Special to the Patriot-Bridge
Senator Sal DiDomenico filed over 80 bills this January marking the beginning of the 2025-2026 Legislative Session. Senator DiDomenico is focused on passing legislation and securing funding on a wide range of issues from supporting working families in need, to providing the best education for our youngest generation, to making our government work better for people regardless of their background or spoken language.
“I am excited about the bills I have filed and the coalitions we are working with this legislative session that will improve the well-being of children and people in need across the Commonwealth,” said Senator Sal DiDomenico. “I look forward to building on the momentum and success of the last session to advance priorities important to my constituents such as preserving affordable housing, increasing cash assistance to families in deep poverty, ensuring everyone has access to nutritious food, protecting our environment, spurring our economy forward, and standing up for workers’ rights.”
Below is just a handful of priority bills that Senator DiDomenico will be spearheading this session:
• Lifting kids out of deep poverty: This legislation would increase cash assistance to families below 50% of the poverty line.
• Preventing wage theft: This legislation would ensure there is strong accountability for contractors and subcontractors who steal wages from hard-working employees, and it would expand the Attorney General’s enforcement powers to include bringing a lawsuit against those employers.
• Expanding tax credits for families: This legislation would expand earned income tax credit eligibility, increase the children and family tax credit per qualifying dependent, and allow for periodic payments of the tax credits.
• Addressing PTSD: This legislation will make it easier for police, firefighters, and other public safety personnel to get the healthcare they need and deserve when suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
• Healthy Youth Act: This legislation would require that when sex and relationship education is taught in school, it must be medically accurate, cover healthy consenting relationships, and be inclusive of all identities.
• The SUPER Act: This legislation would remove barriers to the social work field, incentivize social workers to remain in the field and bolster our workforce.
• Commonwealth Preschool Partnership Initiative: This legislation would expand access to preschool, beginning with high-needs communities, to guarantee high quality education to all our children, regardless of their zip code.
• Providing identification for individuals reentering society: This legislation would ensure that individuals reentering society from prison or jail receive a state identification card upon release.
• Promote high-quality comprehensive literacy instruction: This legislation would ensure that Massachusetts schools teach high-quality comprehensive literacy instruction to our students to improve reading and writing outcomes for our children.
• Establish a Massachusetts children’s cabinet: This legislation would create a Children’s Cabinet under the Governor’s office that would ensure services for children and youth are planned, managed, and delivered in a coordinated and integrated way.
• Eliminate education inflation cap: This legislation removes the annual inflation cap on education funding so that schools can get the resources they need to account for rising costs each year.
• Language access and inclusion: This legislation would ensure that public-facing state agencies and departments provide equal access to services, programs and activities serving limited English proficient and deaf or hard of hearing residents.
• Expand access to pediatric palliative care: This legislation would increase the age of eligibility for pediatric palliative care services to 22 years of age so more young people most in need of care will be able to access life-changing services.
• Reduce waste and recycling costs: This legislation would require that manufacturers of packaging materials create systems for recycling those materials after being used which will reduce fossil fuel emissions and waste.
• Encourage retirement planning: This legislation would create a statewide retirement planning program to ensure that workers all over the state can access a retirement savings account even if their employer doesn’t offer one.
• Compensation for work-related scarring: This legislation would eliminate the restrictive requirement that compensation can only be given to employees who endure work-related scarring that is exclusively on their face, hands, or neck, and allow those employees to access more comprehensive compensation as a result.
• Access to Counsel: This legislation would ensure that tenants and homeowner occupied landlords have full legal counsel in eviction proceedings.
• ENOUGH Act: This legislation will create an innovative strategy to fight poverty by investing resources in high need neighborhoods and collaborating with community residents to help drive decisions that will ensure investments increase economic mobility.
Poverty Commission
• As Co-Chair of the Massachusetts Poverty Commission, Senator DiDomenico has hosted community hearings across the state to gather insight from people living in and working to address poverty. The goal of the commission is to study the ways our state can best address inequality, reduce poverty, and promote opportunity in the Commonwealth over the next 10 years.
• Now the hearings have been completed, and the commission of over 30 elected officials, policy experts, and advocates have gathered recommendations. Senator DiDomenico will use these recommendations to file an anti-poverty omnibus bill. This legislation will address the root causes of poverty, increase pathways to economic opportunity for everyone, and ensure residents have equal and easy access to all of the essential services that our state provides to people in need.