Cities vs The State: How Massachusetts Pre-empts Progressive Local Policy

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Today we talk about cities versus the state, and how the Massachusetts state constitution prevents cities' duly-elected city councilors from passing a whole swath of policy locally that  residents need. We discuss home rule, how we compare to other states, and how inefficient the state's oversight is.

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan  chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 38. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to incorruptible mass. Our mission is to help us all transform state politics. We know that we could have a state that truly represents the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful commonwealth.
And today we are talking about cities versus the state. So we are going to be talking about how Massachusetts state constitution prevents cities duly elected city councilors from passing a whole swath of policy for their cities that their residents need. We are going to be talking about home rule and how we compare to other states.
We'll be talking about how inefficient it is and giving you some really concrete examples. We'll be talking about exactly what it is that the Constitution prevents cities and towns from passing. We will also go into a tiny bit of history about how Massachusetts once was a true font of local grassroots democracy.
And then a little bit also about how important it is for our grassroots candidates, for the kind of candidates that we on this podcast really love, that their ability to pass policy and improve the lives of people in their city, how important that is. But before we go on, I am going to have my amazing co hosts introduce themselves. And I will start off with Jordan.
Jordan Berg Powers, he him. I live in Massachusetts and my start in politics in Massachusetts was showing up to our local city council meetings and then the city councilors getting upset with us for showing up regularly and talking on Twitter about what they were doing. And Jonathan, Jonathan Cohn, he him his joining from Boston.
I'll tag the first thing about talking about my first involvement with local politics was I moved to Boston on August 1 of 2013. My first weekend was moving in. My Second weekend was back in Philadelphia for my sister's wedding.
And my third weekend, I was already volunteering for a candidate for the open mayoral race back then. Why am I not surprised? And I am Anna Callahan, she her coming at you from Medford. And I will say that I for many, many years have been, and still sometimes do, travel around the country to train people in local democracy, right, in local electoral politics.
And I learned a strategy on the west coast where if you took over your city council, you could pass all sorts of things. Minimum wage laws, you could pass. Rent Control, you could pass.
There are tons of things that you could pass that we cannot pass here in Massachusetts. So the very first thing that we want to talk about a little bit is just the difference between states that are, quote unquote home rule and states that are not. They're sort of preemptive.
And I don't know, Jordan, if you want to take this one as like a basic onboarding for folks to little 101 for folks to understand the difference between home rule and a preemptive state. Yeah. Just really quickly, home rule means that if you pass something locally, it becomes the rules of those towns and anything like, we sort of can't imagine it in Massachusetts, but imagine, like in other states, you wanted to increase minimum wage or make it easier for 16 year olds to vote or whatever itis, to have local say over.
When you passed it, it became the rule. So lobbying locally, engaging locally would have effect on the outcome of it actually being the thing that you worked, youknow, the other is that it goes to a different body, preemptive. So it gets preempted by the state legislature.
Think of Florida, where a bunch where Orlando and other places increased minimum wage and the Florida Republicans preempted that and said no. Any of those minimum wages or any of those changes or think about the way in. Yeah.
So all of those things we know as preemption. Right. So they interrupt it to say, actually, we're the people who have say in this.
And just quickly to tag in on that, I found it fitting when we decided to talk about this topic today because this morning when I was reading the american prospect, there was a new article by one other writer is Harold Meyerson, called preemption, with the then kind of tagline after that about how conservative states have now taken to blocking liberal cities from even thinking about legislating on behalf of their residents. And whenever I see headlines like that, I always think, oh, so they're becoming more like Massachusetts, but in a bad way, because that's something that's just standing policy here. And so it's always an interesting thing to me, let's say from a kind of state to state policy comparison.
And I often point this out when it comes to certain elements of election laws, is when we see states moving in this horrible rightward lurch to become more like Massachusetts in a specific area. Ouch, ouch. So absolutely.
I also hate it when states become more like Massachusetts in this particular way, at least. Otherwise it might be good, but in this way it's pretty bad. And I want to bring up the concept of how utterly inefficient this is.
And I'm going to toss it to you, Jonathan, in a second. But first, I want to say how horrified I was a few years ago when I was looking up sort of for the first time, I got interested in state politics in Massachusetts. And I was like, oh, let's see what passed in the state house today.
