After a year of downplaying the importance of losing some state funding over the 3A housing law, the president of Winthrop’s Town Council, Jim Letterie, has strenuously complained to state officials about a $100,000 tree grant denial, calling the move a major threat to public health.

State officials in October announced nearly $632,000 in tree-planting grants through their Cooling Corridors program and made a point of saying that Winthrop had a strong application that likely would have won $100,000 if not for the town’s refusal to implement the 3A law’s zoning rules.

The 3A law generally requires most cities and towns in eastern Massachusetts to add zones for multifamily housing, and the overwhelming majority of affected communities have complied. And unlike many of the communities, Winthrop could join them with no effect on its housing stock by identifying areas of town that already have multifamily housing. But activists from Winthrop and beyond have demanded political resistance to any perceived housing-related pressure, and Winthrop voters overwhelmingly supported 3A critics in last month’s council elections.

Mr Letterie, in a letter this week to Rebecca Tepper, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, complained that her office denied the trees grant “without any legal authority whatsoever,” since the Cooling Corridors grant is not among the state programs specifically identified in the 3A law.

Essential protection

The Town Council president also argued to the environmental secretary that trees “are not optional amenities but essential health protections,” adding that the grant denial makes Winthrop’s residents vulnerable “to weather-related illnesses and resulting death.”

Ms Tepper’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr Letterie’s letter is part of long-running saga in Winthrop over the question of 3A compliance, that has included months of contentious Town Council meetings, legal battling, attempts to remove councilmembers from office, and the election last month in which a third of town voters participated and a large majority of them backed Mr Letterie and his slate’s promises to combat development in town.

Among their rationales for disobeying the 3A law, Mr Letterie and his supporters have argued that Winthrop gets relatively little state aid and that it’s not an essential part of the budget in a town where voters this year approved $38.5 million for a new fire station and $4.95 million in annual new school funding beyond Proposition 2-1/2 taxation limits. Mr Letterie also argued the state eventually will relent to the Winthrop Town Council’s demands for a 3A exemption, even while acknowledging seeing no sign of that happening so far.

Asked this summer about the town’s loss of eligibility for a state grant for combatting sea-level rise – one of several such disqualifications for the town related to 3A – Mr Letterie said that the $750,000 at stake in that case was “not a ton of money.” Yet in his letter this week to Ms Tepper, Mr Letterie argued that Winthrop residents should not be excluded from “life-saving climate adaptation measures.”

No estimates

Mr Letterie also cited for Ms Tepper a statement this past January by the Massachusetts attorney general, Andrea Joy Campbell, protesting broad federal cuts in federal aid to the state, in which Ms Campbell called the US president’s action “a reckless abuse of power that harms the very working people and families he promised to protect.” Winthrop “echoes that philosophy here,” Mr Letterie told Ms Tepper.

Previously, Mr Letterie and the Winthrop town government consistently downplayed the threat of its 3A position, to the point of declining repeated requests that they publicly estimate for residents the amount of state grant money that Winthrop historically has received and that is also subject to 3A-related restrictions.

Winthrop leaders “do not have that information,” a town official said in response to recent repetition of a request for that calculation.

The official instead provided a list of several grants for which the town has been declared ineligible by the state, including several related to flood protections estimated to be worth more than $2 million combined. While most grant denials can’t be directly attributed to 3A, state officials chose in the case of the Cooling Corridors grant to make clear that Winthrop otherwise would have been approved.

The state has stated that 3A-affected grant programs include those in such areas as housing and local infrastructure work, including projects related to rising sea levels. The Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, also made clear her willingness to consider 3A compliance in allocating discretionary local aid.

Enforcement coming

And Ms Campbell, as state attorney general, has set next month – five years after the passage of the 3A law – as the time when she expects to begin initiating legal action against non-compliant towns.

Mr Letterie led the Town Council in voting twice – in November 2024 and again in June 2025 – to reject a 3A compliance plan that he acknowledged would add no new housing. Out of 177 eastern Massachusetts communities covered by 3A, Winthrop is now one of only about 11 still refusing to comply.

Along with climate-related concerns, one of the bigger open 3A-related questions in Winthrop is that of the town’s schools, which account for about half of the town’s total governmental spending. State officials have confirmed that some state funding to schools is regarded as discretionary, but they have not been willing or able to say how the governor will implement that.

“We don’t have a discretionary vs non-discretionary bucket for grants,” said a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. “It’s a little more complicated than that in terms of continued funds and expectations.”

Winthrop’s schools superintendent, Lisa Howard, has said she will likely learn in late June or early July, as the state moves into its new fiscal year, what grant money her budget might lose from the 3A situation. That information “is not yet known to us,” she said.