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Since January 2011, only 5% of bills made it through Mass.
Statehouse
By RUPA SHENOY
NEW ENGLAND CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
April 27, 2014 12:00 AM
It was a rare moment on Beacon Hill. Just 31 hours after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that
state law did not specifically ban taking photos up women's skirts, the House and Senate unanimously passed
a bill outlawing the snapping of covert sexual photos.
That speedy passage stands in stark contrast to what happens to the overwhelming majority of proposed bills
in the Bay State: They go nowhere.
From January 2011 through last month, the Massachusetts Legislature enacted 945 bills just 5 percent of
nearly 17,600 proposed. Only New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota passed a smaller percentage of
proposed legislation in that time, according to data compiled from the LexisNexis website Statenet.com.
"It's more of a top down process in Massachusetts which, as a consequence, cannot handle as much volume,"
said former Republican Massachusetts House member Dan Winslow, who resigned last year to take a better-
paying private sector job.
Typically, he said, bills move through a legislature "like a pipeline stuff comes in, stuff comes out; but in
Massachusetts it's more of a funnel, where it gets down to a choke point, where only a handful of people
the leadership in the House and the Senate really get to decide what becomes law ... and they have
priorities."
Not like 'a scorecard'
State legislators defend their record, saying it's unfair to zero in on the percentages of bills passed. Instead
they say focus should be on what substantive legislation has been passed in recent years, noting successes
such as municipal health reform, an anti-bullying act and a 2012 economic development bill.
"The success of a legislature is not measured numerically like a scorecard but on the basis of groundbreaking,
substantive pieces of lawmaking that save cities and towns money, preserve and create jobs, and improve
peoples' lives," House Speaker Robert DeLeo said in a statement.
But an analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting shows the vast majority of bills passed
in Massachusetts have no statewide impact. Since the beginning of the last full legislative session in January
2011, only 21 percent of the enacted bills effected residents throughout the state. The rest had strictly limited
scope, including 466 that applied to one community, 158 that created what's called a sick-leave bank for a
single state worker and 78 that granted liquor licenses.
Few other states deal with local issues to that extent, said Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the
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Massachusetts Municipal Association.
"We would certainly want to have more local authority to make these decisions and not have to go to the
state," he said. But as things are, Beckwith said, Massachusetts' cities and towns must go to the state
legislature for "relatively routine but distinct and frequently complex issues."
Meanwhile, some statewide legislation gathers dust in committees, like the so-called "Bottle Bill." Groups from
the Sierra Club to the state Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs have pushed for years to expand the
law to include redeemable nickel deposits for bottles of water, sports drinks, and other non-carbonated
beverage containers, to no avail. Similarly, bills to establish an interagency child welfare task force, protect the
privacy of consumers' financial information, and increase penalties for the illegal possession of firearms have
been in committees for more than a year.
In Washington, the legislative gridlock is blamed on an impasse between Republicans and Democrats. But in
Massachusetts, where Democrats rule, critics say the reasons for the slow passage speaks more to arcane
legislative traditions and in recent decades a concentration of power among just a few elected politicians.
Winslow said the Massachusetts Legislature isn't efficiently passing meaningful bills because, within the walls
of the Statehouse, there's an institutionalized culture of complacency, in which members act only with the
approval of Democratic leadership. Winslow said he and other Republicans were often shocked when they
would sit down to vote next to Democratic colleagues who appeared "completely in the dark" about the
legislation they were considering.
"All they really needed to know was which way the speaker was going to vote on a given bill," he said.
Peter Ubertaccio, director of the Joseph Martin Institute for Law & Society at Stonehill College in Easton,
agrees and says that power has concentrated around the House Speaker and Senate President over the past
30 years. Chairs of legislative committees, meanwhile, have gotten weaker, he said.
"Instead of having multiple centers of power in the legislature, we tend to have now two," Ubertaccio said.
Measures of inefficiency
Elsewhere in New England, legislators can and do move more swiftly. Maine passed 40 percent of its 3,757
proposed bills in the past three years. In New Hampshire, legislators proposed 3,297 bills, enacting 26
percent of them.
Critics say that archaic traditions in Massachusetts are one factor contributing to the slow pace of passage.
For example, any resident can propose a bill but there's no way to know how often that happens, because
residents send proposed bills through their legislator.
The commonwealth's legislators also formally read bills on the floor up to five times, while, in other states, it
can be as little as two.
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"We're a very traditional state that likes its traditions that were formed in our early years when we were the
cradle of liberty," said Pam Wilmot of Common Cause Massachusetts. "So the chances of the legislature
saying 'we're going to modernize and get rid of this stuff' is fairly insignificant."
Politicians also do not appear to be overly deliberative. From January 2011 through the end of March, the
House met in floor session for an equivalent of 69 8-hour days, while the Senate met for 43 8-hour days,
according to information compiled from legislative journals. On more than half the days they met, legislators
were in session for less than a half an hour.
Massachusetts' legislators earned a base yearly salary of $60,033 as members of one of the 10 full-time state
legislatures in the country. Only 10 states pay legislators more, according to the National Conference of State
Legislatures.