And it was like, the city of Rockport is allowed to hire a dog catcher for $30,000. And I was like, what on earth is the state doing? Like, the entire 160 people at the state house sat down to talk about whether the city of Rockport should have a dog catcher, whether they should spend 30,000. I was like, just.
My mind was blown. I was like, how is this what they're doing at the state house? So, Jonathan, you have some amazing stats on this, and I just can't wait for you to talk about this. Sure.
And to preface it, on our last episode, we were talking about the way in which many things coming out of the state house that will be celebrated and even maybe positive, aren't really that big of wins. And I would say in the legislature's defense, in 2023, 80 were signed into law. However, if you start actually looking at what those 89 bills are, 39 of them are literally just for one town, could be anywhere across Massachusetts, but 39 out of 89.
So almost like, almost half are just one town. And it gets worse. They have passed a lot, and they've requested.
They said, hey, please state, can you just allow us to do this thing? So it's not like the state is coming up with their own policy to benefit sometown. All they're doing is looking at work that those local people did and deciding, will we let them do that or will we not let them do that? Exactly. And then just to make things kinda slightly even worse or worse of the remainder of.
When you look at those that weren't part of that 39, 12 of them were just for one city as opposed to just for one town? Because we have our towns and different forms of governance. But to your point, when it was some of those things that, why is this a bill going to the legislature and being signed by the governor? Like an act authorizing the town of Leicester to continue the employment of this one guy that is on here determining the order of candidates names, on the town election ballots. Wow.
Like, it's funny when you think that this is something that goes to the legislature, gets passed, it gets signed into law by the governor. Got to guess nobody cares that much about their signing ceremony for some of these things. And that's wild when you think that out of the 89 things passed, 51 of them, over half were just for one municipality in the state.
That doesn't get to all of the issues. But beyond that, you have about, like, I think it was 17 of them, or, sorry, 19 of those remaining were just sick leave banks for people and then some state land, state loans stuff, it takes up. You have very few actual pieces of legislation and originated in the state house and carried to the end.
Some of that obviously gets incorporated into the budget when they add outside sections to that, but it's very much so. Not like the schoolhouse rock bill becomes law. The state house doesn't do much but tell municipalities that they can pass their own laws or that they can hire a few people.
Exactly. The laws that they passed can become law to clarify properly with that, which is just a terrible use of their time, because even if it's not directly competition with what they might be doing, otherwise nothing. It is still a bad use of everyone's time that the municipality's time is taken up with making sure that at least their state rep or their state senator or both file this on their behalf.
The municipality has to then spend kind of time monitoring these kind of local things to make sure that they get through on a timely basis. They still need their three readings and they still need, even if it's just. And all of those in favor say aye.
All of those in favor say no, the eyes have it, the motion is adopted type of vote. Why is any time being wasted on that? Absolutely. The governor's inefficiency is one of the reasons why this is so ridiculous.
But there are even bigger reasons. And I want to talk about what about the Massachusetts Constitution prevents cities from passing things, and there are a few,but the two major ones are about where cities are prevented from passing any laws that have to do with civil relationships, and the other one is taxes. And I'm Going to start off with the civil relationships.
Jordan, maybe I'll pass you the taxes one. Civil relationships essentially means that cities and towns cannot pass anything related to workers and their employers or tenants and landlords. And that writes out almost all housing policy.
I mean, it's insane how much housing. With the crisis that we have, the housing crisis that we are under, cities and towns really have great difficulty passing allsorts of tenant landlord relationships, which means housing policy. So everything from a tenant's opportunity to purchase, to transfer fees, which would raise a lot of money for affordable housing, too.
I mean, obviously, rent control is slightly different because of the ballot measure, but there are many different policies that are housing related, that cities and towns cannot pass. And when I say they can't pass, it's different when you look at how inefficient it is for a city to say, we want to hire a dog catcher. Oh, state, can you allow us to hire a dog catcher.
It's very different when a city wants to pass a transfer fee and they hand it to the state and the state just says no. So these are not things that go through. It's not like it's inefficient and the state has to look at it and then they say yes.
The state just says no. And the other half is really workers and employers. And so no city or town in Massachusetts can pass a minimum wage law.
