It took 40 pages for a special Massachusetts emergency shelter commission to kick the can down the road.

We are all familiar with the numbers and the urgency for solutions: the costs of housing and caring for the influx of migrants and homeless in emergency family shelters are projected to continue to top $1 billion annually. As State House News reported, a commission was tasked with tackling the problem.

The commission’s solution? Approve the report and pass the problem along to the new Legislature after it’s sworn in on Jan. 1.

According to a summary of the report, “The Commission has convened five meetings to better understand the surge in emergency assistance (“EA”) family shelter caseload, the fiscal and operational constraints on the EA shelter program, and how to improve the EA shelter program to better serve families.”

That’s five meetings and 40 pages to determine that emergency shelters are full to bursting, the program costs a lot and solutions are needed.

“I’m sorry we don’t have a ‘ta-da’ moment in person, but just want to say thanks for all the hard work, the ideas, the stakeholder gathering, and the information that’s going to lead us forward in forming a new opportunity to support our emergency assistance program,” said Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, who chaired the meeting at which the report was approved.

Wasn’t the commission an opportunity to support the emergency assistance program?

The report does have some recommendations, 10 of them, including cutting the reliance on hotels and motels for shelters, providing more targeted resources to families, more clearly communicating shelter policies, and making the system fiscally and operationally sustainable. In other words, the commission recommends that the emergency shelter system should work better, help families more, and not cost billions.

“Now the call to action must fall on the legislature as we address these recommendations in greater detail at the start of the next legislative session in January to ensure that the time and effort put into this Commission does not fall to the wayside,” Republicans Rep. Paul Frost and Sen. Ryan Fattman said in a statement.

The commission had until Dec. 1 to submit a final report to the Legislature and existing shelter money is expected to run out in January, though Administration and Finance Secretary Matt Gorzkowicz said officials are planning to seek $400 million in additional funding from the Legislature.

They say the wheels of justice turn slowly, but the wheels of fixing the emergency shelter situation turn with glacial speed. Finding housing for migrants and the homeless has been an outsized problem since Gov. Maura Healey declared a state of emergency in August of 2023. We’ve known since then that there were more people needing shelter than the state had room and the costs were climbing.

The ball will be passed to the new Legislature at the start of next year, and it’s all but guaranteed that there will be more meetings, more reports, more Hail-Mary funding saves, and more declarations that solutions are needed.

Our tax dollars at work.

Editorial cartoon by Gary Varvel (Creators Syndicate)