South Shore News | Ballot Question Series, Week 2 of 9
This is the second in a nine part series looking at each of the ballot questions coming to Massachusetts voters in November.
Please take the poll in the middle of the article.
Question 2 is likely the least understood measure on this year’s ballot, and there is a specific reason why.
In the UMass Amherst/WCVB poll taken Aug. 5–12, 13 percent of registered voters said they did not understand Question 2 — the highest share of any of the nine questions. Another 18 percent were undecided. It draws 45 percent support and 24 percent opposition, making it one of only two questions on the ballot without majority backing.
The confusion is not the voters’ fault. Massachusetts provides lawyers to defendants who cannot afford them through two entirely separate channels, and almost everything the public knows about the subject comes from a crisis involving the channel Question 2 does not touch.
The two channels
The first is the Committee for Public Counsel Services, a state agency created in 1983 that employs salaried public defenders along with investigators, social workers and support staff. Chief Counsel Anthony Benedetti told a legislative committee in March that the agency has 864 employees, 425 of them attorneys. Its staff attorneys handled 31,128 cases in the last fiscal year.
The second is the private bar: roughly 2,600 attorneys in active practice — the agency says about 3,000 are trained and certified — who take court appointments at an hourly rate. They are independent contractors, not state employees. They handled 185,288 cases last year, about 86 percent of the total by CPCS’s own count, though the agency and most coverage round it to 80 percent.
Question 2 covers the first group only. It is the second group that stopped taking cases in 2025.
What it would actually do
The measure amends Chapter 150E, the state’s public employee collective bargaining law, to add CPCS to the definition of an employer — and requires the agency, once it has signed a contract, to ask the Governor for the money to fund it. That is essentially the whole thing.
A collective bargaining agreement is a negotiated contract between an employer and its employees’ chosen representative, covering pay, benefits and working conditions and enforceable through a grievance process. CPCS employees do not have one and cannot obtain one, because Chapter 150E does not list their agency, which means the state’s labor relations board has no jurisdiction to certify a union for them. Organizers describe the gap as a drafting oversight; the agency was created a decade after the bargaining law, so it was never written in.
What a union could and could not do
Question 2 would treat CPCS the way the law already treats the state lottery commission and the county sheriffs: the agency can bargain, but anything that costs money goes to the Governor, who has forty-five days to decide whether to ask the Legislature for it. If she does not, the statute sends the request “back to the parties for further bargaining” — which means the deal is dead and negotiation starts over.
So a union could not force a raise. The Governor can stop it before the Legislature ever sees it, and the Legislature still holds the purse. Anyone telling voters this is how public defenders finally get paid is overstating it.
There is a further obstacle the campaign does not discuss. CPCS attorney salaries are set in statute. Even a signed contract and a funded appropriation would not change them on their own — the Legislature would have to pass a separate bill amending the salary provisions.
It also could not lawfully strike. Massachusetts bars public employees from striking, and Question 2 would bring CPCS staff under that ban.
What a union would get is authority over terms that carry no cost — grievance procedures, just-cause protection against discipline, seniority, how cases are assigned. Within the subjects the law makes bargainable, a contract also overrides conflicting provisions in nineteen chapters of state law, including the statutes governing state personnel, civil service and court administration.
The prize proponents talk about most is caseload and workload standards. Two cautions there. Bargaining is a duty to negotiate in good faith, not a right to obtain — and whether caseload limits are a mandatory subject of bargaining or a management prerogative is exactly the kind of question that takes years to litigate before the labor relations board, particularly for an agency operating under a constitutional mandate. Today those standards are set by CPCS itself, by a statutory requirement that staff attorneys handle 20 percent of new cases, and ultimately by the courts.
What CPCS attorneys are paid
This is the number missing from most coverage, and it complicates the case.
CPCS staff attorneys start at $79,500. Assistant district attorneys start at $72,000. Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden told the Legislature’s budget committees that prosecutors “run a risk of losing district attorneys to the Committee for Public Counsel Services,” and that assistant district attorneys “certainly should not be making less than public defenders.”
CPCS’s own most recent report to the Legislature shows 8 attorney vacancies against 408.6 attorney full-time equivalents as of June 30, 2025.
The crisis that put this on the ballot
In late May 2025, court-appointed lawyers across Massachusetts began refusing new appointments, most visibly in Suffolk and Middlesex counties. They were paid $65 an hour for district court work — against $150 in Maine, $125 to $150 in New Hampshire and $112 to $142 in Rhode Island.
On July 3, 2025, the SJC triggered what is known as the Lavallee protocol in the Middlesex and Suffolk district courts and the Boston Municipal Court: a defendant held seven days without a lawyer must be released, and a case pending forty-five days without one must be dismissed. About 120 cases were thrown out in a single day in Boston Municipal Court that July. By Aug. 27, 2025, more than 4,200 defendants statewide had no lawyer. As of February 2026, courts counted at least 1,687 cases dismissed and 198 people released, figures they called conservative.
The Legislature responded with a law Gov. Maura Healey signed on Aug. 5, 2025, raising bar advocate pay to $75 an hour, providing a further increase to $85 effective Aug. 1, 2026, and appropriating $40 million to hire about 320 new staff public defenders by the end of fiscal 2027. As of February, 57 had been hired with 45 more signed. The crisis eased — about 25 defendants were charged without lawyers in late February, one in custody — though the stoppage was never formally called off.
