Weekly Transcript Round-Up for 1/17/25: 2024's failed Tax Shift Proposal gets 2025 remake; $110M Development Fund approved; PLUS Urban Renewal, BHA Elevators, ICE detainers, & White Stadium
While the birth of Mayor Michelle Wu’s third child on Monday and Governor Maura Healey’s State of the Commonwealth on Thursday dominated Boston’s headlines, there were two other major pieces of policy action this week:
Mayor Wu is making another run at temporary tax relief for Boston’s homeowners, sending a new home rule petition to the City Council that included all the language in her failed 2024 tax shift proposal, along with a senior tax abatement and a tax rebate proposal that amounts to a mid-year budget cut.
The Council approved Mayor Wu’s $110M “Housing Accelerator Fund” after the administration added a homeownership component, apparently in response to demands made by District 4 City Council Brian Worrell and Councilor At Large Julia Mejia in 2024 to focus the fund more on creating homeownership units instead of rentals.
Find more on those two below.
In addition to those two items, at this week’s Council meeting there was discussion and activity on a number of other important issues - find the docket #’s, the page in the agenda packet, and the time discussion of each item starts in the transcript:
An important piece of Mayor Wu’s package of planning & development reforms is coming before the City Council, with a docket this week from City Hall requesting the extension of the City’s Urban Renewal Plans - docket #0241 is on page 24 to 27 & was referred to the Committee on Planning, Development, and Transportation.
Former District 8 City Councilor Kenzie Bok and current Boston Housing Authority Administrator Kenzie Bok updated the Council on plans to replace eight elevators in BHA properties - docket #0247 is on page 35 & was not discussed and docket #0259 on page 64 & discussion starts at the 2:10:45 mark.
Current District 8 City Councilor Sharon Durkan revived a Menino-era proposal to tax sugary beverages, which was cheered by the Boston Municipal Research Bureau - docket #0250 on page 53 & discussion starts at 1:35:36 mark.
Councilor Durkan also resubmitted her hearing over on algorithmic rent-setting, an issue that BPI talked to Herald about last year - docket #0251 on page 54 & discussion starts at 1:45:22 mark.
District 2 Councilor Ed Flynn wants more information on how Boston Police Department and Immigration & Customs Enforcement communicate on detainer requests, an issue in Boston and the Commonwealth that was mentioned by Governor Healey in her State of the Commonwealth speech - docket #0243 on page 29 & was not discussed and docket #0256 on page 60 & discussion starts at 1:58:26 mark.
The fight over White Stadium continued this week, with the Emerald Neck Conservancy releasing a report arguing a new high school athletic complex could be built on the site for less than $30M - hundreds less than the $200M+ Mayor Wu’s proposal will cost - and Councilor Flynn proposing a hearing order about an alternative location in Boston for the new NWSL team’s home field - docket #0258 pn pages 62 & 63, which the Clerk said was withdrawn at the 2:10:18 mark.
The last important piece of news is this headline from the Boston Business Journal:
The major issue appears to be City Hall’s reversal of building height on the Boston Common side of Washington Street. In April 2024 the City proposed zoning that would allow a 180 ft limit, but last week the City proposed new zoning that would allow 500 ft high buildings, so long as those new buildings were 60% residential.
In attendance at Thursday’s meeting was Boston’s new Planning Chief Kairos Shen, who was appointed by Mayor Wu in September 2024 to serve as the head of Boston’s Planning Department and the quasi-official Boston Planning & Development Agency. Shen is a long-time former senior official at the BPDA, working there from 1993 to 2015. After he was hired into his current position in 2024, Scott Van Voorhis at Contrarian Boston added important details to Shen’s departure from the BPDA:
Shen was handed his walking papers in May 2015, just a few months after the completion of an internal probe of abusive texting between employees at the then Boston Redevelopment Authority, where he was chief planner.
2025 does not look like it will get any easier, with Article 80 modernization, fights over the Squares & Streets program to upzone neighborhood business districts, and a new report from the Boston Municipal Research Bureau warning about slowing growth.
2025 TAX RELIEF PACKAGE IS REDUX OF FAILED 2024 TAX SHIFT PROPOSAL
Last year Mayor Wu’s push for state permission to raise taxes beyond the bounds of Prop 2 ½ failed after the City’s final tax numbers were significantly lower than estimates City officials had released in September, prompting business groups to withdraw support for a compromise they had negotiated and State Senator William Brownsberger to tell reporters:
“The way [these property valuation] numbers came down, this bill should not be before us,” Brownsberger said. “If people knew that this was going to be [a] 10 percent [increase], we never would have seen this bill. Now we know, time to end it.”
