Weekly Transcript Round-up for 06/05/26
tahir h
Weekly Transcript Round-up for 06/05/26Council shocks with delay on FY27 Operating Budget approval & amendment vote; Council unanimously approves FY26 budget deficit supplementals, FY27 capital budget
This week’s regular City Council meeting on Wednesday, June 3rd, was supposed to see votes on all of the major FY27 and FY26 budget items. While most of that did get done - the 2 votes on the historic $70M supplemental appropriations to close the FY26 budget deficit, the 1st of 2 votes on the $4.4B FY27-31 Capital Budget, and the vote for Boston Public Schools $1.7B FY27 budget - the most important vote expected this week did not happen.  Dockets #1030 & #1031 are to close the $70M deficit in FY26; #0738 is the Capital Budget; #0734 is BPS budget. The Council opted not to vote on Mayor Wu’s $4.9B FY27 Operating Budget or on any amendments to that budget, and instead voted by a large margin - 10-3 - to delay the vote until next week’s meeting on June 10.
This WTR is focused on the vote to delay: it was both shocking in the moment and a major embarrassment for Ways & Means Chair Ben Weber. In hindsight however, it has been clear for several weeks that Councilors were broadly critical to the Mayor’s FY27 budget, were under severe pressure thanks to the many cuts in the budget, and were unable to work through those issues in the new amendment process that Chair Weber implemented. The reason why breaks down into 3 pieces:
BPI has more on each one of those pieces, based on BPI’s previous experience with the FY25 and FY26 budget processes, and based on what BPI’s liveblogs from all 6 budget working sessions - READ THE LIVEBLOGS #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6. Sign up to get BPI’s liveblog of the Council’s 7th budget working session, scheduled for Monday, June 8, at 12 PM THE PREVIOUS AMENDMENT PROCESS VS THIS YEAR’S AMENDMENT PROCESS To understand why that was such a momentous decision, here is roughly how the amendment process worked for the FY25 and FY26 budgets:
At that point in the amendment process, Councilors knew how much support individual amendments had, what their colleagues supported and opposed, and could gauge the feelings of outside actors, from Wu administration officials to neighborhood activists and public sector unions. Weber was clear that he did not intend to follow that process for the FY27 budget. Weber never distributed or provided a detailed review of the list of all the budget amendments at a budget working session. Instead, after all the Councilors submitted their proposed amendments to him on May 20, Weber spent more than a week whittling $100M+ in amendments down. He presented a $14.5M package to his colleagues for the first time on Friday, May 29. Check out the May 29 version of package through the button below. Weber Amendment Package on 05.29.26 Prior to the May 29 release of his amendment package, a number of Councilors expressed opposition to Weber’s new process and urged him to continue using the previous process, including Ruthzee Louijeune. As the former Council President and an important vote in Breadon’s 7-6 win, the fact that she disagreed with Weber about how he was running the FY27 budget amendment process was notable.
Louijeune was also not the only one expressing this concern. FitzGerald put the issue in starker terms at the 3rd working session on May 28:
The distinct impression at the working sessions where this was discussed was that these 2 councilors were expressing the broad consensus of the body in favor of the previous process, and that Weber was choosing to ignore his colleagues in favor of his new process. NEW PROCESS CREATED NEW OPPORTUNITIES By waiting so long to hand out the amendments, and calling for a budget vote on June 3, Councilors were pressed for time. Not only did Councilors never get to talk about their own amendments or hear about their colleagues’ proposals, they did not even get much time to discuss Weber’s package.
Weber’s decision to skip a public examination of all the Councilors budget amendments forced his colleagues to rethink how to present their ideas to the body. At the June 2 budget working session Councilor John FitzGerald presented his own package of $7M in changes. This was the first time - at least FY25-FY27 - that a Councilor other than the Ways & Means Chair offered their own amendment package to the Council this close to a budget vote. The reason seems to be that the previous amendment review process prevented this kind of effort, since all of the Councilors’ proposals were examined and discussed by the whole body. The spending cuts in FitzGerald’s package were very different than Weber’s: they relied on both using a different approach to pulling more money from vacant jobs and eliminating existing jobs in a number of departments. FitzGerald made the case that some of his cuts could be a substitute for divisive cuts in Weber’s package, and said that by blending the 2 packages “this might get this whole body on board.” FitzGerald’s proposal was not universally accepted: both Durkan and Louijeune criticized elements of the package immediately after it was offered. However, a longer conversation about the package, and how it might blend with Weber’s package, did not happen. Instead, less than an hour after FitzGerald proposed his package Weber gaveled the budget working session closed. Since that was the last budget working session before the planned vote on Wednesday, June 3, all those outstanding issues were being left to be hatched out on the Council floor. Those issues were significant: FitzGerald’s $7M proposal and 47 proposed amendments that Murphy said had been left out of Weber’s package. WEBER’S PROPOSAL ON WEDNESDAY WAS DIFFERENT IN CONTENT & FORM On Wednesday Ways & Means Chair Weber offered his colleagues a much different version of the proposed amendment package they’d had the past 5 days - he offers it at the 2:50:22 mark. There were 2 big differences:
 The image on the left is a page of specific cuts being made for specific spending increases. Compare that to the table on right, which is how the spending increases and decreases were presented to Councilors in the budget working sessions.
Here is the “Committee Report” component of that 50 page packet Weber presented his colleagues on Wednesday afternoon: Councilors were given an hour recess to look that packet over. According to the Boston Herald, during that recess Council President Liz Breadon asked her colleagues to delay the vote on the budget until June 10 - it starts at the 3:00:14 mark and ends at 4:10:14 mark. When the Council returned Breadon immediately recognized Murphy, who motioned for the delay - she makes that motion starting at the 4:10:24 mark. The body did not spend long debating the motion, and the Council voted 10-3 to delay - vote starts at the 4:18:36 mark. Now the Council has a new budget working session scheduled for Monday, June 8, at 12 PM - read the public notice. BPI will have a liveblog of the event. Boston Policy Institute, Inc is working to improve the public conversation - help us by following BPI on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
© 2026 Boston Policy Institute, Inc
|
