South Shore News | Ballot Question Series, Week 6 of 9
This is the sixth in a nine part series looking at each of the ballot questions coming to Massachusetts voters in November.
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The state’s official fiscal statement on Question 6, printed in the booklet that arrived in your mailbox this month, says the measure “would automatically divert tens of millions of dollars of tax receipts that are currently supporting the state operating budget to the new fund.”
The people who wrote Question 6 told the Legislature something different.
On March 23, at the only public hearing the measure received, the House chair of the Special Joint Committee on Initiative Petitions read the petition’s final subsection aloud — all of the provisions of this section shall be subject to appropriation by the legislature — and asked what it meant. “Does that mean that the legislature must appropriate the funding to the trust, or does it mean that the legislature must appropriate the funding from the trust?”
David O’Neill, president and chief executive of Mass Audubon and the petition’s lead signatory, answered: “It’s to the trust, correct.”
Rep. Alice Peisch pressed. “As I read this, then, this could pass and we could choose not to appropriate any of this money. Is that what you intended?”
“It is true, yes.”
A few minutes later, Sam Anderson, Mass Audubon’s senior director of government affairs, explained the reasoning. The appropriation clause is there because Article 48 of the state constitution forbids initiative petitions from appropriating money. “You can’t appropriate funds using the ballot,” he said. “The goal is to set up this fund and send a message that it is to be supported.”
So the state’s budget office describes an automatic diversion, and the measure’s authors describe a message. Both are printed or recorded in public. Nobody has been asked to reconcile them.
That is what a yes vote on Question 6 actually buys, and everything below follows from it.
What it would do
Question 6 is not a new tax. That is the campaign’s central and accurate point: the sales tax already exists and is already collected. The measure redirects a share of it.
It creates a new account in state law, the Nature for All Fund. Starting July 1, 2027, the fund would receive 50 percent of the sales tax tied to sporting goods, recreational vehicles and golf courses. On July 1, 2028, a single line strikes the words “50% of” and the share becomes 100 percent. Two deductions come off the top: one percentage point of the state’s 6.25-cent sales tax already goes to the MBTA and another to the school building authority.
The phase-in, O’Neill told the committee, was not the product of analysis. Asked by Rep. Michael Day how the coalition arrived at 50 percent and then 100: “We didn’t, it wasn’t a great deal of science that went into that, Representative, to be quite honest with you. It was a phasing in just to allow for the system to be able to adjust to the dollars that would be removed.”
The money would be spent by the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs on “natural resource conservation,” defined broadly — conserving land to protect drinking water and the quality of streams, rivers, lakes and coasts; protecting farms and forests; creating parks, greenspaces and trails “especially in neighborhoods with limited access”; connecting open spaces; conserving “lands and natural resources of indigenous cultural significance”; and ongoing stewardship.
Spending would run through a new 15-member board — five state officials plus ten gubernatorial appointees who must include representatives of underserved communities and of indigenous peoples. Eligible recipients are wide: state agencies, municipalities or groups of municipalities, regional planning agencies, water districts, tribal governments, and “operating public charities with purposes involving natural resource conservation,” the category that covers land trusts, which the petition never names directly.
The agency that would run it says the text is unclear in three places. Stephanie Cooper, undersecretary for the environment, told the committee that EEA has “the expertise” and “a proven track record” to administer the fund, but flagged that the petition “does not clearly specify that the board would be housed within EEA administratively,” that if EEA is meant to write the regulations with the board’s approval “it will be helpful to articulate this to give EEA that explicit authority,” and that “the petition does not designate a board chair, which could create potential governance and accountability challenges.”
Peisch’s response was the constraint that governs this whole question: “You are undoubtedly aware that we do not have the authority to change the petition. We have to either accept it or reject it as it was filed.”
That matters, because there are further defects. The subsection listing what the board must write rules about runs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and then jumps to (vi) — there is no clause (v) — and the petition contains no severability clause, so a court construing the gap has no instruction about what survives. And the crediting language gives the fund its share “net of the dedicated sales tax revenue amount transferred under sections 35T and 35BB” — read literally, the entire statewide transfer of more than $2 billion, which would leave nothing. None of it can be fixed by the Legislature. Voters take the text as filed.
