Testimony

Letter to the Budget Conference Committee on No Cost Calls

Monday, July 27, 2022

Dear Chair Michlewitz, Chair Rodrigues, and members of the Committee:

I am writing on behalf of Progressive Massachusetts to thank you for your support of legislation that would keep families connected by eliminating the cost of phone calls for those who are incarcerated and for their loved ones. As you and the other members of the Conference Committee consider the FY23 budget reports, we urge you to consider that, to truly keep families connected, calls should be free, fully funded, and guaranteed.

We are proud to be among the 70 organizations, including legal service providers, public defenders, social workers, bar associations, and directly-affected people, that have advocated for No Cost Calls. We recognize that criminal legal reform is a racial justice issue and that mass incarceration disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities and people living in poverty. We understand that families often have to choose between staying connected to an incarcerated loved one and paying for necessities like rent or food—or risk going into debt.

We urge you to include the following essential pieces in the ultimate budget language:

Guaranteed Telephone Access

Currently, Massachusetts jails and prisons do not restrict how many minutes incarcerated people can talk to their loved ones each day. Calls are only limited by the cost. The Legislature must ensure that this current level of contact does not decrease once calls are free. Both the House and the Senate have approved language that aims to avoid new restrictions on access to phone calls. We urge you to bar any new caps on calls in order to maintain continuity and to guarantee at least 120 minutes per person per day.

Funding of Communication Services

We strongly support the House language creating a $20M Trust Fund dedicated to communication services. Upon proof of expenditures, the Fund would reimburse prisons and jails for their spending on communication services. That Trust Fund should be in the final FY23 budget, to take effect this year.

Prohibition on Commissions

Both the House and Senate budgets address site commissions, i.e., payments made by phone companies to jails and prisons, taken from revenue paid by consumers. While some Sheriffs have said they need this money to provide programs, the House and Senate have agreed that low-income telephone consumers should not pay for programs in the jails and prisons. Instead, the Sheriffs should seek such funding through their budget requests, with full transparency and accountability, and the Legislature should ban site commissions.

Start Date

Families have shouldered the financial hardship of paying the high costs of maintaining contact with their incarcerated loved ones for too long. We respectfully request that you include fully funded, guaranteed No Cost Calls in the final FY23 budget, to take effect this year.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Policy Director Progressive Massachusetts

decarceration

Gig Companies’ Lies…As Easy as A, B, C

Dear Chair Feeney, Chair Murphy, and Members of the Joint Committee on Financial Services,

Thank you for holding today’s hearing. My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the Policy Director of Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group fighting for a Massachusetts that is more equitable, just, sustainable, and democratic.

Progressive Massachusetts is opposed to Big Tech’s anti-worker, anti-consumer Ballot Initiative (H.4375/H.4376), An Act defining and regulating the contract-based relationship between network companies and app-based drivers.

Massachusetts has very clear standards for determining independent contractor standards (the “ABC test”), and gig economy companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart have been in flagrant violation of them.

As a reminder, those three parts are (1) that the work is done without the direction and control of the employer, (2) that the work is performed outside the usual course of the employer’s business, and (3) that the work is done by someone who has their own, independent business or trade doing that kind of work. None of these apply to gig economy work. For example, there would be no Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, or Instacart without their drivers; the claim that their companies are merely an app is a clear fallacy intended to evade the law.

Knowing that they are in violation of the law, these companies want to change it, rather than adhere to it. They are planning to spend possibly hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that the law does not apply to them and that they, themselves, can rewrite it in order to bolster their own profits and power over workers.

These ballot questions would deny app-based gig workers a living wage, benefits, legal rights, and anti-discrimination protections. They also effectively take away consumers’ and the public’s right to take legal action against the companies in the event of an accident, and will disincentivize the companies from doing everything they can to ensure that riders are safe when they avail these services.

These companies spent over $200 million to pass a similar ballot question in California called Proposition 22 with devastating impacts for workers and communities.

