TODAY: Council to vote on Boston's FY26 Budget, budget amendments
Today's votes will send the budget back to Mayor Wu for approval or vetoes
By law the Boston City Council has until the 2nd Wednesday in June - a week from today on June 11 - to vote on Boston’s FY26 budget.
As he did last year, Ways & Means Chair Brian Worrell is asking the Council to act on the budget a week early, and that means voting on the FY26 budget today. Based on the Agenda Packet for this today’s regular Council meeting, the Council will be voting on all three of the City’s FY26 budgets today: Operating Budget; Capital Budget; and Boston Public Schools’ budget - Dockets #0822-#0845, on p. 33-90 in this week’s Agenda Packet.
The major focus of the Council for the last few days, and of today’s meeting, will be on the specific changes - called budget amendments - the Council makes to Mayor Wu’s FY26 budget.
Yesterday the Council spent more than 8 hours in an FY26 budget working session - starting at 10 AM and ending after 6 PM - working on budget amendments. Tuesday’s working session was a departure from Monday’s working session, which started more than an hour late. The strong attendance at Tuesday’s working session also appeared to be a depature from the previous meetings: Monday’s working session started with just 3 Couniclors, and during that same meeting Councilor Sharon Durkan commented that not enough of her colleagues were in attendance at this or earlier working sessions to find consensus on important budget decisisons.
Exactly what specific changes the Council will propose to Mayor Wu’s budget is not currently known: BPI requested access to the Council’s running list of proposed budget amendments on Monday but has not gotten a response as of the publishing of this post.
If history is any guide, the changes will be minimal. For example, last year the Council made $15M in changes to the $4.6B budget, or .3% of the FY25 budget. Mayor Wu vetoed $13.3M of the changes, and the Council was able to override $6.2M worth of her vetoes, leaving $8.2M worth of changes, or .17% of the FY25 budget.
BPI’s Executive Director wrote an op-ed for the Dorchester Reporter criticizing last year’s budget process as “a Live Action Role Play of what the Council thinks a robust legislative process would look like, if it had one,” because of how little in Boston’s recent budgets the Council has attempted to change. Read it here:
Today’s meeting starts at 12 PM and will be streamed live on the Council’s YouTube channel.
BPI will be monitoring the votes & have a summary of what happened in Friday’s Weekly Transcript Round-Up, so make sure to sign up for the newsletter & follow BPI on your favorite social media platforms!
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