Norman Daoust, “How our state Legislature has failed us,” Cambridge Day, September 3, 2024.
How has our state Legislature failed us? Let us count the ways.
Failed to include the local option transfer fee, the tenant opportunity-to-buy policy and a rent control local option in the Affordable Homes Act.
Failed to pass an economic development package, clean-energy siting bill and halt on gas infrastructure expansion; a bill to allow supervised drug-consumption sites; and a ban on the sale of cellphone location data.
Failed to include voter access reform to delink a municipal census from voter registration in the state budget (even though it passed in the Senate).
Never made it out of committee: same-day voter registration; Make Polluters Pay legislation; and Medicare for All in Massachusetts.
Failed to pass bills out of conference committee so they could be voted on by the entire body: hospital oversight (given the Steward hospital fiasco, how could they fail to bring this to a vote?); a climate bill; drug pricing bill; a Raise-the-Age juvenile for possession of a firearm; and a Plastics Reduction Act.
Stuck in Ways and Means are a moratorium on construction of prisons and jails and expanding the public-records law called the Sunlight Act to cover the governor and state Legislature.
It’s guaranteed that other bills you care about also were never passed.
By effectively taking the final five months of the legislative session off, the likelihood of additional bills passing is minimized.
If you believe our state Legislature has failed you, contact the speaker of the house and president of the Senate as well as your state representative and senator and let them know the bills you want passed.
Norman Daoust, Raymond Street, Cambridge