The impact of these laws extends beyond just the gig economy sector itself. The ability to define away terms like “employee” and “independent contractor” sets a dangerous precedent, enabling companies across sectors to gut labor rights. Will we see restaurants claiming that the “restaurant” is only the physical building and physical infrastructure, relegating all employees to independent contractor status? Or hospitals claiming that the “hospital” is just the brick-and-mortar building, rather than the doctors, nurses, aides, and other health care workers that make it run? The list goes on.

That is not the future we want to live in, and we hope it is not one you want to live in either.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Policy Director

Progressive Massachusetts

workers rights

PILOT Reform: Our Wealthy Institutions Need to be Better Neighbors

Friday, January 28, 2022

Chairman Hinds, Chairman Cusack, and Members of the Joint Committee on Revenue:

My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the Policy Director of Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group committed to fighting for an equitable, just, democratic, and sustainable Commonwealth.

We urge a favorable report for H.3080 and S.1874: An Act relative to payments in lieu of taxation by organizations exempt from the property tax (Rep. Uyterhoeven & Sen. Gomez).

Massachusetts is lucky to be home to many world-class hospitals and universities. But these large institutions, despite often operating indistinguishably from for-profit institutions, do not have to pay taxes. Given their large footprint, that is a fiscal drain for many communities across the Commonwealth, especially as communities are looking to find much-needed funds for investments in schools, housing, and infrastructure.

This bill would address this discrepancy by requiring large hospitals and universities to pay 25% of commercial property taxes to municipalities, based on the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) agreement in Boston. Under this bill, municipalities could opt in to requiring a mandatory PILOT rather than having to engage in drawn-out negotiations or chasing down institutions one by one.

Why 25%? This number reflects the costs posed by such large institutions to municipal services like police, fire departments, and departments of public works. It is still a good deal for the institutions, who are still paying far less in property taxes than an individual would have to pay. And, by applying only to institutions with property worth over $15 million, the bill would avoid risking any adverse impact on smaller institutions.

We need to be empowering municipalities to take action to address the many crises before us, but they need the funds to do so. And when they have wealthy institutional neighbors, they shouldn’t be forced to be stuck in struggling fiscal straits.

Moreover, municipalities across the Commonwealth, as well as the state government itself, would benefit from a clearer understanding of how much money gets lost through such tax exemptions each year. We thus also urge a favorable report for H.3802 An Act establishing a study to examine lost municipal real estate tax revenue (Rep. Robinson), which would provide a clearer assessment of just what that lost revenue is.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Policy Director

Progressive Massachusetts

revenue

How MA Can Be a “HERO” for Climate and Affordable Housing

Friday, January 21, 2022

Chairman Hinds, Chairman Cusack, and Members of the Joint Committee on Revenue:

We urge a favorable report for H.2890 and S.1853: An Act providing for climate change adaptation infrastructure and affordable housing investments in the Commonwealth, jointly known as the HERO bill.

The motto for Progressive Mass is “We all do better when we all do better.” If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we are all connected and that we must trust and rely on each other to create the robust, healthy state we all want to live in.

As income inequality skyrockets and housing prices rapidly escalate, exacerbating the housing stability faced by countless families, Massachusetts must take action to ensure that we can still be a place where people can afford to live and thrive at any stage of life. Likewise, as the consequences of climate change become increasingly apparent, we must similarly take bold action to enable us to meet and exceed existing climate goals. But both of these crises cannot be addressed without raising the funds to address these issues.

Raising the deeds excise tax to be more in line with the rest of New England is an easy way to raise some of this much-needed revenue. We cannot afford to pass up this opportunity to add $150,000,000 to our Global Warming Solution Trust Fund to allocate towards climate mitigation and climate adaptation measures and another $150,000,000 towards Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and the Housing Preservation and Stabilization Fund (HPSF).

