Commonwealth Report Legislators Method

Commonwealth · Report

Methods and limits

Data sources

Data corrections, 18–19 October 2026

Two errors were found and fixed before this report. DESE numbers 33 towns differently from the Department of Revenue, and one file had read DESE numbers as DOR codes, which put $524.8 million of regional school payments on the wrong town in 31 towns; statewide totals did not change. Separately, five fiscal years had been credited to the General Court seated in January of the fiscal year rather than the one that enacted the budget; every year now carries its enacting court, on that court’s district lines. No headline result reversed. Three within-town power results lost significance and are not reported: a House member moving into a top post, Senate Republican representation, and within-town Senate leadership tiers. The cross-town Senate stipend effect also fell back above p = 0.05 and is not reported.

A third issue surfaced on October 19. CTHRU records cherry-sheet aid as the cash paid after assessments for charter tuition, school choice and regional transit are deducted; ten-year Chapter 70 is $46.35 billion net against $57.10 billion gross. This report uses the gross DESE and cherry-sheet figures for all formula aid, as the Fairness Index does, and the town-level model was rerun with gross formula aid as its control; every power result reported here held. The old figures had also credited $9.01 billion of charter and virtual-school tuition to the town where each school sits, which put Hadley 8th in formula aid per resident; on gross formula aid to the town government and its school districts, the basis the Fairness Index uses, it is 294th.

The Fairness Index: blend and lenses

Two features of the method bear on how the scores read. First, the blended score tracks the per-resident (Equal) lens closely: across the 351 towns the rank correlation between the blend and the Equal lens is 0.98 on all aid and 0.996 on discretionary money. A town’s blended rank is close to its per-resident rank, which is why section 9 and every town page show the four lens scores separately. Second, the Effort lens divides the residential property tax by residents’ income. In practice that rate rises with median household income (rank correlation 0.24) and with school spending above the required minimum (0.37), and falls with poverty (−0.26), so a town’s Effort score reflects its spending choices and tax base as well as how heavily its residents are taxed. The lens is shown as built.

Named legislators

Legislators are named for facts of record: posts, stipends, sponsored amendments, enacted items, public roll-call votes and the money that reached their districts. Each association reported with a name is an association, not a finding of cause. The web edition carries a page for each legislator, with no composite score.

Known weaknesses

  • House dispositions are inferred by matching amendment text against the consolidated amendments; the House records most amendments only as “Consolidated A–G.”
  • Leadership base-text and conference money cannot be assigned to a member from the public record. Of the 61 enacted clauses of $950,000 or more placed in a town (second measure), 37 match no member’s amendment.
  • Earmark figures are enacted text, not payments. A held or unspent earmark counts in full.
  • Of $5.44 billion in enacted earmark clauses, 15% can be placed in a town counting everything placed, 13% placed in the town and 9% naming the town; the large clauses are statewide program floors.
  • Section 8’s cost figures come from the Division of Local Services: FY2026 spending is incomplete (55 of 351 towns filed), pensions are not separable from other fixed costs, and cherry-sheet detail before FY2010 could not be retrieved.
  • Section 11’s counts of local earmarks are the administration’s and the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation’s; they match none of the three measures.
  • Competitive grants appear at two totals. $2.73 billion is the amount awarded in the award catalog (sections 1 and 3). The Comptroller’s payments to town governments and their school districts total $2.52 billion, the figure the Summary and the Fairness Index use; payments to all recipients, including organizations other than town governments, total $3.68 billion.
  • Merit scores rest on 300-character excerpts for 56% of rows and are not used.
  • Capacity is proxied by population band; form-of-government data could not be retrieved by script.
  • Matching each grant program to its burden measure is judgment; every match is listed, and a second set of plausible measures leaves the rankings close (rank correlation 0.94). Sixty-seven western towns have no digital FEMA flood map, and their resilience grants are left out of the burden index rather than guessed.
  • Aid to towns in regional school districts is an attribution by enrollment; no compiled source gives each member town’s assessment.
  • The breadcrumbs result is association. The House sample of reform voters is small and aging.
  • The Secretary of State’s lobbyist registry blocks automated access, so lobbying is not part of these tests.

Sources