Weekly Transcript Round-up for 04/03/26
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Weekly Transcript Round-up for 04/03/26Parents & Admin tell different bus stories; Budget docket blocked by Wu ally; Senior tax exemption has tough road; Housing hearing yields little news
Much of this week’s policy action centered on CFO Ashley Groffenberger’s announcement Monday that Boston was facing a $48.4M deficit in FY26. The Council won’t have a lot of time to grapple with that deficit: Boston’s FY27 budget coming out next week on April 8. That means that the Council and the public is going to need to grapple with understanding what caused the FY26 deficits at BPS (they have a $53M deficit) and in City Hall, while also learning about the FY27 budget. The big question that needs to be answered: how does the FY27 budget solve the challenges that caused the deficits in FY26? Even outside of the deficit announcement, there was a lot of press attention on the Council. Here is this week’s press coverage of the Council, and where to find these moments in BPI’s AI-generated transcripts: PARENTS AND DISTRICT TELL DIFFERENT ON-TIME BUS STORIES. While this hearing was scheduled on March 4, the stage for it was set with this article from WBUR published on Monday morning. That article successfully forecast how the hearing would go: parents think BPS transportation is failing, while the district officials points to “the strongest bus performance on record for BPS.” The major takeaway from the hearing was the City would begin fining TransDev $500 per so-called blown trip, which Rosenberg defined as “any trip which does not receive coverage or runs more than an hour late” - he is Speaker 4 & this answer is at the 1:52:57 mark. The revelation that the district had this tool, but chose not to use it, leaving $1.7M+ on the table, appears to have been revealed in WBUR’s article on Monday. Read more from the Herald, WBUR, and NBC10 Boston. WU’S TOP COUNCIL ALLY BLOCKS DEFICIT DOCKETS WITH USES PARLIAMENTARY MANEUVER. This week’s regular Council meeting was almost three hours long, but one exchange, which came in the last 10 minutes of the meeting, got attention from the Boston Herald and Universal Hub. That was District 8 Councilor Sharon Durkan, who prior to being elected to the City Council in a special election was a long-time campaign consultant for Mayor Wu, blocking 2 late file dockets from Councilors Flynn and Murphy - this starts at the 2:48:51 mark. Those 2 dockets were a hearing order on athletic funding, following news that the current deficit prevented a BPS baseball team from getting new hats - read more from the Herald on that issue - and a resolution calling for an “independent performance audit” of both BPS and City Hall. The result of the objection is that in a week where City Hall revealed the City had a $48.4M deficit, the word “deficit” wasn’t actually said on the Council floor. Check out the blocked dockets here:  The exchange prompted an editorial in the Herald, and this week the Globe Editorial Board also weighed in on the budget, urging the Mayor to cut spending and focus on private-sector real estate development. GBH REPORTING ON LOUIJEUNE’S SENIOR TAX BREAK MISSES CONTEXT: WU ADMIN REALLY DOESN’T LIKE THESE OPT-INS. This week GBH reported that Councilor-at-Large Louijeune offered Docket #0697 (p. 62), which seeks to opt Boston into 41C, an extremely narrow program that allows “single senior property owners 65 or older who have been living in Massachusetts for the last decade owning property for at least half the time and who have a gross income of less than $25,980 . . . up to $1,000 in tax relief.” Discussion of the docket starts at the 1:36:13 mark. GBH missed that opting into a program to provide small amounts of property tax relief was recently offered by a different Councilor, and the Wu administration emphatically rejected it. In June 2024, in the midst of the 1st round of fighting over Mayor Wu’s tax shift proposal, Councilor Gabriella Coletta Zapata offered Docket #0925, a “small business homestead exemption,” which like Louijeune’s proposal was an opt-in to an existing local option. In Coletta Zapata’s case, the opt-in would protect some small businesses from the impact of Mayor Wu’s property tax increase on commercial property - read her July 2024 op-ed in support of it. CFO Ashley Groffenberger told the Council at an early July hearing that it would be too much work: “We estimate it would take 24 working days, or five weeks of them doing nothing else, in order for them to do the work needed to implement this in time before the tax rate setting.” Groffenberger is Speaker 2 and this clip comes from a statement that starts at the 29:36 mark in the transcript. Despite all the action on property taxes in 2024, Coletta Zapata’s tax break opt-in didn’t happen. That bodes ill for Louijeune because looking at the 2 proposals side by side, Coletta Zapata’s appears much more straightforward - and impactful. That makes this an interesting docket to watch. COUNCIL TALKS HOUSING FOR FOUR HOURS. On Thursday morning the Council’s Housing & Community Development Committee held a long hearing on Docket #0286, a hearing order offered by Council Ben Weber “on housing development costs and barriers to building affordable housing units in the City of Boston.” This didn’t get covered by the press, but the hearing was important nonetheless as a check-in on City Hall housing policy at the start of Mayor Wu’s second term. Unfortunately for the editorial board at the Boston Globe, the hearing didn’t seem to show that the Wu administration was showing new energy or taking a new tack when it comes to housing production. The lack of any announcements, or even teasers of announcements, itself is an important statement on where housing policy stands in Boston. There was a long presentation from long-time Housing Chief Sheila Dillon - she is Speaker 11 & starts at the 27:25 mark. Dillon and the rest of the administration panel - which also included Deputy Planning Chief Devon Quirk and BHA Administrator Kenzie Bok - spent a lot of time defending the administration’s housing policies, which many outside experts have blamed for the collapse in new growth and fall in housing production in the City of Boston. There were also a number of important policy stories outside the Council:
Circle your calendar for April 8: Mayor Wu releases her FY27 budget and oral arguments for the White Stadium lawsuit take place before the Supreme Judicial Court. 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.
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