On Monday night, the Cambridge City Council voted unanimously to instruct the city manager to draft a home-rule petition in hopes of protecting domestic-partnership benefits for city employees. In 1999, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that cities cannot offer such benefits to employees until the state legislature passes a law explicitly allowing the practice. In response to a lawsuit filed last year by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a conservative legal group affiliated with Pat Robertson, Cambridge’s domestic-partnership law was struck down, and the partners and families of more than 60 city employees lost their health-care benefits in January.

The home-rule petition, to be drafted within a month, will ask the state legislature to allow Cambridge to continue offering the benefits. It will then return to the council for a vote, where it’s expected to pass easily. “The city council has been quite adamant in its support for the city’s provision of benefits,” says Sue Hyde of the Cambridge Lavender Alliance. She notes that since the ACLJ filed suit, every councilor has supported efforts to protect the employees’ health-care coverage.

It’s crucial that Cambridge be allowed to reinstate the benefits, says Councilor Ken Reeves, who co-sponsored the order with Councilor Marjorie Decker. At the council meeting, Reeves notes, “some [employees’ partners] said they were now paying 200-something dollars a month for health-care coverage, others said $400, and some don’t have any coverage at all.” But the real struggle will be on Beacon Hill, where House Speaker Tom Finneran has opposed efforts to offer domestic-partnership benefits to state employees. Hyde, however, sees the home-rule petition as a possible compromise, and a concession to Finneran’s critics on the left. “It has a chance of passage because the leadership of the House will find it more palatable to pass one town’s home-rule petition rather than pass the statewide domestic-partnership bill,” she says.

Issue Date: April 12 - 19, 2001