Massachusetts has long been notorious for being one of the least progressive states with regard to government transparency. The state’s public records law is alone in exempting the governor’s office, the Legislature and the judiciary, leaving cities, towns, counties and the state’s executive agencies as the only government bodies that may be compelled to produce documents when requested to do so by journalists or members of the public.
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What’s worse, there are few penalties for failing to comply with the law. As John Hilliard observes (sub. req.) in The Boston Globe:
In Massachusetts, the state law’s deadlines for fulfilling records requests can be ignored, workers can conspire to overestimate costs, elected officials can spend years fighting requests in court, or not bother releasing records at all. No one tracks whether local governments like cities and school districts follow the law; state agencies self-report requests, but not the reasons why they refuse them.
Michael Morisy, the chief executive of Boston-based MuckRock, who’s been helping people file public records requests for years, told the Globe: “It’s among the worst states when it comes to public records access.”
That could be about to change, although a lot of pieces will need to fall into place. State Auditor Diana DiZoglio is pushing a question that may appear on the ballot this fall that would end the exemption for the governor’s office and the Legislature. Granted, there’s nothing in the text of the measure that would strengthen enforcement of the existing law — and a previous DiZoglio-backed law to allow her to audit the Legislature is bogged down in legal challenges even though it was overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2024.
Still, subjecting the governor and the Legislature to the public records law would be a step in the right direction. Chris Lisinski of CommonWealth Beacon reported earlier this week on a hearing before a special legislative committee that is considering a range of proposed ballot initiatives. Some legislators remain hostile to the idea, Lisinski noted, which shows that they are not going to embrace greater transparency without a clear message from voters. State Sen. Cindy Friedman, D-Arlington, co-chair of the committee, cast her opposition as an affront to her ability to speak candidly with other legislators:
The Legislature is a deliberative body. It is our job to think of things, to have many discussions, to talk over what our differences are. If every one of those is public, if everything we do is public, we will not be able to do our work because someone will take something out of that and turn it into a completely different message, and that’s what we will end up responding to.
She continued:
I need to be able to talk to my folks, my other senators, and be able to have a real and honest conversation. We are not hiding anything. We are not trying to go and do nefarious, nasty, bad things. We are not spending huge amounts of money on yachts, right? None of that.
DiZoglio, who was also there, had this to say in testimony before the committee: “Knowledge is power, and when we as elected officials believe that knowledge belongs only to a select few and not to everybody, what does that say? It says we believe that we should just have all the power.”
The Globe story made reference to a survey the paper conducted in 2025, when it asked all 200 members (sub. req.) of the Legislature whether they would support extending the public records law to themselves. “The vast majority of lawmakers — 78 percent — did not respond,” the Globe reported. “And many of those who did respond did not offer a clear answer on their positions on the issue.”
At Northeastern, we found the same in 2020. That’s when we assigned our intermediate reporting students to contact not just incumbents but all 257 candidates for legislative seats. We reported our results in The Scope, a digital publication that’s part of our School of Journalism. The findings: Only 72% of those contacted responded to our survey despite repeated emails and phone calls directed at each candidate.
Of those who did respond, “about 72% of respondents said they favored expanding the public records law to cover the Legislature. Only 7% were opposed, while another 21% provided responses that did not fit neatly into either ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” As we noted at the time:
Despite the state’s progressive image, Massachusetts has a dubious record when it comes to governmental openness. In 2015, the Center for Public Integrity awarded Massachusetts an “F” for failing to provide public access to information. A reform law approved in 2016 did not address the legislative exemption, which also extends to the judiciary and the governor’s immediate staff.
The story in The Scope led with comments by Erika Uyterhoeven, a Somerville Democrat who was running for a House seat and who supported ending the exemption. “Democracy is not just about voting,” she told our students. “It’s about ongoing political engagement and understanding of the issues, understanding of the debate.”
Uyterhoeven won, and now she’s running for the state Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Pat Jehlen. Uyterhoeven has been at least partly successful in bringing more openness to the Legislature, pushing successfully for a measure to make committee votes public. But she’s just one of 200.
It seems likely that the voters will have the ultimate decision on whether to end the public records exemption, although it’s possible that state Attorney General Andrea Campbell will rule that it’s unconstitutional, as Central Connecticut University Professor Jerold Duquette argued in testimony before the special committee. Duquette said such a law would infringe upon the separation of powers, Lisinski wrote for CommonWealth, since it “could force the House and Senate’s ‘involuntary cooperation’ with the secretary of state, the elected official who enforces the law.”
With an entrenched Democratic majority that appears to be resistant to change, a moribund Republican minority, and the very real possibility that an affirmative vote by the public would be challenged in court, it appears that we remain a long way from guaranteeing that the Legislature and the governor conduct the public’s business in public. I hope I’m wrong.
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Have had personal experience in trying to get information on the behind-the-scenes string pullers regarding a particular piece of legislation. I had strong indications as to who some of the characters were behind the scam, but needed the details who they were, how they worked their scheme. It’s conceivable the entire thing could have been blown wide open, with international implications. Of course all the needed information was behind the impenetrable wall protecting the legislature.
My state senator, a darling of the liberals, is also high up in the Democratic leadership and a lieutenant of Karen Spilka, who wanted this legislation to get through, in no small part because she saw to it that $10 million in taxpayer money went to it. So of course appeals to my senator to get the information went nowhere. Similarly, my state representative was useless, apart from being inept was also dealing with wire fraud and falsification of records charges. Nice pair upholding democracy, huh?
Needless to say the legislation sailed through, with dire implications for First Amendment protections, amongst other undermining of democracy, because the legislature was essentially bought off and commandeered by its leadership. A meaningful public records law could have prevented this. Think the necessary majority of pols want to change this?