It’s 2025. And with the new year, comes new Massachusetts laws and some changes for the state's residents.
The Massachusetts Parentage Act was signed into law last summer by Gov. Maura Healey. The effective date is today, January 1. So what changes?
Chris Lisinski, SHNS: This law is something that supporters, especially those in the LGBTQ community, have been seeking for years. It's a lot of back-end regulatory shifts designed to protect parentage rights.
For parents from a whole range of backgrounds who build their families through pathways like in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy, essentially trying to guarantee that parents of children born through those techniques do have full parentage rights and don't face obstacles in court or on legal footing, defining children as their own.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: At the end of this week, state law is going to allow the Legislature to be audited by the state auditor's office. The current auditor, Diana DiZoglio, and Secretary of State Bill Galvin had been at odds over that exact date since voters granted the auditor that power in November. So, what do we expect to happen now?
In some ways, we expect a repeat of everything that Auditor DiZoglio has been trying — basically — since she took office. She's probably going to make formal again her request to legislative leaders to audit, to take a closer look behind the curtain, behind which so much is hidden, and they are very likely to claim some kind of constitutional concern over that.
They've argued all along, during and after the ballot question campaign, that allowing the auditor (who technically falls under the executive branch) to probe the Legislature, would violate the separation of powers clause of the state constitution. So that fight could now head to court and force Attorney General Andrea Campbell to take a side and weigh in on what she thinks the constitutional outlook is.
Is that a united front in their opposition by both the House and the Senate?
Effectively, yes. There have been some tweaks, some rule changes that the House has made that the Senate has not made. But when it comes to the big picture, audit the Legislature, push House and Senate Democrats, who sometimes are at odds with one another, have been very united.
Starting this fall, it's going to be easier to know exactly what pay scale is attached to open jobs with larger companies under a salary range transparency law in Massachusetts. What's that all about?
Yeah, employers with I believe it's 25 or more employees will need to post pay ranges alongside new job openings. Bigger employers with 100 or more workers will need to file equal employment data with the state secretary's office, so Massachusetts officials can do some more analysis of demographic breakdowns in different industries.
This is another long-running effort that's finally hitting the books, aiming at reducing gender gaps, in particular where women are paid less than men for largely the same job.
I imagine this has already been enacted in many other states.
Yes, there are several other states that already have this on the books. Massachusetts is not breaking new ground here.
And lastly, Gov. Maura Healey had extended the COVID-era provisions of the open meeting law to the end of March this year. That means that public bodies can continue to hold remote or hybrid meetings. How do government officials at all levels feel about this one, Chris? Is it likely to be extended again?
Well, thank you for reminding me because this is something I always forget to put on my calendar every year. It's become a perennial debate in the Legislature whether to extend those COVID-era provisions. They are very popular, especially among local government officials who see an uptick in civic participation because it's simply easier for residents and constituents to participate in public meetings when they don't physically need to get to town hall or the high school at an inconvenient time.
I would expect municipal officials to launch another hardy push to extend or even make permanent these flexibilities, and it will really be up to lawmakers to decide if they still see a need for them. It's been more than four, maybe — what are we, five years now — since the COVID pandemic broke out?