Two things followed from that law, and together they explain why Question 2 exists.
First, it provides that a coordinated agreement among bar advocates to refuse appointments shall be evidence of a violation of the state’s antitrust act. It does not outlaw a stoppage outright, but it hands the state a ready-made theory against one. The Massachusetts Association of Private Appointed Counsel and several individual attorneys sued Attorney General Andrea Campbell over the provision in May 2026, arguing it targets protected expression. No ruling had issued as of the end of August.
Second, the $40 million is about to nearly double the size of the workforce Question 2 would organize. The petition was filed days after the Governor signed that law, and SEIU Local 888 announced its organizing drive on Aug. 11, 2025 — at the peak of the collapse.
So the intuitive story is right about why this is on the ballot. It is wrong about what the measure would do. The contractors who forced the Legislature’s hand got a raise and a new legal shadow; the staff attorneys got neither a raise nor bargaining rights, and their bill went nowhere.
What happened in this area
Less than most readers would assume, and the geography is worth getting right.
The refusals were statewide, but the Lavallee protocol was never extended beyond Suffolk, Middlesex and the Boston Municipal Court. No court in Brockton, Plymouth, Hingham or Wareham ever operated under it. That distinction matters: the protocol was the mechanism that forced releases and dismissals, so a defendant without a lawyer in Plymouth District Court had no such clock running in his favor.
A Massachusetts Trial Court informal assessment of late May 2025 recorded twelve defendants released in Quincy District Court for lack of representation, and three unrepresented in the Plymouth and Falmouth district courts.
CPCS petitioned in July 2025 to extend the protocol to juvenile cases, reporting sixty-five juveniles without lawyers across the counties it named, including Norfolk. Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt denied the request, writing that the problem was “better addressed on an individualized, case-by-case basis.”
On June 25, 2025, Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz moved to intervene in the Lavallee case. The court denied the motion without prejudice, noting the petition sought the protocol only in Middlesex and Suffolk. The order does not say what Cruz wanted.
The case against
Ten weeks before the ballots are printed, the state’s own watchdog made it.
On June 10, 2026, Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro issued a report describing Massachusetts public defense as “broken, expensive, and resistant to oversight.” It found that CPCS staff attorneys carry lower caseloads than public defenders in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont — and lower than Massachusetts assistant district attorneys. It found the agency has too many supervisors relative to its caseload, spends $2,752 per new case against $1,200 to $2,500 in neighboring states, and has handled under 16 percent of new indigent cases against a statutory mandate of 20 percent, missing that mark for at least a decade. It also found that during the 2025 stoppage, CPCS staff were largely unavailable at peak hours and that the agency “contributed to the detrimental effects” of the crisis.
Every one of those findings cuts against the case for Question 2. If staff caseloads are already low by regional standards, bargained caseload caps solve a problem the IG says does not exist in the form proponents describe. If the agency is already resistant to oversight, a contract that overrides conflicting statute is a strange remedy. And the account of staff attorneys as bystanders to a crisis caused by contractors is contradicted by an official finding that they made it worse.
Benedetti’s answer is on the record: “Public defense is not a mechanical system. Caseload numbers alone do not measure whether representation is constitutionally effective.” That is a serious rebuttal, and reasonable people weigh the two differently.
Beyond the IG, the objections are these. Prosecutors have a live grievance about pay parity, described above. Bar advocates — who handle most of the caseload and are excluded from Question 2 — were told the $40 million would shift work away from them toward staff attorneys; MAPAC president Sean Delaney has said the underlying crisis “hasn’t gone away.” A contract raises personnel costs against a budget with no dedicated revenue, and no fiscal estimate exists. And work rules constraining how CPCS assigns attorneys could reduce the flexibility the agency used to move lawyers into overwhelmed courtrooms in 2025.
On cost, the state has now weighed in — barely. The Executive Office for Administration and Finance, in the Information for Voters guide mailed to households this month, wrote that Question 2 "may have an impact on state finances," that CPCS is funded in part by state appropriations, and that "the fiscal impact of the proposed law is difficult to project due to the uncertainty regarding the outcomes of any such collective bargaining." It is the only one of the nine questions where the state declined to call the fiscal consequences immaterial — and it is not an estimate. Nobody has produced a number.
At the March 16 hearing before the Special Joint Committee on Initiative Petitions, no one testified in opposition. Rep. Michael Day of Stoneham, a committee member who co-chaired that hearing, raised the one concern on the record: “What the ethical obligation is for an attorney versus what their role is as a member of the union, is certainly one with public defenders that’s very acute, given their job is representing these individuals.”
No committee appears to have registered against Question 2. A yes campaign exists, backed by SEIU Local 888, the Massachusetts Defenders Union, AFT Massachusetts and the National Association of Government Employees.
And there is now a definitive measure of how little organized opposition exists. Massachusetts law requires the Information for Voters guide to print an argument against every ballot question. For Question 2, nobody submitted one. Under a statute directing the Secretary of the Commonwealth to write the argument himself when no opponent comes forward, Galvin’s office prepared it, drawing on the Legislature’s majority report. The guide prints a notice saying so, and where an author’s name would normally appear it prints the statute instead.
That state-written argument is the closest thing to a formal case against Question 2 that anyone has made: that CPCS is an independent judicial-branch agency, and that collective bargaining could disrupt its supervisory structure, blur lines of authority, and limit its flexibility to respond to caseloads that swing.