I mean, that is crazy that cities, obviously, there are different living expenses in different cities and towns in Massachusetts. How is it possible that our local elected officials cannot set a minimum wage higher in an incredibly expensive area than in a very low relatively? I mean, of course, Massachusetts is a place where nowhere is super cheap, but certainly there are places where living expenses are lower and those should be different. But if you try to pass anything, the state will just, they will just reject it.
And Jordan, I'm going to. Anyone comment on those? But Jordan? Yeah, I mean, and by reject it, we mean do what they do best, which is nothing. They will just do nothing.
They won't debate it. They won't talk about it, its merits. They won't tell voters, hey, I don't think that you should get more money locally.
What will happen is nothing will happen. They won't take a stand. They won't talk about it.
They will pretend it never happened. They'll be like the Newton legislators while there was a big strike in their town. They'll say nothing and pretend it's not going right.
Like, they will just do so. You know, I think that's important. The other piece is that towns, their only ability to raise revenue is regressive taxation, which means that their only ability to raise revenue do is to disproportionately take money from poor and middle class people as opposed to rich people.
And that's because of these restrictions at the state constitution, right. There are, of course, ways that municipalities, we could all imagine, could be finding progressive taxation sources so as to better tilt the scales towards people who live there and sort of allow people who are doing fine to just pay a little bit more.We could imagine that there are certainly those policies in other places, but not in Massachusetts.
That's illegal. And so recently, the governor said that part of the way that she was planning to pay for some of her ideas in the future was to allow cities and towns to pay fees more. But fees are a tax on poor people, right? Like, if you don't have $50 for something, then charging you $50 is the difference between you eating and having medicine and not if you're rich and you don't even notice that $50 or even middle class, and you don't even notice that $50, that's not that big of a tax on you.
Right. But you are hurting people. And so again, that was to pay for tax cuts for rich people.
We're now going to allow municipalities the only lever they're allowed, which is to fee and nickel and dime people into the things. And I will say that that's actually one of the reasons that people feel that Massachusetts is Taxachusetts still, is because we have little fee here, little fee there. And so a lot of the taxation is falling down onto regular people.
But even if it's not like in the totality of it, it's the where people feel it, right? There's $35 here, there's $50 here, $25 here, $50 here, and they're just like enough. And so it's an inefficient way to tax people. It's a bad way to tax people.
It's a bad way to generate revenue. And it is because of these regulations, the only way that cities and towns have to pay for things, which is the majority of city budgets, are schools and police. Just very quickly on driving kids to school.
Sorry, just very quickly on this. That reminded me of one thing that I think is often important, especially when you talk about, let's say, like state comparisons around taxes, is that a lot of the conservative states like to describe themselves as low tax states, but they're just low income tax states. Because even if you have your legislature that's barely in session and you have limited actual things that the government does, you still need a certain amount of money for the government to function.
That's not coming from an income tax. That gets more money from rich people. That's coming on every type of way to nickel and dime other people because the money has to come from Texas.
Various things in Texas just have additional fees so that people don't associate that with a tax burden. But you're just getting nickel and dime from a number of interactions with the state because they won't make rich people pay more. Yeah.
Well, we are happy to ask folks who are listening to this and have a little bit of extra income to pay a little more for the amazing analysis that you get, if I may say so myself here on this podcast. And so we hope that you will just scroll down just a tiny bit. You'll see right at the top of the description of this, there is a link, and you can go ahead and donate to the show to make sure that we can continue to bring you discussions like this as well as all the interviews we do with progressive folks around the state and to keep you informed about what is happening around our state in terms of progressive policy.
Back to our topic. I'm going to toss it over to Jordan. Jordan, give us a little bit of your kind of take on how Massachusetts has historically been around this local democracy.
Yeah, it's a real perversion of sort of what people who started the state envisioned, which know they really believed in democracy. They believed in direct democracy and local democracy. So they wanted a state where people could make decisions.
I mean, I say they like they're a monolith. There was obviously lots of arguments about this at the time, and ultimately they reflected these tensions between how much power each level of government has. But Massachusetts is very much in the line of the reason we have all these small towns, the reason we have town bodies right where you would literally people, the town could just show up and have a say over what's running is because that's democracy.
And that's what they wanted for this state is actual democracy. And these are really interruptions on that vision of a democratic body of direct people having a say over their daily lives. And that's more important on local level than anywhere else.