What the goods actually are — and the coalition picked the codes to hit a number
The petition sets its scope by reference to the 2022 North American Industry Classification System. NAICS classifies establishments — businesses — not products. The Census Bureau’s product classification is a separate system, NAPCS, which the petition does not mention.
The campaign’s public explanation says the opposite. Its FAQ: “All consumer goods sold in the US are assigned a category under the the U.S. Economic Census’ North America Industry Classification System (NAICS). Items categorized as sporting goods include everything from camping gear and ski boots to RVs and golf clubs.”
What the coalition told the Legislature is different, and more revealing. Rep. David Vieira asked for “a sense of when you say sporting goods and recreational vehicles, what’s the plethora of that market?” Andrew du Moulin answered
“The coalition decided that there would be three codes that we looked at. We looked at just the sporting goods code. We didn’t feel like it necessarily raised enough money. Just looking at that, so the additional codes, 441210 for recreational vehicle dealers, and 713910 for golf courses and country clubs was also added to get to that $100 million mark in order to make the rules, make them fit into the funding.” - Andrew du Moulin, sponsor of Question 6
Two things follow. First, the drafters selected industry codes, and named two of them by number — both establishment classifications. Second, and more consequential: the scope was chosen to reach a revenue target. The sporting goods code alone did not raise enough, so two more industries were added “to get to that $100 million mark.” The $100 million is not an estimate derived from the measure’s scope. The scope was assembled to produce the $100 million.
Asked to describe what was actually covered, du Moulin read a list of retailer categories — “athletic uniform supply retailers, fishing supply retailers, bicycles retailers, golf, bowling equipment,” diving and ski equipment. Vieira had asked whether it was “boots and backpacks and tents and ammunition.” He got back a list of kinds of stores. Nobody in the room noted the difference.
If the establishment reading governs — and it is what the drafters used — the practical consequences are substantial. A rifle from a gun shop counts; the same rifle from a big-box store does not. Boats drop out, because boat dealers are a separate code, 441222. So do ATVs, snowmobiles and personal watercraft, at 441227. Massachusetts also exempts clothing under $175 from sales tax, so most apparel and footwear in these stores generates nothing either way.
The petition still names no code numbers in its own text. It supplies three English phrases, and the words “as classified under” grammatically modify the goods rather than the sellers. So while the drafters’ intent is now on the record, the statute they wrote does not say it — and the Department of Revenue, which publishes no sales tax data by industry and whose business registration procedure does not appear to collect a NAICS code at all, would have to resolve it.
One further wrinkle: Massachusetts generally taxes goods rather than recreational services, which would mean green fees and memberships are untaxed and the golf category contributes little beyond pro-shop merchandise — one of the two industries added to reach the target.
How much money
The campaign’s voter-guide argument says “as much as $100 million each year.” Its FAQ reaches “approximately $107 million” by starting from “more than $2.496 billion” in Massachusetts “sporting goods category” consumer spending in 2022, subtracting the two pennies, and applying the remaining 4.25 percent.
Tufts cSPA says “roughly $65 million” when fully phased in. A&F says “tens of millions.”
The gap is not about the MBTA and school-building pennies; the campaign’s arithmetic already subtracts them. It is about the base. The campaign begins with consumer spending on a product category. What the petition earmarks is tax remitted under industry classifications, which is a much smaller number, because so much of that spending happens at big-box retailers, online and in department stores.
Neither figure can be checked against published Massachusetts revenue data, because none exists at that level of detail. There is no public figure for what Massachusetts sporting goods retailers remit, and the department has not said whether it could produce one. Sen. Cindy Friedman asked Cooper at the hearing how much sales tax would be diverted. “I don’t,” Cooper said. “I think the Department of Revenue, I would want to defer to them on that.”
The poll that found 67 percent support never mentioned a dollar figure.
The case for it, which is stronger than the mechanics
The affirmative argument rests on a baseline that is not seriously contested, and the administration’s own witness made much of it.
