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Rep. Mike Connolly, a Cambridge Democrat, has filed a ballot question that would grant cities and towns a range of new “tenant protection” options, including the ability to impose rent control, which voters banned statewide via a 1994 ballot question.
“This afternoon, acting in my personal capacity as a renter, I filed a petition with 15 residents of Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston to preserve the option of a 2024 ballot question relative to lifting the ban on rent control and enabling local tenant protections. More to come!” Connolly, who has a similar but broader bill (H.1304) pending before the Housing Committee, tweeted Wednesday afternoon.
Previous efforts to reverse the ban or revive the policies in a handful of specific communities have failed to gain momentum with legislative leaders. A recent Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance Foundation poll found that voters who are in favor of rent control would waver in their support of the policy shift depending on how different phrases appear in a potential ballot question: Nearly 59 percent of people support a statewide rent control policy that “prevents landlords from raising rents too much,” compared to 26 percent who oppose it, compared to 28 percent of people would support and 47 percent would oppose “allowing the government to control” the rental rate.
Campaigns that want to put a proposed new law before voters in 2024 or a proposed constitutional amendment in 2026 needed to file their measures by the end of the day Wednesday. But not every question submitted will make it to the ballot, and recent history shows only a few typically survive every cycle.
Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office will now review each measure and either certify, which keeps a proposal moving forward in the process, or decline to certify, which ends its progress. Those decisions are not based on how Campbell herself or her deputies feel about the merits of the policies, but instead on whether the questions comply with a set of requirements in the state Constitution governing initiative petitions.
Questions must be “in proper form for submission to the people,” contain subjects that are “related” or “mutually dependent,” and cannot feature a proposal “substantially the same” as anything that went before voters in either of the two most recent biennial statewide elections. They also can’t tackle certain topics, like religion, judges, specific state appropriations and portions of the state’s Declaration of Rights.
Campbell’s certification decisions are due by Sept. 6.
Material from a previous State House News Service report was used in this story.
