Legislature bring rules negotiations into public view with open meeting
Photo | Courtesy of Chris Lisinski, State House News Service
The Massachusetts State House
Lawmakers kicked off negotiations over policies and procedures governing House-Senate operations this term by eschewing something they have long embraced: privacy.
The conference committee tasked with finalizing a package of joint rules designed to boost transparency and efficiency kept its first meeting open for the entire 45-minute runtime, in the process acknowledging -- but not resolving -- the most significant differences between the House and Senate reform packages.
It was a shift from the way conference committees typically operate. In recent years, negotiators offered opening remarks about their work's importance, then voted to move their deliberations behind closed doors.
House Majority Leader Mike Moran and Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Creem, the lead negotiators, told reporters afterward they expect to keep at least the committee's next meeting open to the public as well.
"Usually conference committees are not open, and we're trying to have a lot of discussion so the public can see that," Creem said.
The big negotiations are still ahead, and it's not clear if those will occur in a public setting or in private discussions between Moran, Creem and other negotiators. Legislators are not subject to the open meeting law.
Moran said there would still be some "further discussions offline."
"It's never going to be 100% in front of the public because you're not going to be on the conversations with our staff," Moran told reporters. "Things have to work out. They're going to talk about language that we think is not innocuous."
With about a dozen people in attendance, mostly reporters and legislative staff, lawmakers at Tuesday's meeting walked through the Senate and House joint rules proposals (S 18 / H 2026), effectively sorting individual components into three piles: areas where both branches already agree, provisions where the differences are minor enough for committee staff to iron out a final version, and topics where there's enough disagreement that the lawmakers will need to have a larger discussion.
The panel did not land on any significant compromises, but members gestured at some early openness. After pointing out that the House and Senate proposals differ on who would be responsible for redacting potentially sensitive testimony submitted to committees -- the House would leave that up to each committee, while the Senate would ask the Joint Rules Committee to oversee the process -- Creem said "either is a good idea."
On several occasions, Moran and Creem echoed a similar sentiment: that the House and Senate rules reforms each sought similar goals with varying executions.
"I think we're both saying the exact same thing, we're just trying to get to it in a different way," Moran said.
One such area is on allowing more business to take place after the traditional even-year July 31 formal session deadline. The Senate package would allow the Legislature to reconvene formal sessions past that date only to take up reports from conference committees formed before July 31, while the House version would also allow action in that window on gubernatorial amendments, veto overrides and new spending bills.
"It may be worthwhile. You've given us a way to take up more things than we have," Creem said.
Legislative negotiators failed to agree on a final package of joint rules in each of the prior two sessions, leaving the House and Senate operating under 2019-era policies extended on an ostensibly temporary basis.
Moran said Tuesday he hopes the conference committee can get to an agreement "quickly."
"We're trying to get rid of the non-confrontational, or what we perceive as being stuff that's really not [confrontational] to get to the [topics] that are," he later added. "We both agree that the goal is to try and get something done here and try and reset the calendar going into this session."
Beacon Hill is facing increased scrutiny this year, driven in part by a chaotic end to formal business last summer. Democrats are also under pressure as Auditor Diana DiZoglio pushes -- unsuccessfully so far -- to probe the Legislature using powers that voters granted her office at the ballot box in November.
Creem told reporters the audit issue did not factor into the conference committee's decision to keep its full meeting open to the public.
"This has been going on for some time -- 'Are we transparent? Are we transparent?' " she said.
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