Undersecretary Cooper testified that Massachusetts is “currently on track to meet our 2030 goals” of conserving 30 percent of the state’s land — but added the crucial qualifier: “thanks in part to one-time American Rescue Plan Act funding.” To go further, she said, “we aim to double the pace of conservation.” Her conclusion: “while these programs have enabled substantial progress and success, the identified needs and the demand continue to grow and outpace the existing resources.” She noted that all of the state’s land protection programs are “over-subscribed currently.”
The numbers she gave: the capital plan carries $300 million a year for EEA and its agencies, about two-thirds of it for conservation, natural resource protection and recreation, with about $40 million annually programmed specifically for land conservation. Beyond that, a scatter of small dedicated sources — the Massachusetts Environmental Trust spends about $500,000 a year, funded largely by environmental license plates; the Wildlands Stamp Fund generates about $1.5 million from hunting, fishing and trapping licenses.
Then Rob Johnson of the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition, which represents more than 140 land trusts, supplied the number that makes the case:
“I appreciate Undersecretary Cooper telling us about the $40 million that funds key lines that support all this work… So that $40 million is the FY27 capital plan number, pretty much. I just want to say the FY26 capital line number for those same lines was $65 million. So that’s illustrative. That’s like a 36% drop year over year.”
A one-year, 36 percent cut in the state’s land conservation capital lines, described by the body whose members receive the money. That is the volatility the measure is meant to fix, in a single figure, and it has not been reported elsewhere.
Katie Theoharides, president of the Trustees of Reservations and a former State Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, made the same point from experience: “Conservation funding in the commonwealth has been historically variable and inconsistent. I’ve seen that myself on the inside when I was the State Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs.” She put recent annual state land conservation funding “around $25 million, which is not nearly enough to meet the need.”
On the size of the gap, the two lead proponents gave different figures at the same hearing. O’Neill cited Mass Audubon’s 2025 report Funding Nature’s Future: the state “may require at least an additional $300 million per year or more” to reach 30 by 30. Theoharides said “it’s around $350 million a year.” Either way, even the campaign’s optimistic revenue figure closes well under half the gap.
And the land is getting more expensive faster than the grants. Emma Ellsworth of Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust told the committee that back land in the North Quabbin went from about $500 an acre before the pandemic to “$2,000 an acre, $2,500 an acre” — while state grant caps held. On a 600-acre farm assembly in Ashburnham costing $5 to $5.5 million, the available state grant is $1.25 million: “that same $1.25 million several years ago could have covered half the project. Now it’s less than a third.” Mount Grace has 40 active projects, $21 million in costs, $15 million committed, and a $6 million shortfall. “In Boston, $6 million is a trickle. It’s a nothing. Well, in Warwick, that’s an insurmountable funding gap.”
The Environmental League of Massachusetts calculates that the fiscal 2025 budget appropriated “$545 million for energy and environmental programs … roughly 0.95% of its $57.7 billion total.” The Legislature’s own Special Commission on the Department of Conservation and Recreation reported in December 2021 that “relative to its population, income, and total government spending, Massachusetts’ local and state investments in parks and recreation are at or near the bottom of all states,” cited an earlier estimate of $1 billion in deferred maintenance, and found DCR down 300 full-time employees since 2009 — about a quarter of the workforce — though 139 of those were transferred to MassDOT. Gov. Healey’s fiscal 2027 proposal trims environmental programs roughly 4 percent and cuts DCR by about 8 percent, with almost half of the total reduction falling on state parks.
The economic case is real too, and it came from the administration: Massachusetts has the fastest-growing outdoor recreation economy in the country for the second year running, growing at nearly 7 percent annually, generating more than $14.5 billion in economic value in 2024 per the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The Community Preservation Act question, asked and answered
Sen. Barry Finegold put the obvious alternative to the proponents: “Do you feel the Community Preservation Act is not getting it done? Why isn’t that a vehicle to potentially use that?”
Cooper had described the CPA as “a really important” local source, with 190 participating municipalities.
O’Neill’s answer: “Currently, CPA falls far short in terms of the needs to protect land… the dollars tend to be small in the first place and as a result, we’re starting to see just a lot of pressure on CPA and not an ability of CPA funding to actually support the need that’s out there on the conservation side.”
