Four months into Mass. Legislature’s session, the question of transparency still looms

Four months into the Massachusetts Legislature’s new session, the House and Senate have each adopted different rules that feature long-awaited transparency reforms, including public committee votes and stricter meeting attendance requirements.

But the two branches are still working out their differences on how to run their joint House-Senate committees — which handle most of the Legislature’s bills. Joint committees are already reviewing bills, but the negotiators assigned to write joint rules for the committees have only met once.

In the interim, the Legislature is still operating on joint rules from 2019, which transparency advocates have criticized as allowing too many bills to die without explanation.

Meanwhile, the legislative audit that garnered over 70% of the vote on a 2024 ballot question is no closer to becoming a reality.

Joint rules are key to both transparency and efficiency, according to Scotia Hille, executive director of Act on Mass, an advocacy group. She said that as joint committee meetings started up for the session, they’ve adopted a “patchwork of different rules.”

“Until we have a standard set of rules for all the joint committees, we can’t really count on the individual committee chairs to hold the standard on transparency that they promised to deliver on,” Hille said. 

The House-Senate conference committee assigned to finalize joint rules met for its first time — and so far, only time — on March 18. The meeting was open to the public for 45 minutes, during which negotiators addressed the most significant differences between House and Senate reform packages. That was a departure from previous years, where negotiators gave opening remarks before swiftly voting to make deliberations private. 

The House and Senate proposals for joint rules both discuss making votes public, but the Senate proposal is more specific: it says any recorded votes on a favorable report, adverse report, or study order about a bill should be posted on the Legislature’s website. The House proposal doesn’t specify which votes should be public, but imposes a 48-hour deadline for posting the recorded votes.

Advocates like Hille prefer the Senate’s more specific language, but like the House’s deadline. 

The committee includes four Democrats and two Republicans: House Majority Leader Mike Moran (D), Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Creem (D), Sen. Joan Lovely (D), Sen. Ryan Fattman (R), Rep. William Galvin (D) and Rep. David Muradian (R). Moran and Creem both suggested in the committee’s first meeting that the packages have similar goals.

The committee promised its next meeting would be public as well. But so far, Fattman (R-Sutton), the assistant Senate minority leader, hasn’t heard about any future meetings. 

Fattman served on a similar committee in three prior sessions, when disputes between Senate and House leadership prevented a rules agreement. Fattman said he’s hopeful to see a joint rules package for this two-year term, because he thinks leadership is reacting to criticisms over how little the Legislature accomplished last session. He also said the dialogue between Senate and House leaders has improved.

Mary Connaughton, director of government transparency and chief operating officer at the Pioneer Institute, a policy think tank, said it’s bad for public trust when the House and Senate can’t even agree on rules. She said a team effort to foster more transparency would be a good sign to a disengaged public.

Fattman said that Republicans have been suggesting transparency reforms — like giving more time for the public to participate in hearings — for 10 years, and are just now being heard. 

But, he said, “the clock is starting to run out” on a rules package. After a slow school vacation week last week, he hopes the committee will agree to joint rules this week. But he hasn’t heard about a second meeting, and he’s concerned. 

The other five members of the conference committee did not return an email from The Light.

For Paul Craney, executive director of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, joint rules and other transparency reforms are “window dressing, to distract you and deflect away from what they’re not doing, for the audit.”

“When they do agree to rules, they’ll suspend them. So what’s the point?” Craney said. “A rule is only good if it’s followed.”

Fattman called the audit the elephant in the room. He said he thinks the Legislature will do what it can to appease the public — including finalizing a joint rules package — to avoid an audit. 

The audit question

Since November, when voters approved giving the state auditor the authority to audit the Legislature, the state has made scant progress toward the audit. 

State Attorney General Andrea Campbell and Auditor Diana DiZoglio have clashed over the ballot question’s constitutionality. DiZoglio has sought Campbell’s support in enforcing the audit law. Campbell said the Auditor’s office was not providing adequate responses to her questions. DiZoglio then waived attorney-client privilege and released approximately 150 pages of documents, including her exchanges with Campbell, in an effort to demonstrate that her office is cooperating. 

The House and Senate have adopted separate approaches that have ultimately stalled implementation. The Senate stalled with an early April hearing to examine the audit, which the auditor didn’t attend, where lawyers raised concerns about constitutionality.

DiZoglio said she believes there’s no legislative transparency without the audit. She calls it a bipartisan issue and says she’s working on it with progressive and conservative organizations, including Act on Mass and the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance and think tanks like the Pioneer Institute. 

“You have folks from across the political spectrum coming together and uniting to say enough is enough, and we are not going to accept a handful of people who have wielded too much power dictating policy to the rest of us, while excluding us from the process,” DiZoglio said. “It’s no longer about Democrat or Republican up on Beacon Hill. It’s about people with power, and everybody else.” 

Advocates on transparency

Meanwhile, lawmakers continue making moves that critics say are symptoms of an opaque Legislature. For instance, they’ll pass an amendment but make it contingent on a study — which is frequently a way to kill a proposal.

The Democratic-controlled House did that April 9 to a Republican-backed amendment that would ban public schools from allowing athletes to play on a team of the opposite sex. The amendment, attached to a $1.3 billion supplemental budget spending bill, was further amended to require a study.  

Hille, of Act on Mass, didn’t support the Republican amendment, but didn’t like the way the House disposed of it.

“We have a Democratic supermajority Legislature,” Hille said. “We’re under no obligation to consider reactionary, Trump-inspired amendments to Massachusetts as part of a supplemental budget.”

But, she said, amending the amendment to make it contingent on a study, and then passing it on a voice vote, not a roll call vote, means there’s no record of who voted to approve or reject it. Hille called this a “key example of exactly the kind of policies that happen when they’re operating behind closed doors.”

The Pioneer Institute’s Connaughton wants to see an audit, joint rules, and a law subjecting the Massachusetts Legislature to public records requests. All three branches of state government in Massachusetts are considered exempt from public records law, so records held by the judiciary, Legislature and governor’s office are generally not available.

Important information, like the itemized records of credit card payments from the Senate, is not retained by the state comptroller, Connaughton said. Instead, they’re retained at the Legislature, which is legally under no obligation to share it. 

Connaughton worries that the lack of transparency in the Legislature is bad for public trust, which she said is essential to a working government.

“A healthy government has an engaged population; people engage in the work that the government does,” Connaughton said. “They engage with the Legislature. But if there’s no information available, or if they’re shutting the people out by not letting them see what they’re doing, how can the public really be actively engaged?”

Abigail Pritchard is a graduate student in journalism at Boston University, covering state government for The Light as part of the Boston University Statehouse Program.