Nearly 42 percent of representatives and senators in Massachusetts receive an additional stipend for
leadership positions, totaling more than $1 million, according to an analysis of figures provided by the State
Treasurer's office. The largest stipends of $35,000 each go to the House Speaker and Senate President.
The Chairmen of the Ways and Means Committee receive a $25,000 annual stipend; Majority and Minority
leaders take home $22,500 on top of their salary; while assistant floor leaders, division chairmen, and a
handful of committee chairs, vice chairs, and ranking minority members earn $15,000 each. All other
committee chairmen are paid $7,500 stipends. Representatives and senators also can claim as much as $100
a day in reimbursable travel expenses and more than $7,000 a year for office costs.
In all, taxpayers spent $57.2 million in fiscal 2013 and $40.5 million through March of fiscal 2014 to run the
Legislature and employ 1,102 people in the House and Senate, according to the Massachusetts Executive
Office for Administration and Finance.
There is no discernable pattern in the amount of time it takes to pass legislation. Of the 198 bills enacted since
January 2011 with statewide effect, about a fourth took a month or less for the legislature to do its work and
the governor to sign; another fourth waited 16 to 24 months for approval; and the rest fell somewhere in
between.
Once a bill is proposed, its fate is often determined in a committee that is supposed to analyze, debate and
ultimately decide if the bill should move forward for a full vote. But some legislators complain that the House
Speaker and Senate President control what happens in committee.
"The chairs feel accountability to the people who've appointed them," said Senate Minority Leader Bruce
Tarr.
By controlling when a committee goes into executive session to vote on a bill, Tarr said chairs essentially
determine which bills make it to the full floor.
"You actually have to convince the chairs, one, to hold an executive session, and, two, to take up the matter
you're interested in at that executive session," Tarr said. "And in that scheduling function there is a tremendous
amount of power either to move legislation or to delay legislation."
Tarr said committees also delay legislation by committing bills to indefinite "study." Committees must deliver
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bills to the floor by a certain date, but Tarr said chairs regularly ask for extensions. For example, last month
the House voted to extend until June 30 the deadline for the Judiciary Committee to report on 800 bills. Tarr
said he often tries to find out why a bill's time in a committee has been extended, and is simply told it's "stuck."
"I suspect that very frequently from the beginning the fix is in, and that the time that it takes is simply used up
with routine attempts to gather information that are never going to yield anything other than the predetermined
outcome," said David Tuerck, executive director of the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University.
But the Speaker and President can't snap their fingers and get legislation passed, said former Massachusetts
Inspector General Greg Sullivan, who served in the legislature for 18 years. They still need cooperation from
members, he said. Consequently, Sullivan said, delay has become one of the most powerful tools individual
legislators can yield.
"They want to delay," Sullivan said. "They use delay as a means of defeat of legislation. And that's always in
play."
Lawmakers achieved the feat of passing in one day a ban on covert sexual photos because there was
virtually unanimous support for the measure and it didn't require funding, Common Cause's Wilmot said. And
she believes it might be a good thing the Massachusetts legislature doesn't usually move that fast.
"I think we sometimes underestimate the difficulty of this undertaking" Many of these decisions are not easy
there are many competing interests to balance," she said. "Are there things that I'd like to see? Absolutely.
We'd like to have more citizen participation in the process. And speed would actually make that more difficult.
If everything passed in a day, there would be no way in."
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting (www.necir.org) is a nonprofit news outlet based at
Boston University and WGBH TV and Radio in Boston. NECIR interns Rebecca Lee, Madelyn Powell,
Selina Wang, and Michael Bottari assisted with the research for this story.
Percentage
of proposed bills enacted by state
Data includes all bills between January 2011 and March 2014
Percent
State Enacted
Minnesota 3.17%
New Jersey 3.51%
New York 4.92%
Massachusetts 5.35%
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Pennsylvania 5.42%
Missouri 5.57%
South Carolina 6.48%
West Virginia 6.95%
Hawaii 7.08%
Iowa 7.19%
Illinois 7.36%
Ohio 7.71%
Kentucky 8.14%
Connecticut 8.64%
New Mexico 10.42%
Florida 10.58%
Wisconsin 10.59%
Georgia 10.92%
Mississippi 11.19%
Vermont 11.85%
Alaska 12.79%
Oklahoma 12.86%
Indiana 13.07%
Kansas 13.15%
Washington 13.93%
Texas 14.06%
Arizona 17.58%
Michigan 18.00%
Maryland 19.95%
Nebraska 21.11%
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Rhode Island 21.87%
Louisiana 22.33%
Alabama 24.87%
New Hampshire 25.57%
California 25.92%
Virginia 26.29%
North Carolina 26.46%
Oregon 27.29%
Tennessee 28.43%
Montana 34.96%
South Dakota 37.99%
Maine 39.79%
Utah 42.95%
Colorado 43.73%
Delaware 44.31%
Wyoming 45.44%
Nevada 48.04%
Idaho 48.55%
North Dakota 55.44%
Arkansas 59.14%
StateNet.com
and malegislature.gov