $139 million bill Baker filed in November to hand more cash to the system.

In a letter earlier this month, Healey’s administration argued Kennealy and Baker left them with an emergency assistance shelter system that “was flawed from the outset and simply not set up to handle the growing number of families entering the system.”

The program had no residency requirements, capacity limits, waitlists, immigration prerequisites, length of stay limits, criminal background checks, or requirements to disclose past criminal convictions before entry, and was increasingly reliant on costly hotels and motels, according to the letter.

The Healey administration and Democrats in the Legislature have since implemented policies addressing all those areas after facing intense criticism for shuttling hundreds of millions into the program amid a spike in migrants arriving in Massachusetts.

Healey has also faced pushback for a series of serious security incidents in state-run shelters, like the arrest of one immigrant at a Revere shelter who was in the United States illegally and allegedly found with an assault rifle and a fentanyl stash worth $1 million.

Kerrigan said Kennealy’s only response to a surge of families seeking shelter “was to ask for millions more in taxpayer funding and send people into hotels.”

“Mike Kennealy failed to lower housing costs and failed to reform the shelter system. That lack of leadership is not surprising from a person who wouldn’t even make a choice for president in the last three elections,” Kerrigan said.

Holly Robichaud — a strategist working for Brian Shortsleeve, Kennealy’s likely opponent in the Republican gubernatorial primary next year — said the “migrant housing crisis” began on Kennealy’s watch.

“Healey didn’t inherit a broken system, she just followed the Kennealy playbook that kept voters in the dark even as their tax dollars were being used as migrant magnets. This is why Republicans can’t beat Healey with Kennealy,” Robichaud said in a statement.

Trupiano, Kennealy’s spokesperson, shot back.

“Brian Shortsleeve’s campaign not only sounds like the Democrat Party he has helped fund to the tune of over $90,000 — but is equally as ignorant to the (Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s) finding that Maura Healey alone bears responsibility for the migrant crisis,” Trupiano said, referring to a report DiZoglio released this week on Healey’s handling of the shelter system.