The HERO Coalition has been an impressive effort uniting housing advocates and climate advocates around shared goals. Indeed, the goals of affordable housing and climate justice are deeply linked, as greening our housing stock is essential to climate mitigation and combating climate change is essential to community stability amidst extreme weather. This bill provides a great opportunity to take action, with long-term positive benefits that ripple across the Commonwealth.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Policy Director

Progressive Massachusetts

climate housing

Request that A&F Revise Upwards Goals on Minority and Women’s Hiring on Construction

Progressive Mass signed on to this letter organized by the Coalition for Equal Access to Jobs / Massachusetts Communities Action Network.

January 13, 2021
Michael Heffernan
Secretary of Administration and Finance
State House
Boston, MA 02133
Dear Secretary Heffernan,

The last time the Executive Office of Administration and Finance set goals on hiring of people of color and women on construction jobs was on March 18, 2009. At that time it was set for 15.3% for minorities and 6.9% for women. This was in Administrative Bulletin #14 issued by A&F at www.mass.gov/administrative-bulletin/equal-opportunity-and-non-discrimination-on-state-and-state-assisted-construction-contracts-af-14

Today more than 11 years later, 2020 census data for our state shows it’s 67.6% White, 12.6% Hispanic, 7.2 % Asian, just under 7% Black and 4.7% identifying with two or more groups. SO WE NOW HAVE DOUBLE THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE OF COLOR THAN WHEN A&F LAST SET THESE FIGURES IN 2009.

Additionally, women comprise over 50% of the workforce but less than 4% of building trades workers in Massachusetts. Two recent disparity studies in Springfield and Worcester suggest that at least 9% of women workers have skills transferable to the construction trades. And, we have now seen a rise of women apprentices in union building trades programs to over 10%. We are calling on you to issue a new Administrative Bulletin increasing hiring goals for people of color and women and we would like to meet with you on this issue.

Massachusetts will soon be getting an estimated over $9.3 billion in funds under the Bi-Partisan Infrastructure bill. So let’s get a new Administrative Bulletin so with the increase in jobs from this new funding that will benefit all, so people of color and women could get a fair share of the jobs, if you make and enforce new goals.

We as community groups, unions, civil rights, and social service agencies, local governments call on you to issue a new updated Administrative Bulletin on Equal Opportunity and Non-discrimination on State and State-Assisted Construction Contracts and meet with us on this.

You can reach us at (617) 470-2912, LewFinfer@gmail.com

Sincerely,
NAACP, New England Conference
Greater Boston Building Trades Unions
Building Pathways
La Collaborativa (Chelsea)
Massachusetts Association of CDC’s
Project Right (Boston)
Essex County Community Organization
Pioneer Valley Project (Springfield)
Progressive Resistance Boston
Worcester Interfaith
I Have A Future (Boston)
MA Communities Action Network
YouthBuild Boston
Madison Park Development Corporation
The Neighborhood Developers
350 Mass
Progressive Massachusetts
Action for Equity

cc Jamey Tesler, Secretary of Transportation
James Cowdell, Deputy Chief of Staff at A&F
Gary Blank, Chief Adminstrative Officer, DOT

equity

Public Testimony of 53 Organizations Submitted to The Special Commission on Department of Correction and Sheriff’s Department Funding

Progressive Mass was a signer to the following testimony organized by Prisoners’ Legal Services – MA. Read the full testimony here.

The mission of the Correctional Funding Commission is a critical one for the good of the Commonwealth. We spend approximately $1.3 billion each year to incarcerate 13,000 people. This means that we are spending approximately $100,000 a year to incarcerate each person currently behind bars – and the Executive Branch projects $732 million to repair, renovate, or replace prisons and jails on top of that. The critical question we must collectively ask is: what is the purpose of this spending, and is this purpose being served?

