Quincy mayor's pay hike ballot question heading to court

A group of Quincy voters has sued the city to allow a question onto the November ballot that would halt a massive pay raise for the mayor.

A Norfolk Superior Court judge will hear arguments in the case Wednesday. The plaintiffs want the judge to oblige Quincy to put the pay hike question on the ballot.

Quincy Citizens for Fair Raises delivered more than 7,000 signatures in late September, well over the number required by the city to place a question on the ballot. But Quincy’s city clerk rejected 2,618 signatures — more than a third of the total submitted — most on the basis that they were illegible, according to the group’s court filing.

The group contends that more than 1,800 of the signatures thrown out were legitimate, and came from verifiable Quincy voters. They filed their lawsuit Thursday.

“I’ve never seen people who took such care to make sure that they could reduce the number of uncertified signatures as well as this group did,” said Quincy Citizens for Fair Raises attorney Gerry McDonough. “To see them rejected on such an arbitrary and baseless grounds is a matter of concern.”

After Quincy rejected the ballot initiative, the group quickly raised some $20,000 to take the issue to court.

“All we want is to get the signatures certified and give people the ability to vote on it,” McDonough said. “That's why we're in a democracy.”

Attorney Lauren Goldberg is representing the city of Quincy. Goldberg previously served as general counsel to the Elections Division of the Secretary of the Commonwealth. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

McDonough said there’s no statewide template for how signatures for municipal ballot petitions must be gathered. He said the group not only collected signatures, but went above and beyond by collecting printed names in a separate column. That, proponents said, would allow the city to easily check whether illegible signatures are from Quincy residents.

Quincy City Clerk Nicole Crispo told the Quincy Patriot-Ledger that her office only  considered the signature column when certifying signatures.

A spokesperson for Mayor Thomas Koch did not respond to a request for comment.

If the pay hike goes through, Quincy’s mayor would see a salary hike from $159,000 to $285,000, which is more than the mayors of Boston and New York City earn.

Koch has justified the increase by likening himself to the CEO of a $500 million corporation. He's also dismissed the ballot initiative as an effort led by people who don’t support him anyway, and stressed the “representative democracy” form of government, in which elected officials make most policy decisions.

The legibility of signatures at the center of Quincy politics brings a stroke of historical irony. The city is the birthplace of founding father John Hancock — the undisputed king of legible signatures — most remembered for his oversized autograph on the Declaration of Independence.

"We can’t expect everyone to have Hancock’s fire or his classic penmanship, but that’s not really the point," wrote Joe Murphy, one of the plaintiffs in the case. "Signing your name to a document calling for change was an act of political courage in 1776, and it still is in 2025."