Issue Position: Standing for Transparency and Fiscal Responsibility

Issue Position

Will Brownsberger has:

Fought for reforms in public employee benefits. Will believes that employee benefit reform is necessary to preserve jobs and protect services. Public employees should have good basic benefits, like employees in a good private sector company. That means capping public pensions, radically simplifying the byzantine rules of the pension system and assuring that future taxpayers do not bear all the risk of poor stock market performance. It also means standardizing health benefits at a reasonable level. Will advocated for the major reforms in health and pension benefits achieved over the past two years and has been publicly recognized for his fair and thoughtful approach. Major reforms to pensions will only affect newly hired employees.

Opened up the bid process for House contracts. Until Will made an issue of it, the House of Representatives was spending millions each year on secret contracts awarded on a no-bid basis. The objects of spending were legitimate (technology, sound systems, etc.), but the business approach was antiquated and unlike that of any other state or local agency. As a result Will's efforts, the House now has a public bidding process for large contracts and the contracts are accessible to House members.

Made state spending details available online. If we are spending the taxpayers' money, the taxpayers have every right to know just how we are spending it, whenever they want to and regardless of their reasons for wanting to. Yet, many experienced, thoughtful legislators who are in politics to serve feel that transparency creates distractions that are not in the real interest of the public. As a result of Will's advocacy for greater transparency (together with advocacy by other legislators), state law now requires that all state spending be readily viewable by the public online.

Stood against special interest tax deals. Will favors a much simpler business tax code. The state shouldn't be in the business of picking business winners and losers and handing out special deals to particular businesses or industries. In part as a result of his efforts, information about where tax benefits are going is now more accessible. Additionally, he has voted for repeal of the film tax credit, which pays 25% of film company production costs for film's produced in Massachusetts. Much of the benefit of that credit goes to out-of-state millionaires. These costly tax deals take away critical funds better spent on valuable state and local services such as schools, public safety and human services.

Taken a stand with contributions to his own campaign. In 2008, Will put in place a policy that his committee shall not accept contributions from Political Action Committees or from individual lobbyists who are not constituents. In 2012, serving a larger district that includes many lobbyists, he tightened that policy -- he now declines all contributions from lobbyists.

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