The charge of the Correctional Funding Commission is, in part, to conduct a comprehensive study to determine the appropriate level of funding for incarceration in the Commonwealth. Unfortunately, as of the public hearing on January 4, 2022, the Commission had not yet discussed “potential ways to increase efficiencies and reduce fixed costs,” a critical component of the analysis. The undersigned believe the Commission can only advance the public interest if its recommendations on spending for the Department of Correction (DOC) and Sheriffs’ Departments are backed up by robust independent oversight mechanisms that provide transparency and accountability to Commonwealth residents.

For decades, we have been attempting to incarcerate our way out of social problems while failing to comprehend crime as primarily driven by poverty and structural racism. Abundant research shows that high levels of incarceration do not increase public safety. Conversely, investing in communities has proven to be extremely successful in reducing violence and the risk of incarceration. The current and long-standing reality is that the Legislature awards ever-larger budgets to the DOC and Sheriffs without requiring measurable and meaningful outcomes for public safety, public health, or the public good.

decarceration

“I can think of nothing more disruptive to a child’s education than an unexpected move because of a large increase in rent.”

The following testimony is from Keith Bernard, Malden School Committee Member and co-chair of Mystic Valley Progressives.

Thank you, Chairs Rep Arciero and Senator Keenan and all the members of the joint committee on Housing. I’d also like to thank and appreciate my fellow elected officials activists and renters in Massachusetts that have testified already in favor of these bills.

My name is Keith Bernard, a member of the Malden School Committee and I am here to state my support for the following bills: H.1378/S.886, sponsored by Reps. Mike Connolly and Nika Elugardo and Sen. Adam Gomez, H.1440/S.889, sponsored by Rep. Dave Rogers and Sen. Patricia Jehlen.

Malden is the 5th most diverse community in the state and our high school is the most diverse in the state. We speak over 60 different languages in our school systems. Malden also has a large population that do not own their home but rent. Over 55% of housing in our city is rental properties, our rental rates have nearly doubled in the last ten years, and it is getting more difficult for our working families to stay in Malden.

I can think of nothing more disruptive to a child’s education than an unexpected move because of a large increase in rent. If a family is lucky, they may be able to find housing in our city, but that is unlikely. When a student leaves us, it means that the family needs to go through the stress of re-enrollment and the child acclimating to a new school system. If the child has an IEP or other necessary services, that family has the additional stress of getting those services in place. Finally the emotional impact that a child experiences being uprooted from their friends and neighborhood that not only affects that child, but the children and community around them.

On a personal note, I’ve been volunteering with many of the mutual aid community groups that arose during these last two years. There is nothing more heartbreaking than finding out a neighboring family that I had an opportunity to help had to move because of an unexpected rise of housing costs.

Most families are not looking for a hand out but a hand up. We are looking to you, the members of this committee, to allow municipalities to sculpt solutions that work for their community. What works for Boston may not work for Malden or Medford or Worcester or Pittsfield. Each community has its own officials and local representation that can “right-size” a solution for their town or city.

I ask that the committee please keep these thoughts in mind when considering implementing rent control. By stabilizing the cost of rentals, we stabilize those families, we keep our children safe and we protect our communities. And by implementing these bills we allow the people who know best, our local cities and towns the ability to implement the best solution for our individual towns & cities.

I strongly encourage the committee to support and endorse passage of H.1378/S.886, sponsored by Reps. Mike Connolly and Nika Elugardo and Sen. Adam Gomez, H.1440/S.889, sponsored by Rep. Dave Rogers and Sen. Patricia Jehlen.

Respectfully,

Keith Bernard

Malden School Committee, Ward 7

(Photo credit: Boston Globe)

housing

“Massachusetts has a lot to offer, but that does little if people can’t afford to live here.”

Tuesday, January 11, 2022

Chairman Keenan, Chairman Arciero, and Members of the Joint Committee on Housing:

We urge a favorable report for S.886/H.1378 (An Act enabling local options for tenant protections).

