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Longtime Burlington, Vt. Mayor Miro Weinberger will not seek re-election

Majority Of Proposed Mass. Ballot Questions Clear First Major Hurdle

picture of Your Vote Counts pin
Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley  has given a constitutional OK to most of the ballot questions activists hope to put before voters next year.

One of the 28  questions moving forward is an effort to repeal the expansion of the state’s sales tax to computer and software services.  Michael Widmer , president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation says it strikes at the heart of the state’s  technology driven innovation economy

Questions setting nurse to patient staffing ratios, raising the minimum wage, and cutting the state’s sales tax could also make it to the ballot, if supporters can collect the signatures of more than  80,000 registered voters. Five questions were rejected including one to outlaw casino gambling in Massachusetts and one to require labels on genetically  modified food.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.