Massachusetts Senate makes a stab at transparency – The Boston Globe

Still, hold the applause for now. The House hasn’t announced its rules plans for this session — now in its sixth week, let’s not forget — and the House and Senate haven’t agreed on joint rules for about a half dozen years. And both branches routinely suspend their own rules.

Still, the Senate changes would represent some progress.

In hopes of making the body operate more efficiently, it is proposing to move up the date for joint committees to report out legislation — known as Joint Rule 10 — from its current date of early February of the second year of the session to the first Wednesday of December in the first year. Perhaps that would prevent so many bills from piling up at the end of the session.

Senate rules would also codify — and improve — the way it deals with important and complex bills that remain stuck in conference committee when the Legislature ends its formal sessions July 31 — as it does in all election years. The July 31 deadline for formal sessions would remain in place — except for bills still in conference committee — but the rules change would allow for a formal roll-call vote on those bills.

“We’ve heard from many members who want to be able to vote and record their vote in a formal session,” Senator Joan Lovely, chair of the Temporary Senate Committee on Rules, said at a briefing last week.

The Senate Ways and Means Committee would be directed to prepare bill summaries in “plain English,” as Senator Paul Feeney put it, for all legislation reported out favorably from committee and make those available online.

And even if the House doesn’t agree, the Senate rules for joint committees propose making all senators’ votes on bills public along with any in-person or written testimony received by senators.

Now wouldn’t it make some sense for the House to go along with that?

The Senate rules package is, of course, just a start. It is a far cry from the kind of sweeping, culture-altering reforms being proposed by the Coalition to Reform Our Legislature, a group that includes former lawmakers Jay Kaufman of Lexington and Jonathan Hecht of Watertown.

The group has filed two pieces of legislation this year that truly would change the way the Legislature operates. One would establish two independent and nonpartisan offices for legislative research that would include expertise in drafting legislation and researching its policy implications and another office for fiscal analysis that would report back on the fiscal implications of bills. State Auditor Diana DiZoglio has also endorsed the idea of resurrecting an independent Legislative Research Bureau.

The other bill proposed by the coalition would get at the heart of the power of the House speaker and Senate president to control the members of their branches through awarding (or withholding) “leadership” posts and the extra pay that comes with them.

By the group’s calculation there are some 68 posts in the Senate and 94 in the House “that can boost a legislator’s annual pay by 10 percent to 120 percent above the base salary of $82,044.” Those positions range from bona fide jobs that may merit extra pay to sinecures with little or no heavy lifting.

This bill would limit the number of leadership stipends (including those for Ways and Means chairs), lower the amount of money paid out, and also require that extra pay go only to the chairs of joint committees that deal with 50 bills or more in the course of a legislative session.

It is a thoughtful if rather complex approach to the problem that currently exists of the consolidation of power in the hands of a few.

The voting public has given every indication it’s tired of the kind of closed-door lawmaking that has become the norm on Beacon Hill. The Senate rules package sends the right message — acknowledging the public demand for change and responding in a few incremental ways.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.