QUINCY CITY COUNCIL President Ian Cain is criticizing his US Senate Republican primary opponent, cryptocurrency lawyer John Deaton, calling him “evasive” for avoiding his call to schedule a debate before their September 3 face-off in the GOP primary. Deaton’s camp was dismissive of Cain’s request in a statement to Politico.
But Cain did a bit of evading of his own this week, skipping a key council vote on a hot-button issue, citing a scheduling conflict. Seven councilors, with one dissenting, gave initial approval to a proposal giving the longtime mayor of Quincy, Tom Koch, a whopping 79 percent raise to $285,000 a year.
The raise will make Koch higher paid than New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who presides over a budget of more than $100 billion and serves more than 8 million constituents. The Patriot Ledger noted that the Quincy council hadn’t even held a hearing on the measure before advancing it.
Cain, who was elected by his eight colleagues to the presidency in January, said he had another meeting on his calendar that evening, and the final vote on the pay package is set for a later date.
The upcoming June 17 vote is widely viewed as a formality, however. Cain, who had Koch help him kick off his Senate campaign back in April, said he’ll be voting at that meeting in favor of the boost in pay. He gamely pointed to the city’s population of 100,000 and the mayor overseeing a $425 million budget in defending his stance. (Along with outpacing the pay of the mayor of the country’s largest city, the new salary will put Quincy’s mayoral compensation well above that of Boston, with a population of 675,000 and a $4.2 billion operating budget, where Mayor Michelle Wu is paid just over $200,000.)
The move provided an opening for Deaton to hit back in a statement. “The definition of ‘evasive’ is ignoring the responsibilities of your elected office because they are politically inconvenient,” his campaign manager, Mike Gorecki, said in a statement. “Washington is already full of politicians who value political expediency above serving their constituents.”
Note on anonymous donor riles tipped wages campaign
Voters may be approaching the time when they check out for the summer, but a battle between opposing camps in a looming ballot question showdown over tipped wages is heating up over allegations of “financial impropriety.”
The nonprofit group One Fair Wage is behind a question that would boost the minimum wage for workers who depend on tips, as well as eliminating a ban on sharing tips beyond the waiters and bartenders, which would allow the expansion of the tipping pool to office workers and managers.
The Globe featured the nonprofit in a story earlier this week, noting that in the Bay State, “the group says it has raised $2 million from an anonymous donor and plans to use most of it to raise voter awareness about subpar working conditions for service-sector workers.”
That line caught the eye of opponents – restaurant owners arguing that the ballot question would be calamitous for their industry – and they’re planning to file a complaint with campaign finance regulators. “Individuals and organizations with even a basic understanding of campaign finance regulations know that anonymous donors are strictly prohibited,” said their spokesman, Chris Keohan.
Angelo Greco, One Fair Wage’s spokesman, said any money that comes into their ballot committee, a separate entity from the nonprofit, will be disclosed. “We’re in compliance and we intend to follow all the rules of disclosure,” he said.
He didn’t want to tip the tipped-wage group’s hand beyond that, and declined to identify the donor when asked.
What’s in a ballot title?
The Supreme Judicial Court’s ballot question season is in full swing and getting busier. Decisions are expected from the high court in the next few weeks on whether potential measures to classify app-based drivers as independent contractors, allow those drivers to unionize, and raise the minimum tipped wage are fit for ballot.
In the meantime, another proposed ballot measure that would eliminate MCAS as a high school graduation requirement is getting its moment before the court based on a challenge to the title and description of the initiative. As published, the question is titled “Elimination of MCAS as High School Graduation Requirement,” and explained thus:
A YES VOTE would eliminate the requirement that students pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) in order to graduate high school but still require students to complete coursework that meets state standards.
The Committee To Preserve Educational Standards For K-12 Students, which opposes the ballot measure, filed suit last month with the SJC, arguing that the title and description of the initiative is misleading and needs clarification from the court. The language of the initiative, the group says in a filing, would get rid of “any uniform statewide assessment” for graduation – not just boot MCAS as the final word.
Then the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which supports the ballot question, waded in with their own request for the court to change the title and description to reflect that the ballot question would replace MCAS “with a more accurate measure of student competency, not to eliminate the competency requirement.”
The suits, which are being considered together, were first reported by Politico’s Massachusetts Playbook. Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office, which along with the secretary of state’s office certified the questions and their summary language as fit for the public, filed their response Wednesday.
According to their brief, the title and description combination “is fair and neutral, and addresses the primary and most identifiable feature of what the proposed law would do, which is eliminate the requirement that high school students pass the MCAS in order to receive a diploma.” Voters will also have a “suite of information” available to them explaining the question in more detail, the attorney general’s office argues, and other recent unchallenged questions also lack compressive detail in their title and summary.
New polling from UMass Amherst/WCVB found 44 percent of respondents would vote for a measure that “would remove the requirement” that students must pass the MCAS to receive a diploma, while 36 percent would vote no, though the poll did not mention other competency systems.
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