Massachusetts has a lot to offer, but that does little if people can’t afford to live here. The US News & World Report’s annual state rankings put Massachusetts at #48 in affordability. [1] A worker earning minimum wage in Massachusetts would have to work 83 hours a week to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home at market rate (and 102 hours for a modest two-bedroom). [2]

Clearly, Massachusetts has an affordable housing crisis. This is unsustainable. It has led to expanding economic inequality, increased homelessness, and damage to our economy, as talented workers often leave the state for less expensive regions.

Solving this affordable housing crisis will require us to use every tool in the toolbox. That requires zoning reform that encourages the creation of walkable, sustainable, and inclusive communities. It requires public investment. And it requires strengthening tenant protections that ensure that communities can remain affordable, inclusive, and stable.

However, municipalities across Massachusetts are blocked from taking the necessary steps to address the housing crisis. The misguided statewide ban on rent stabilization policies and a stringent home rule system that prevents municipalities from passing their own laws to govern the basic aspects of civil affairs hamstring municipalities.

S.886/H.1378 provides the appropriate redress. It repeals the outdated and misguided statewide ban on rent stabilization policies and enables cities and towns to pass policies aimed to regulate rents, limit condo conversions, prevent landlords from evicting tenants without just cause (e.g., failure to pay rent, illegal activity), require landlords to inform tenants of their rights, and take other steps to protect tenants and ensure long-term affordability.

We cannot build our way out of the crisis alone because the people at the highest risk for displacement will already be pushed out before they can benefit from any medium to long-term reduction in rents.

The pandemic we have been living through for almost two years, moreover, has underscored the essential role of housing stability to public health: we cannot ask people to stay at home when they are sick or exposed if they do not afford a home to go back to.

There is a lot of fear-mongering around rent control, but I want to make a simple point. If you don’t think a landlord should be able to double or triple someone’s rent in a year after doing no work on the property, you believe in rent control, and the question is just a matter of percentages and exemptions. And the Tenant Protection Act would enable us to debate and answer that question.

On too many issues, Massachusetts is haunted by the ghosts of ill-advised ballot initiatives past. It’s 2022, and we need to act like it.

There is no silver bullet to solving our affordable housing crisis. But if we are to have a chance at solving it, we must empower municipalities to take action. We thus encourage you to give a favorable report to S.886 and H.1378.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Policy Director

Progressive Massachusetts

[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity/affordability

[2] http://nlihc.org/oor/massachusetts

(Photo credit: Boston Globe)

housing

MA Needs a Just Transition to 100% Renewables

Tuesday, December 14, 20201

Chairman Barrett, Chairman Roy, and Members of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy:

My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the political director for Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide multi-issue advocacy group focused on fighting for a more equitable, just, democratic, and sustainable Commonwealth.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world must reach net zero emissions by 2050 in order to contain runaway climate change. The Next-Generation Roadmap bill passed earlier this year committed Massachusetts to the goal of net zero by 2050. But here’s the catch: if we are to reach that goal, we must do far more than we are currently doing, and as one of the most affluent states in the most affluent country in the world, we should be setting higher goals than those for the world as a whole.

That is why we urge you to give a favorable report to S.2170/H.3372: An act investing in a prosperous, clean commonwealth by 2030.

The bill is essential both for the higher goals that it sets (net zero by 2030 and 100% renewable electricity by 2030) and for the concrete steps that it proposes to achieve the decarbonization of our energy and transportation systems.

The bill mandates the procurement of new offshore wind and solar capacity, while increasing the accessibility of solar to low-income and environmental justice communities. It requires electric vehicle charging infrastructure for new residential and commercial construction and sets strong goals for the electrification of the MBTA, RTAs, and fleets used for a public purpose. It establishes a mandatory net zero building code for new constructionwhile harmonizing building efficiency standards across the commonwealth, and retrofits all publicly assisted housing by 2030.