Right. That's the place that we should allow people to have a say because that's the level of government that directly affects them the most. And so it is a real perversion of that and sort of a grabbing of power in a way that, again, if it were Republicans doing it in Florida, there would be more outrage.
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to bring up something that is deeply important to me. And it's really about the effect that this has on the quality and type of the candidates that you will see as you move up the sort of ladder of democracy.
So when I think about national politicians, for the most part, I think most of them, they're taking tons of man, they're raising millions of dollars, millions and millions of dollars every cycle. And they're doing it by calling billionaires and millionaires. Like all their conversations are with folks that I don't think any of the three of us know.
Those people right there listening to the show, you probably don't know those people either. And those people's lives are different. Their needs are different.
When you spend in your 4 hours a day, I will say that is the average amount of time that a member of Congress spends calling donors 4 hours a day. When you spend 4 hours a day listening to the needs and perspective of billionaires and multimillionaires, that is when you get a government that acts like our government,that really represents the needs and votes for policies that favor those people, that tiny segment of people. So the reason I'm bringing this up is because the onlyway for real grassroots, regular folks to get elected is by starting at the local level.
That is how it normally happens. Once in a million years an AOC can get elected, right? But that is not the norm. For all the hundreds and hundreds of people who run at the national level, some tiny fraction of 1% of them ever win a national seat.
So the way you do it is by starting at the local level and then moving your way up to the state level and moving your way up to the national level by being an amazing politician who really does reach out to their constituents and builds small donors and all of those things. So that is really important. And when you make it so that people at the local level, elected officials at the local level, don't actually have any power and they can't actually do anything, they can't really affect people's lives.
A lot of the really good people, they just drop out. Why should they waste their time? And as I've traveled around the country, I have heard this so many times.People who, they've been there for two years, they've been there for four years in their locally elected seat, and they're like, this is a waste of my life.
I'm not going to do this. And the other thing that this does, the reason that legislators like this, is that it makes it harder to challenge them, because your ability to get your local things passed is directly related to your relationship with them. So you'll see a lot of camaraderie where city councilors behind closed doors,because they will definitely call you and tell you will be like, that state rep is the worst.
I hate them. They don't do anything. They don't represent my values.
They're terrible. But then publicly they'll like, oh, they're doing great. And why is that? Because if you want to just get somebody hired, I've seen state reps hold up the hiring of critical people to a town because they're mad at the city council because somebody ran against them.
Right. Because you have that ability to do that. The problem is it also stifles the people who are most likely to run against your state rep and state senators,because the state rep and state senator is responsible for just the running of your town.
Right. Like, whether or not a teacher gets some time off, whether or not you get to hire that new position. 
But you know what I mean? Like, some of those things, it's just a bonkers situation that Korea also creates. Like, it gives more power and it creates this little fiefdom for state reps who otherwise have, feel no, have no, state reps have no ability to affect state policy, but they can stop your town from doing things and stop somebody from running against. And like, that's really the reason they like it.
Oh, man. And if you are listening to this thing that Jordan just said and you're like, state reps have no power to pass anything. Oh, boy.
You got to go back, listen to some of our earlier episodes because, boy, do we love to talk about that. But we haven't talked about it in a while. Maybe that'll be one of our upcoming episodes.
All right, gang, what are any final words on the fact that our city and town, our duly elected city councilors and select board members and town committees and all that thing, are unable to pass giant swaths of policy? I would say one, we need the state legislature to pass more, one more enabling laws, such as we talked about with the transfer fee, the win stabilization focus enabling legislation that also exists for some local voting legislation or even with liquor licenses. But I think that it's like past time for them to actually engage in a serious look at the whole home rule process and how to make that something that is just more efficient and more equitable and isn't just a way for them to kind of hold a little bit of power and leverage over municipalities. And it actually has credible consideration of whichthings municipalities should just be able to do by themselves and which things, for whatever reason, should have state approval.
Yeah, Jordan, I think I said my wonderful. Well, I think, I think listeners, you've gotten a kind of handle on our opinions on this. We think that locally elected officials,because they're locally elected, they ought to be able to pass laws that affect your life.
I think that's how democracy works. And that would be wonderful. Well, everyone, we hope you've enjoyed it.
Thank you so much for listening. And we look forward to chatting with you all next week. Bye.