On Monday Mayor Wu unveiled a new tax shift home rule petition, consisting of the entire failed tax shift proposal, along with a senior tax abatement and a homeowners tax rebate - it is docket #0236 on page 8 to 13 of the agenda packet. The tax rebate represents a major change in City Hall policy, because it amounts to a mid-year budget cut. Here is that policy:
6. In the event that the tax rate for Fiscal Year 2025 does not change as outlined above, it gives the City of Boston the legal authority to issue some degree of residential tax rebates from surplus funds. The amount of money and the rebate shall be determined by the City of Boston and will be subject to an appropriation reviewed and approved by the Council.
The FY25 budget was approved last June and did not include any “surplus funds,” which means the money to pay for “residential tax rebates” has to come from some other budget item: in other words, a mid-year budget cut. This is a major change in policy from the Wu administration which last year rejected the idea of budget cuts and in an October 15 letter provided a list of potential cuts to illustrate “what an immediate 1% budget cut in this current fiscal year could entail.
BPI’s analysis of the legislation was featured in an editorial from the Boston Herald and BPI was also quoted in the Dorchester Reporter’s article about the proposal. The legislation was sent to the Government Operations Committee, where a hearing should take place soon.
HOUSING FUND APPROVED AFTER CITY HALL ADDS HOMEOWNERSHIP COMPONENT
More than four months after Mayor Wu announced a $100M “Housing Accelerator Fund” at her annual speech before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce the program had its first formal City Council hearing on Tuesday and was approved on Wednesday.
The quick approval obscures how much the fund approved Wednesday differed from the Wu administration’s original proposal. Councilor Brian Worrell detailed the significant concessions he won from the administration in his speech Wednesday asking the Council to approve the fund, including a separate homeownership fund and much more robust and public reporting requirements for how money is spent - he is Speaker Speaker 6 and starts at the 31:15 mark in the transcript.
The addition of the homeownership fund is the biggest concession Worrell won from City Hall. In a hearing on October 1, 2024 before Worrell’s Ways & Means Committee about a similar fund proposed by Councilor Worrell, administration officials argued against including homeownership units in the “Housing Accelerator Fund.”
Devin Quirk, then the interim chief of the city’s Planning Department and now back to being a Deputy Director, said - he is speaker 2 and starts at the 27:09 mark in the transcript:
Whether in market or affordable, it’s [public money] going to stretch further, because there are other sources of capital that we can pull in from the state and federal level. We might get more housing for our local dollar if we’re investing in the rental market.
Kenzie Bok, former District 8 City Councilor and current BHA administrator warned - she is speaker 4 and starts at the 1:25:32 mark in the transcript:
It’s a public interest to get these families rooted and… close the racial wealth gap. But it’s key for us to keep those things where we’re just spending money on something that we think is a good housing purpose, separate from an investment that we expect to return.
Watching the hearing on Tuesday, it was clear City Hall officials had done an about-face on homeownership. At the same time, in describing how the new homeownership fund would work, it is clear why those officials pushed back so hard against the idea in October: it is complicated, legally fraught, and time intensive.
Here is Boston Housing Chief Sheila Dillon describing the separate homeownership fund - she is Speaker 5 and starts at the 28:16 mark in the transcript:
Here is a transcript:
To that end, the city is seeking to launch a homeownership investment pilot. And how would this work? We would be seeking to use a portion of the $110M in that that we're talking about today. This funding would be used to provide construction financing, probably participating with other lenders, but lending at a lower interest rate to make projects more viable, and to jump start home ownership projects that are stuck. These investments, of course, would be paid back when the units sell. So really participating in much pretty traditional construction financing for home ownership projects. MASS Housing through the Momentum Fund, is unable to invest in home ownership projects, So learning from the discussions and the process that we've gone through so far, we'd be issuing an RFP looking for a financial institution that we can trust with our funding to underwrite and work very closely with us on investing in homeownership projects.
The other interesting thing to come out of this hearing was more detail on where the “Housing Accelerator Fund” would sit inside of Boston’s government. Answering a question from Councilor Worrell at the 1:49:10 mark, CFO Ashley Groffenberger said that “the Boston Housing Authority will sort of administer the accelerator fund.” BHA has a tradition of housing unusual operations aimed at spurring development: the Boston Redevelopment Authority was first created as a division of the BHA before becoming an independent agency in 1957.
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