The bill centers equity, both in the ways outlined above and in how it protects workers from fossil fuel industries, allowing them to choose to retrain or to collect a pension early while guaranteeing that jobs created as a result of the energy transition are union jobs with wage and benefit parity.

The fact that we just had a humid, 60-degree Saturday in the middle of December while tornadoes wrecked other states shows that the erratic weather patterns that climate change foretells are already here, and they will get worse, with impacts to

agriculture, infrastructure, and human health. Our efforts must match the scale of the problem.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Political Director

Progressive Massachusetts

climate

Inflicting Long-Term Harm on Protesters and Youth Does Not Improve Public Safety

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Chairman Eldridge, Chairman Day, and Members of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary:

We believe in an approach to public safety that centers the public health and well-being of all. For that to be possible, we must end practices that inflict long-term punishment on individuals for crimes not committed and even for crimes committed, and must ensure that our policies procedures embody respect for the dignity of all.

We thus urge you to give a favorable report to H.4150: An Act banning the use of tear gas by law enforcement and to H.1531 / S.980: An Act relative to expungement of juvenile and young adult records.

H.4150: Banning Tear Gas

The use of chemical weapons is banned in war, and it should be banned on our streets.

Last year, amidst the outbreak of protests following the murder of George Floyd, the president of the American Thoracic Society called for a moratorium on the use of tear gas and chemical weapons by police: “They cause significant short- and long-term respiratory health injury and likely propagate the spread of viral illnesses, including COVID-19.” [1]

The American Academy of Ophthalmology likewise condemned the use of tear gas, noting that it causes “serious eye injuries, including hyphema, uveitis, necrotizing keratitis, coagulative necrosis, symblepharon, secondary glaucoma, cataracts and traumatic optic neuropathy and loss of sight.” [2]

Recent research has also shown that exposure to tear gas among soldiers increases the risk of contracting bronchitis. [3]

The use of tear gas to inflict short-term bodily harm and the possibility of long-term debilitation is similarly a perversion of the justice system: it enables police officers to inflict punishment for crimes not charged, not convicted, and not even committed. Police officers should not be given such extrajudicial power, and we should never be advancing forms of punishment that cause long-term debilitation if we care about the health of society as a whole.

At a time when many politicians and community leaders are discussing how to rebuild trust between communities and law enforcement, how to demilitarize policing, and how to rethink our approaches to and definitions of public safety, banning tear gas is a vital step.

H.1531 / S.980: Juvenile Expungement

In 2018, Massachusetts passed a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill that created an opportunity to expunge juvenile and adult criminal records for individuals whose offense was charged prior to their twenty-first birthday. This was an important step, but the bill limited the opportunity for expungement to individuals with one case on their record. Individuals with even just two cases on their record were ineligible.

These bills would eliminate the one-case restriction and instead limit eligibility by how long ago an individual had their last court case, allowing individuals to expunge their records if their last offense was three years (for misdemeanors) or five years (for felonies) and they have no subsequent court case since. They would reduce the number of offenses which are categorically ineligible for expungement, while preserving prosecutorial discretion. And they would reduce the time to seal juvenile records for non-adjudications and allow for automatic sealing of eligible

records.

A juvenile record can be a long-term barrier to accessing higher education, finding employment, or maintaining housing. Our corrections system should not be seeking to inflict such long-term negative consequences. We should be finding ways to best integrate individuals returning to society and ensure they have the opportunity for mobility, basic security, and meaningful participation in public life, all of which are beneficial for reducing recidivism.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Political Director

Progressive Massachusetts

[1] https://www.thoracic.org/about/newsroom/press-releases/journal/2020/tear-gas-use-during-covid-19-pandemic-irresponsible-moratorium-needed,-says-american-thoracic-society.php

[2] https://www.newswise.com/articles/nation-s-ophthalmologists-condemn-use-of-tear-gas-and-rubber-bullets

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5096012/

criminal legal reform police reform