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Auditor Diana DiZoglio tells reporters July 26, 2023 she wants to pursue litigation against the House and Senate, where top Democrats have “stonewalled” her attempts to audit them. Photo by Chris Lisinski | State House News Service
Beacon Hill has become a legislative black hole, a place where good proposals go to quietly die in a vortex of petty feuds and back-room deal-making.
In the style of tin-pot dictators everywhere, legislative leaders in Massachusetts have since forever made all key decisions behind closed doors, and the results have been abysmal.
After decades of underfunding, our public transportation system is coming apart at the seams. And until very recently, Beacon Hill all but turned a blind eye as local communities bottled up housing construction, driving up home sale prices and rents to insane levels.
When even committee votes are shrouded in secrecy, accountability to the public is practically nonexistent.
Enter: State Auditor Diana DiZoglio, who is waging a campaign, that, if successful, could strike a mighty blow for government transparency and force open some long-closed doors on Beacon Hill.
A Crusader at Work
During her time as a state senator, the Methuen Democrat earned a reputation as a maverick. DiZoglio crusaded against the use non-disclosure agreements by legislators to shut up young staffers who were abused in one way or another – an indignity she herself suffered getting her start as a twenty-something legislative aide.
Elected state auditor last fall, DiZoglio unveiled plans to audit the state legislature and its use of those sleazy nondisclosure agreements, only to have House and Senate leaders refuse to open their books, arguing they are answerable only to the voters.
It is an argument that DiZoglio has done a good job of shredding, digging up evidence, long buried, of several legislative audits over the years.
Now she is preparing to take her case over the heads of legislative leaders to the voters themselves in the form of a 2024 state ballot question that would end the debate once and for all.
However, to make that proposed ballot question a reality, DiZoglio faces a daunting challenge: collect and submit to the secretary of state’s office 75,000 signatures by Dec. 6. If the legislature refuses to pass her proposal, she’ll be on the hook for another 12,429 signatures by July 3.
To do that, DiZoglio will have to collect nearly a thousand signatures a day.
And that is going to take more than fire and passion, which DiZoglio has in spades. Rather, she will need cold hard cash and lots of it, fast, in order to hire a professional signature-gathering firm.
It will likely require anywhere from $300,000 to $350,000 – and that’s just for the first round of signatures due in December. And that’s just to get on the ballot, with millions more required to wage a successful statewide ballot question campaign.
She Needs Deep-Pocketed Help
To raise that kind of money, DiZoglio will have to court some deep-pocketed donors, and fast – which, of course, will provide fodder critics given that she is effectively preaching good government.
In fact, one of her first big donors is none other than car dealership tycoon Ernie Boch Jr., DiZoglio said during an interview on Margery Eagan and Jim Braude’s Boston Public Radio talk show on GBH News.
Boch is not very much not a progressive Democrat, having voted for Trump.
But DiZoglio is clearly not afraid to ruffle a few feathers, having openly courted supporters for her cause from the conservative side of the aisle, also enlisting the help of Amy Carnevale, chair of the state’s embattled Republican Party.
Yet she is also picking up support from the left as well. Heading into this weekend’s Democratic state convention in Lowell Our Revolution Massachusetts, a group born out of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, is throwing its support behind DiZoglio’s push for regular audits of the legislature.
Scott Van Voorhis
DiZoglio Strikes a Chord
DiZoglio is clearly hitting a chord here. Massachusetts is one of the least transparent states in the country, with the legislature leading the way when it comes to doing business out of the public eye.
The top-down decision making and secrecy clearly has yielded neither good nor efficient government, but rather a tendency to keep passing the buck, year after year, on the pressing problems and issues facing our commonwealth.
We can all see the results in the broken-down MBTA and the grossly overpriced, inflated and dysfunctional real estate and rental markets.
DiZoglio will have a powerful case to make to voters – if she can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next two months in order to get the ballot.
It’s tall order, but I wouldn’t bet against her.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