Ellsworth added the point that matters most for this region’s smaller towns: “a lot of our rural communities have not passed CPA, and in fact, have voted down CPA numerous times. So it’s simply not a resource that exists in a lot of places where conservation needs to happen.”
The constitutional question, raised twice and answered thinly
Finegold asked whether anyone had checked the measure’s constitutionality — “Because you’re, in theory, appropriating funds.” O’Neill, after conferring: “I’m told by our team over here that the constitutional question has been asked and it is constitutional.”
Day pushed harder, and his objection is one that appears nowhere in the coverage: “How do you square this with a constitutional requirement that money bills originate in the House and move to the Senate on a budgetary basis?”
The answer: “we retained Ropes & Gray for some of our voter work who lent us a memo, which we are happy to submit to you all” — Ropes & Gray, and a memo offered to the committee.
The Legislature’s majority report later noted that the attorney general’s certification under Article 48 “is limited only to the narrow criteria listed in Article 48,” and that the petition “has not been evaluated by her or the courts for its constitutionality at this time” — boilerplate true of every petition, but pointed here given what was asked in the room.
Who is paying for it
Question 6 has among the healthiest campaign treasury on the ballot and no opponent to spend it against. The figures below come from South Shore News’s review of the committee’s OCPF filings.
Vote Yes for Water and Nature has raised $2,641,958 in cash and reported $460,782 in in-kind contributions across 93 contributions since organizing in August 2025. As of Aug. 30 it held $1,180,572 in cash with no outstanding liabilities — the committee promoting Question 5, by contrast, is roughly $215,000 underwater. Its 2026 spending is almost entirely one consultant: eight monthly retainers to ACF Impact Strategies totaling $92,000, with nothing else above $5,000. The money is seemingly being held for October.
The biggest institutional backers are the same conservation groups the measure would make eligible to receive money from the fund. Mass Audubon, the Trustees, the Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land, the Conservation Law Foundation and the Appalachian Mountain Club have together put roughly $1.5 million in cash and staff time into the campaign. All are public charities with conservation purposes, which is exactly the category the petition makes a lawful recipient.
Mass Audubon (Lincoln): $300,000 cash plus $277,176 in staff time, supplies, postage and legal support, for $577,176 total
Conservation Law Foundation (Boston): $300,000
The Trustees of Reservations (Boston): $250,000
The Nature Conservancy (Arlington, Va.): $75,000
The Trust for Public Land (San Francisco): $25,000
Mass Audubon is effectively running the campaign. Its chief executive is the lead signatory. Its senior director of government affairs answered the committee’s questions about the measure’s central clause. The argument in favor printed in the voter guide lists Mass Audubon’s Lincoln address instead of the campaign’s. Its total contribution is more than twice that of any other institution and second only to the largest individual check.
Charities may lobby within limits, and ballot advocacy is ordinary. This is a matter of structure, not scandal. But readers are entitled to know it.
Largest individual donors ($10,000 or more)
Kirsten Waerstad, Belmont: $800,000
Natasha Grigg, Boxford: $420,279 (three gifts)
Helen Pounds, Cambridge: $250,000
Jessie B. Panek, Harvard: $160,000
Edward Homer Ladd, Dover: $26,258
Phillip Edmundson, Hingham: $10,000
Nagesh Mahanthappa, Cambridge: $10,000
Out-of-state cash totals about $101,500, which is under 4 percent of the total.
The money became the hearing’s dominant theme, and it came from the committee, not from opponents.
Day had read the filings before he arrived. “In your 2025 filings, you listed $1.38 million in donations, and that was from three individuals total… There were $220,000 in in-kind, and that was from Mass Audubon, the Appalachian Mountain Club, trustees and others. Of that $1.38 million that were donated by the three individuals who were not signatories of the ballot petition… 789,000 were dedicated to paid signature gathering. Over 83% of that money was to pay for signature gatherers to get on the ballot.”
