MassTrack Legislative Memorandum

MEMORANDUM

To: Members of the Massachusetts General Court
From: Christopher R. Anderson, President
Date: March 7, 2006

Re: MassTrack.org; a new online tool to measure support for the public policy priorities of the Mass. technology community

For nearly 30 years the Massachusetts High Technology Council has worked with the Legislature and Governors to help make Massachusetts more competitive for our technology economy. Our CEO members, who run leading companies from across the state’s diverse technology economy, have always set our positions on a variety of public policy issues.

Beginning with this legislative session we will link—for the first time—the results of our annual survey with MassTrack.org, a new online tool to measure the support by you and your colleagues for the technology community’s public policy priorities. A key feature of this tool will be a weighted assessment of each individual vote linked to the importance of the issue assigned to it by the state’s technology employers.

Results will be available on a new website that will serve as a clearinghouse for this information in a format that is easy to access and understand. The results of the legislative assessment will be released this summer, after the 2005-2006 legislative session ends and in advance of the fall elections.

So, how will you know when an upcoming vote will be included as a MassTrack vote? Based on our most recently completed CEO survey, we will notify you in advance of legislation that will fall within this category. A “MassTrack Technology Vote” designation means that on that specific issue, your vote on that legislation will be included in the MassTrack scorecard.

The first potential new vote we will alert you to will be the health care bill that is currently being redrafted by both branches. In our 2006 CEO survey, our members ranked “Oppose new employer taxes to fund state health care system” as the fifth highest ranked policy priority. So, if the final bill includes an employer tax, a “yes” vote will negatively impact a legislator’s rating in the current session.

Later this month, we will release the first phase of MassTrack which ranks how each of our 351 cities and towns are viewed based on factors taken into account by technology employers when considering site location within Massachusetts. Features of interest will include rankings of each community based on the concentration of workforce in technology, openness to permitting and housing growth, and local tax policies.

We expect MassTrack will be a valuable educational tool for technology employees, voters, the media and, most importantly, elected leaders. If you would like more information on MassTrack or for a demonstration on how it will work, please contact me or Cort Boulanger at (781) 890-6482.