BOSTON — Two months after bar advocates stopped taking new cases to demand pay raises, legislative leaders on Wednesday rolled out a take-it-or-leave-it proposal that some dissatisfied attorneys quickly slammed as insufficient.
In one swoop, top lawmakers moved to present a potential solution to the crisis that has erupted in some courtrooms and to resolve a months-old spending bill that offers funding injections for rental aid, elder home care services and electronic benefit cards.
The bill (S 2575) will receive House and Senate votes Thursday, the last day before lawmakers plan to slow down for a traditional-but-not-mandatory August break.
One bar advocate at the center of the months-long fight criticized the measure, calling it a “slap in the face” and questioning whether it would succeed at bringing the private attorneys back to court for new cases.
The 40-page legislation also includes $60 million to fund home care services for older adults, nearly $43 million for the Residential Assistance for Families in Transition program, $28.9 million to cover settlements and judgments, and $15.5 million to help the Department of Transitional Assistance roll out electronic benefits transfer chip cards.
Legislative negotiators left several major spending ideas on the cutting-room floor during their talks. They dropped $134 million for the Medical Assistance Trust Fund that both branches originally approved and $209 million for fiscally strained hospitals and community health centers that the Senate pushed.
A House Ways and Means Committee spokesperson said the Healey administration asked the Legislature to wait until a forthcoming “closeout” supplemental budget to tackle the Medical Assistance Trust Fund. Senate budget chief Michael Rodrigues said he hopes to revive the hospital funding proposal “in the very near future.”
“We’re not there yet on the provisions, but we are committed, and we want to say so publicly, committed to get to a solution as soon as possible,” he said at a meeting the conference committee held to approve the agreement.
The compromise would also push the reporting deadline for a commission studying assisted living facilities from Aug. 1 to Dec. 31, 2025 -- a nearly five-month extension that surpasses the 90 additional days members sought in order to incorporate lessons learned from the deadly Gabriel House fire in Fall River into their recommendations.
All six lawmakers on the conference committee signed the compromise, signaling their support. Lawmakers filed the accord with the Senate clerk’s office at 1:25 p.m. Wednesday, and newly reformed legislative rules bar either branch from taking it up until 24 hours later.
The underlying legislation (S 2540 / H 4265) did not feature any language dealing with bar advocate pay, but lawmakers were worried enough about the crisis to add something brand new to the spending bill during the conference committee process.
They landed on a proposal that would both increase pay for bar advocates, who are private attorneys contracted to represent defendants that cannot afford representation, and reshape their working relationship with the state.
Attorneys contracted to represent indigent clients would get raises of $20 per hour over two years, less than the single-year $35 per hour bump they sought. Lawmakers expect that to cost about $27 million per year, with money for the raises coming from the fiscal year 2026 annual budget and then the eventual fiscal year 2027 budget.
Today, bar advocates earn $65 per hour for their work in District Court, $85 for most Appeals and Superior Court work, and up to $120 per hour on murder cases. They contend those rates are the lowest in New England, and argue that most other neighboring states pay at least $100 per hour at a base level.
“This is a 30% increase over a two-year period in a very difficult fiscal time period that we’re in,” House Ways and Means Committee Chair Aaron Michlewitz said. “Most of the folks working for state government are not getting 30% increases over the next two years, so we are hopeful that they will accept it.”
While speaking with reporters later in the day, Senate President Karen Spilka added, “Who else is getting a 30% salary increase at this time? Your face tells it all. I mean, 30% salary increase, and the reason we’re doing it is because we believe, the Senate and the House believe, access to justice is so important. They went out on a work stoppage without really talking to us.”
The bill would require bar advocates to sign a biannual contract with the Committee for Public Counsel Services detailing minimum coverage requirements. If the attorneys once again bonded together and agreed not to take new assignments unless they receive a pay raise, that would constitute an antitrust law violation under the new legislation.
Michlewitz said that provision will “hopefully prevent any future issues that we had similar to what we’ve had over the last couple of weeks.”