He asked how many signatures were gathered organically. Theoharides answered precisely: coalition members and volunteers collected about 18,000, “a little bit more than 15%,” and “the paid collection firm collected about 119,000 signatures.”
Day’s framing: “The process is set up with a necessarily high hurdle because you’re circumventing the normal legislative process… The influx of money allows these groups who have those funds and individuals who want to donate $1.3 million… that they can then go out and pay for this service, as opposed to those groups who may not necessarily have deep pockets behind them to be able to access the ballot.” And more broadly: “money is infiltrating considerably on the political process, but also in particular on the initiative ballot petition process.”
O’Neill’s defense included a detail he volunteered: “the paid signature firm that we use said we’ve never had an easier question to ask people to sign on. Which begs the question, why wouldn’t you go up and get them? It is a question of time.” Volunteers, he said, need training and the collection window is short.
Vieira, the committee’s ranking minority member, drew the comparison that will follow this campaign: “when I stand for re-election, or the governor stands for election… we can only receive $1,000 per individual citizen… And you’ve got one individual that wrote a check for $800,000. And I can only get $1,000, and the governor can only get $1,000 to get our message out.”
Who is against it
There is no opposition committee registered with OCPF, and nobody urged a no vote in the voter guide. Under state law the guide must print an argument against every question, so the secretary of the commonwealth’s office wrote one — the third question on this ballot where that happened, along with Questions 1 and 2. The state-written argument’s central claim is the appropriation clause, and it now reads as prescient: “Even if approved by the voters, the funds may not be allocated to the ‘Nature for All Fund,’ as the Legislature retains exclusive authority over appropriations decisions.”
The absence is more complete than that. Peisch opened the March 23 hearing by dividing it into four parts — subject matter experts, proponents, opponents, and pre-registered members of the public — with thirty minutes allotted to each. Nobody used the opponents’ half hour. The hearing went from the proponents’ questioning directly to public comment, and all five public witnesses testified in favor.
The skepticism came entirely from legislators, and from one fiscal watchdog outside the room. Friedman put the trade-off plainly: “I think we should be really serious about our natural resources. I also think we should be serious about the fact that we have a $3 billion deficit in mass health, that we are losing funding from the federal government on all of our programs, and so there’s always this horrible choice that we have about who gets… Who do we serve first?” Day called the fund “a lockbox that we’re not allowed to get near,” and O’Neill agreed with the characterization.
And Peisch’s assessment, delivered after O’Neill conceded the Legislature could appropriate nothing:
“It seems like a lot of effort to do something that, at the end of the day, is no different from the process we have right now, which is that you would all, and many others, advocate with the legislature during the budget process to get the appropriate amounts of funding for these various initiatives.”
Theoharides’s rejoinder is the proponents’ best answer: “I think the difference is, right now, none of it is directed to be appropriated to Nature and Water.”
Outside the hearing, Doug Howgate, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, has made the general objection: “From a public finance standpoint, carving up existing revenue sources into dedicated streams for specific things is a dangerous road.” MTF has published formal positions opposing three other questions this year and has taken none on Question 6.
The committee voted May 4 to recommend no action; the report was placed on file May 7, signed by Sens. Friedman, Crighton and Finegold and Reps. Peisch, Kate Hogan, Frank Moran, Day and Vieira. No minority report was filed — not unusual this cycle, since Sen. Ryan Fattman filed the only two, on Questions 1 and 5. Fattman arrived at this hearing during the public comment period, after the questioning was over.
And the proponents told the committee they would rather have legislation. O’Neill: “our priority is to secure a dedicated funding source for nature and water. The best way to do that is to pass legislation. That is the preferred path of the coalition and of those who are testifying today. The ballot measure is there, but our goal is to pass this legislation as soon as we can.” Theoharides: “we do prefer a legislative path, as we said.” The AMC’s witness asked the committee to advance the companion bill by number.
That bill, Senate 2571, was reported favorably in August 2025 and referred to Senate Ways and Means that October. It has not moved. Day was unpersuaded by the preference: “you’ve got a ballot question here that says, if we don’t get the majority of legislators agreeing with us… we’re going to go to the ballot. So I’ll take that with a grain of salt.”
