Massachusetts voters deserve a legislature that works for them, not one where their elected representatives must bend to leadership’s will or risk loss of pay.
Our 2026 ballot initiative ties reasonable compensation to performance, promoting a more transparent, accountable, and effective legislature. With your support, we can deliver a major win for democracy, while building momentum for even more progress.
What’s Broken and Why It Matters
Massachusetts’s system of ‘leadership stipends’ is an outlier among the 50 states. Out of 200 MA state senators and representatives, 149 receive ‘leadership stipends.’ Stipends can go upwards of $119,000 on top of a legislator’s base salary (currently $82,044). Since 2015, the legislature has quadrupled the amount of taxpayer money spent on stipends to $5.4 million.
This centralizes control and stifles dissent. Stipends are doled out at the sole discretion of the Senate President, Speaker of the House, or minority party leaders and can be taken away by them at any time. Removal of stipends has been occurred for criticizing the speaker or speaking to the media without permission. Legislators are forced to capitulate to leadership or end up sidelined.
The Legislature is unproductive and unresponsive. Massachusetts is last in the country in state legislative effectiveness, passing few substantive bills, and those with little or no debate The most powerful voices in the Statehouse are those of lobbyists, not those of the public and our representatives. The legislature is also one of the least transparent in the country, often killing bills or advancing omnibus packages with little public notice or oversight.
What the Stipend Reform Initiative Will Do
Empower legislators to lead with integrity and represent their constituents actively and openly without risking financial retribution.
Link compensation to performance by limiting stipends to positions involving significant work and conditioning payment on meeting benchmarks for transparency, accountability, and timeliness of lawmaking.
Save taxpayers $500,000 a year by capping the number and size of stipends.
Reduce pay disparity among legislators: Legislators currently paid the least will earn more, making serving possible for more people, and the pay disparity between the lowest and highest-paid legislators will be reduced by over 50%.
Why Your Support Matters
This initiative will pass if voters get the opportunity in 2026. Polling shows 75% of MA voters support stipend reform. Voters want their legislators to have the freedom and conditions to work for them, not to be controlled and bossed by legislative leaders.
To get this initiative onto the ballot, we need 75,000 signatures from MA voters. We have just 2 months to gather the signatures. We will be mobilizing volunteers but also need money for professional signature gatherers to fill any gaps.
We invite you to be part of making our legislature more effective & accountable.
Who We Are
Our campaign grows out of the Coalition to Reform Our Legislature (CROL)—a cross-partisan alliance of former lawmakers, civic leaders, and democracy reform champions, including former State Representatives Jay Kaufman and Jonathan Hecht, former ethics commissioner Jeanne Kempthorne, MassGOP Finance Chair Jennifer Nassour, Act On Mass, and Partners in Democracy.
When CROL filed its stipend reform bill in the 2025–26 session (HD 4303 / SD 1301), the legislature refused to consider it. That’s why we need to bring this reform directly to the voters. We need your help to make that happen.
Massachusetts voters have demanded reform before—and we are still waiting.
Let’s not let the Legislature ignore us. Let’s lead. Let’s win.
Let’s reform for real!