Lawmakers also proposed a $40 million injection for CPCS, which would allow the organization to hire about 320 additional public defenders.
“Massachusetts is an outlier in relying on private [lawyers] to handle 80% of the cases of indigent cases. That’s unlike anywhere else in the country,” Rodrigues said. “So we now are making significant investments to more than double the number of public defenders in order to alleviate the need for as many bar advocates as we’ve had.”
In a statement, House Speaker Ron Mariano said the bill “takes steps to ensure that the Commonwealth will no longer be over-reliant on the bar advocates.”
“The right to legal representation is a crucial element of the Constitutional guarantee to a fair trial, which is why I urge the bar advocates to return to work so that they can resume upholding that right and put an end to this public safety crisis,” he said.
Jennifer O’Brien, a veteran bar advocate who has been a major figure in the issue, said Wednesday that the proposal lawmakers rolled out “doesn’t go far enough.”
“It’s very disappointing. They really obviously haven’t heard us,” O’Brien said. “To me, it just looks like they’re doing everything to retaliate against us or not fund the program -- everything they can do except for solve the crisis, which is just to pay the market rate, which is what other states have been doing.”
The labor action by bar advocates, who work as independent contractors, has been somewhat informally organized. O’Brien said she is on a listserv with more than 500 “like-minded” attorneys frustrated by their pay for public defense work.
For many, she said, “the consensus is that this is a slap in the face.”
“I don’t know that this proposal is going to get current bar advocates that are not taking cases to run back to court, or incentivize the attorneys who have already been taking cases to take more cases,” O’Brien said.
Many bar advocates stopped taking new cases in late May to protest their pay after what they describe as several months of outreach to lawmakers. Amid constitutional concerns, the decision prompted some courts to begin releasing defendants or dismissing cases.
Beacon Hill grew increasingly frustrated with the labor action in recent weeks, calling on bar advocates to resume accepting assignments before a final resolution and suggesting elected officials were surprised by the demands.
One reporter asked Michlewitz if the bill was “basically a take-it-or-leave-it deal.”
“Yeah, at this point,” he replied. “We think we’ve done something that is significant, sufficient, [and] is [a] much higher [raise] than anybody else in state government’s really seeing right now.”
Some bar advocates have said top Democrats ignored their calls or declined meetings. O’Brien and fellow bar advocate Sean Delaney met earlier Wednesday, before lawmakers announced their proposal, with Senate Republicans.
“This has been a situation that’s been festering for a while,” Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr told reporters after that meeting. “It’s not a secret that for many years, bar advocates in Massachusetts have not been paid at the same rates that their colleagues in the New England states, and by extension, even across the country, are being paid. So this is not a secret.”
Michlewitz on Wednesday said there had been a “communication breakdown between the bar advocates, CPCS and the Legislature.”
“These last couple weeks exposed that, I think, for both of us. We were not ready to hear that it was at this boiling point that it was after both of our budgets had passed,” he said.
The Senate added language to its annual budget proposal that would have increased annual pay for bar advocates by $5 to $10 per hour, but the final accord that emerged from private House-Senate talks made no such change.
Asked why negotiators dropped that provision, Rodrigues said it “came to us very quickly.”
“It came to us at a very late hour. After we passed that version adopted in the Senate budget, that’s when actions were taken by the private bar advocates that said that was not adequate,” he said. “So we decided to punt it, to hold it on that, and to deal with it in this vehicle so we could have real conversations with our friends at CPCS, with the private bar advocates that were actually working in constitutionally protecting indigent defendants. And I think we’ve come to a very good resolution.”
Before lawmakers announced the deal, Gov. Maura Healey on Wednesday described the situation as “a matter of public safety.”
Asked how damaging it would be for hundreds of cases to be dismissed, she replied, “Look, it’s all the more reason why there needs to be a resolution. Because, you know, for the sake of defendants who are entitled to due process, for the sake of victims, who need to have their cases heard. I mean, for our whole system of justice, we need folks back at work, and we need the wheels of justice to start moving again.”
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