DEMOCRATS ON BEACON HILL really don’t like the idea of voters taking matters into their own hands when it comes to cutting taxes.
After months of legislative leaders slamming a would-be ballot question that would have cut the state income tax — and then making no effort to hide their glee when the Supreme Judicial Court booted it from the ballot on a technicality — a couple dozen Massachusetts state senators have now set their sights on a second tax-reform ballot question poised to go before voters.
A majority of senators are coalescing around a late-term push to repeal the law known as Chapter 62F, which would both wipe out the statutory artifact that four years agoforced Beacon Hill to return billions of dollars to taxpayers and also neuter a measure set to go before voters this fall.
Sen. Jason Lewis, a Winchester Democrat, filed an amendment to a wide-reaching economic development bill up for debate this week that would strip Chapter 62F from the state’s books, in the process inviting incendiary anger from groups that want government to control its spending habits.
Already, the amendment has drawn 19 other cosponsors. With Lewis, that represents half of the 40-member Senate. And Lewis told CommonWealth Beacon there are more senators who backed the idea but are not listed as official cosponsors — seemingly enough to ensure the measure has the votes needed to pass.
“We have more than a majority in support of the amendment,” Lewis, who is not running for reelection, said.
It’s not yet clear if Senate President Karen Spilka and her leadership team will get on board or will instead encourage members of their caucus to back down from what could become a contentious political fight over tax policy. The change would also need buy-in from the House, whose top Democrats have historically chafed at the tax cap law but have not recently expressed any interest in changing or eliminating it. Unless lawmakers are confident they can achieve a veto-proof majority, Gov. Maura Healey would need to support the maneuver as well.
But if the nascent idea does win Senate passage, it would open up another front in the Legislature’s public-relations battle against citizens and interest groups seizing lawmaking power for themselves through the ballot question process.
Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute and a chief proponent of the tax cap reform ballot question, called Lewis’s amendment “a creative level of contempt for the voters.”
The existing tax cap system — often dubbed Chapter 62F for the section of state law that houses it — sets a limit on how much tax revenue Beacon Hill can collect, essentially limiting the growth in tax collections to no more than the growth in wages. If the state surpasses the threshold in any year, it must return the overage to taxpayers.
Voters put the law on the books in 1986, supporting a ballot question backed by Citizens for Limited Taxation and the Massachusetts High Technology Council. The cap was triggered the following year, and then faded from memory until 2022, when a burst of tax collections forced policymakers to issue about $3 billion in rebates and temporarily killed momentum for tax relief in the Legislature. In 2023, with Healey in office, lawmakers changed 62F to provide equal rebates to all taxpayers rather than proportional amounts that gave more money back to those who earned and paid more.
Lewis said he, like most people in and around state government, learned about Chapter 62F for the first time when it suddenly reentered the spotlight in 2022.
“When I did learn what it was and how it worked, I thought, ‘This is not good tax policy because having kind of arbitrary revenue caps is not something you would want in a well-designed tax system,’” Lewis said. “Ever since then, I felt like this is something that the Legislature should address.”
But the upheaval the tax cap wrought four years ago was not the only impetus for Lewis’s proposal. He said he was also motivated by a question that will appear on the November ballot that, if approved by voters, would make it more likely that state government hits the cap and owes money back to its residents in any given year.
The Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University, which neither supports nor opposes the question, estimated the new framework would trigger three to five times as many refunds — and return five to 15 times as much money to taxpayers — as the current law.
“That would be very damaging to the state’s finances and to the ability of the Legislature and future legislatures and governors to make sound investment decisions,” Lewis said, citing the Tufts report. “Maybe this is the appropriate time,” he said of his proposal to scrap the tax refund law entirely.
Proponents of the question, which include the Pioneer Institute and the Mass. High Tech Council, argue a tighter limit on tax collections could force policymakers to budget more conservatively and counter a years-long pattern of growing state spending beyond the rate of inflation.
“Go back in time nearly 40 years ago. The voters wanted to impose discipline on state government spending, so they passed a ballot initiative that said if tax collections grow faster than our paychecks, then the excess will come back to us. Instead of honoring that commitment, first, Beacon Hill diluted it, and now some lawmakers want to erase the protection entirely,” Stergios said. “That’s not reform. It is contempt for the voters.”
The groups had already been at odds with top Democrats for months after pushing a separate ballot question that sought to cut the state’s income tax rate by one-fifth. That measure was on course to appear before voters until the Supreme Judicial Court ruled it ineligible because of an error in a summary prepared by the attorney general’s office.
For Stergios, the latest proposal continues a pattern of Beacon Hill Democrats meddling with what voters decide, such as the lack of compliance with a legislative audit or the slow-walk implementation over decades of an income tax reduction approved in 2000.
“This is what a one-party state does when it doesn’t like an outcome,” he said. “It dilutes, it delays, and it denies the will of the voters.”
If the House and Healey got on board with the tax caprepeal, it could make for a confusing election since the question overhauling the law is already set for the ballot.
Lewis said he thinks that the ballot question would still go before voters, but would have no actual effect if Beacon Hill preempted it by nixing Chapter 62F.
“The ballot question would then be referring to a chapter of state law, Mass. General Laws, which would no longer exist,” he said.
Raise Up Massachusetts, the influential coalition of labor, faith, and community groups that led the charge for a voter-approved surtax on wealthy households, has been pushing lawmakers to pull the trigger on eliminating Chapter 62F.
Andrew Farnitano, a spokesperson for the coalition, welcomed Lewis’s amendment and said it “certainly has traction” in the Senate.
“There’s all these arbitrary economic factors that can end up triggering this law, and we think it’s better for legislators to take those spending and tax decisions into their own hands, driven by the needs of the state,” he said. “The needs of Massachusetts working families look different today than they did in the 1980s when Chapter 62F was created.”
Despite the cosponsors and chatter, it’s far from certain that the Senate will formally embrace the controversial change. Many proposals gain traction among rank-and-file lawmakers but fail to advance because of opposition or hesitation from top Democrats in either chamber.
Members in both chambers sometimes make use of a technique that can drive some thirsty-for-action onlookers crazy: delivering impassioned speeches in favor of an amendment, then withdrawing the amendment without actually forcing a vote.
Asked if that pattern would happen again in this case, Lewis replied, “I’m not going to lay any odds on what may transpire this week except to say that I’m certainly committed to trying to see this through.”
