 The year was 1994 and I was chair of the election laws committee. It was my first chairmanship as a freshman state senator and during that season a common cause which is a good government organization that operates nationally but also has a very active and strong chapter here in Massachusetts decided that they wanted to see some campaign finance reform and so they decided to go to the ballot. They filed legislation but they also decided to go gather signatures to go to the ballot in case the legislature didn't approve the legislation and the the house chair was a now good friend of mine John McDonough and John and I said that we felt that the best campaign finance reform legislation would come out of a legislative process where the citizens could be active and involved in the discussion where common cause the proponents of it could be involved and the legislators because a ballot question once it gets on the ballot it's an up-or-down vote and it really shouldn't be amended in any significant way by the legislature afterwards and so we wanted to make sure that we had a good strong and fair bill and so John and I worked with common cause and with our colleagues in the legislature and some other folks other interest groups outside and we negotiated over about a five month period even as they were gathering the signatures to go on the ballot and we ended up producing what was at the end of the process described by mass purge and common cause as at that time the toughest state-based regulations and legislation in the country we went from $1,000 contributions from individuals to legislative candidates down to a maximum of 500 the same for lobbyists from $1,000 maximum down to $200 we also took the the check off on your state income tax form and we changed it to a withdrawal of a dollar from your taxes as it goes into the general fund rather than you having to add the dollar if you wanted to support the state's campaign finance public funding account which was then distributed to candidates for statewide office through as a result of the money collected in the state income tax and then we also provided for increased disclosure we also set up what was known as people's packs which would essentially be considered packs that groups of individuals rather than lobbyists and interest groups could organize and mainly organized labor could could use this mechanism to take large numbers of people taking small contributions and be able to pass those on as contributions to legislators to try to equalize the power that small donors would have over large donors so campaign finance reform continues to be a concern throughout the country and here in Massachusetts in fact there was another chapter a few years later where a ballot question for public funding for candidates for the legislature and for the statewide offices was put into effect and unfortunately over time we were not able to agree on the amendments that were necessary to work out some of the technical problems and so eventually that question was just simply set aside and was not implemented but the strong campaign finance laws that were adopted in 1994 as a result of the efforts that John McDonough and I made in negotiating with Common Cause are still in effect and a few of them have been even strengthened in the last few years as a result of some problems that we've identified and so in Massachusetts we have among the strictest campaign finance laws in the country