Bipartisan group pushing Legislature to rein in generous leadership pay structure – The Boston Globe

A bipartisan group of good-government advocates is pushing to overhaul the Massachusetts Legislature’s generous stipend system, which currently provides additional “leadership pay” to roughly three-quarters of the state’s 200 lawmakers, including some committee leaders whose panels do not consider bills or hold hearings.

A proposal filed this week by the Coalition to Reform our Legislature would drastically reduce the number of stipends on offer for legislators, and also link pay to performance, ensuring lawmakers receive additional pay only for positions that “involve significant work,” according to a summary proponents provided. It would reduce the amount spent on lawmaker pay by more than $500,000 a year, the summary said.

Currently, the Democratic leaders of the state House and Senate each have about $2 million in extra leadership pay to dole out among their party members for roles as high-profile as majority leader and as modest as vice chair of a committee. Critics of the system say it centralizes power in the hands of the Senate president and House speaker; those leaders effectively control the salaries of their colleagues, a power structure that discourages dissent.

Not all of those paid legislative leadership positions require much legislating. The Globe found last year that 12 of the Legislature’s committees — more than 20 percent — had not held a single hearing or considered a single bill during the legislative session. Committee leaders defended their records, arguing their panels were meant to support and advise.

No other full-time state legislature relied so heavily on leadership stipends to compensate its members or gave out as many stipends of such generous size, a Globe investigation found last year.

The amount of additional pay for leaders ranges widely, from $7,776 for committee vice chairs to $119,632 for top legislative leaders. The stipends come on top of legislators base pay of $82,044 and a stipend for travel and expenses that every lawmaker gets. That travel subsidy ranges from $22,431 and $29,908, depending on how far a lawmaker lives from the State House.

Jeanne Kempthorne, a former state ethics commissioner and federal prosecutor who is advocating for the measure, said the stipend system is “probably the most important feature of control of rank and file by leadership.”

“It makes it very, very hard for legislators to stand up to leadership, even when their constituents are super clear about what they want,” she said.

The proposal faces a steep uphill battle in a Legislature where the vast majority of lawmakers benefit from the leadership pay system — and where leadership would seem to have few incentives to change it either. For one thing, as of now, not a single lawmaker has agreed to put their name on the measure. Under the Massachusetts Constitution, citizens are empowered to file their own proposals with the Legislature, but those measures are not assigned to committees or considered at legislative hearings unless a current member of the Legislature is willing to take them up. Lawmakers can do that through a process known as filing a bill “by request,” which allows lawmakers to put forward a constituent’s idea for consideration without sponsoring it, which could signal a stronger endorsement.

Lawmakers traditionally sign and file those measures on behalf of constituents who ask, according to a state guide on the process. In this case, though, no one has been willing to put their name on the measure yet.

Jonathan Hecht, a former Democratic state representative from Watertown who is pushing for the change, said his group asked a handful of Democrats to put the measure forward so that it could get a hearing, but they declined.

The measure deserves “a careful look,” he argued.

“The fact that legislators are too scared to take the small step of helping a serious idea to get a public hearing tells you how undemocratic and frankly toxic a place the Legislature is,” Hecht said.

House and Senate leaders launched the current legislative session by promising greater transparency, Hecht noted. “My hope is that leadership will step up and send a signal of openness, saying, ‘Hey, let’s take a look at this.‘”

In response to inquiries from the Globe, neither the Senate President nor the House Speaker took a position on the measure or even whether it merits a hearing.

Separately, the coalition is also pushing a measure to create offices of legislative research and fiscal analysis. That proposal has been filed by State Representative Tricia Farley-Bouvier, a Pittsfield Democrat, at the request of the coalition.

Emma Platoff can be reached at emma.platoff@globe.com. Follow her @emmaplatoff.