Weekly Transcript Round-Up for 2/28/25
School Cmte presented Madison Park's state aid bid; Council approves 3 Net Zero Board members w/o vetting, hearing; Did City Hall answer BPI's 5 Qs on Revenue?
Coming back from February vacation, Boston had a busy week filled with important policy updates and decisions:
At Wednesday’s regular City Council meeting 3 nominees for the Building Emissions Reduction And Disclosure (BERDO) Review Board were approved without hearings on their qualifications and over the objections of some Councilors - these nominees were only submitted to the Council on February 12 and BERDO has been cited by developers and housing policy experts as a major factor driving up the cost of construction in the City & leaving 26,000 homes permitted but unbuilt.
On Wednesday night Wu administration officials for the first time presented the formal Massachusetts School Building Authority application for Madison Park High School to the School Committee, which left out major information included at a January 28 community meeting, and raised more questions about BPS’ long-term facilities plans.
On Thursday morning the Council’s Ways & Means Committee held a hearing on FY26 revenue projections - keep reading to find out if City Hall answered BPI’s 5 questions.
Before getting into those three items, the Council held hearings & took action at the Regular meeting on items that have been making news:
Docket #0407 is an “ordinance for Road Safety and Accountability for Delivery Providers,” which was announced by Mayor Wu earlier this month and is targeted at delivery drivers like GrubHub, DoorDash, and UberEats. The Docket had a hearing on Monday before the Government Operations Committee where both City Hall officials and delivery app representatives spoke - check out that hearing transcript. At Wednesday’s regular meeting Chair & District 1 City Councilor Gabriela Coletta Zapata said she was keeping the ordinance in committee due to significant unanswered questions and major potential revisions of the ordinance, so expect more Council action on this in the coming weeks - she is speaker 13 and starts at the 58:01 mark in the transcript.
Docket #0144 is a home rule petition (HRP) to change how Boston elects City Councilors and being using Ranked Choice Voting. The HRP had a hearing back in October 2024 - read the Herald’s coverage & check out the transcript - was the subject of an un-televised Government Operations Committee working session this week, and saw an op-ed about it by Council President Louijeune in the Boston Globe. Last summer BPI wrote about how this version of RCV differs from Cambridge in ways that experts say make it significantly less impactful - TL;DR, using RCV in Boston’s single-member districts just doesn’t increase voters’ options the way using RCV in a multi-member district like Cambridge’s 9-person all at-large Council does. At Wednesday’s regular meeting Chair Coletta Zapata said it would remain in committee - she is speaker 13 and starts at the 1:13:21 mark in the transcript.
During discussion about Docket #0144, discussion began about Commonwealth Secretary of State William Galvin announcement on Monday that he was putting Boston’s Election Department into receivership for the 2025 & 2026 elections and possibly longer after what he called “serious problems” with how the November 2024 election was handled. Early in the meeting it was reported that Election Commissioner Eneida Tavares had sent a letter to the Council about the receivership decision and Council President & Councilor-at-Large Ruthzee Louijuene objected to District 2 Councilor Ed Flynn’s use of the term “receivership” to describe what was happening to Boston’s election department, despite its widespread use, including in State House News Service’s reporting - Flynn is Speaker 11 and starts at the 1:16:37 mark and Louijeune is Speaker 1 and starts at the 1:21:17 mark in the transcript. Later in the meeting the Council accepted a late file for an “emergency hearing” on Boston’s Election Department, so expect to see more about this in the coming weeks.
Docket #0558 was a resolution in support of Eve Griffin, a Boston Public Library battling cancer. She used all of her sick time and paid leave, and her colleagues want to contribute their own sick days and leave in order to keep her from having to go on unpaid leave in order to attend doctor’s appointments and treatment. BPL administrators and City Hall have so far refused, causing an increasingly public battle. On Wednesday Council President Louijeune spoke against the resolution, telling colleagues she did not think taking official action like was appropriate, because “I don't want this council to be engaged over and over again on personnel disputes that are in the purview of the administration.” That prompted a response for Councilor Flynn and Councilor-at-Large Murphy - the discussion on this docket starts at the 2:40:00 mark in the transcript. The vote on this resolution once again shows the deep divides on this Council, with the entire Council leadership - the Councilor President and the Council’s most powerful Committee Chairs for Ways & Means, Government Operations, Planning, Public Safety, and Education - all voting present.
COUNCIL APPROVES 3 APPOINTEES TO HIGH PROFILE NET ZERO BOARD WITHOUT HEARING, OVER OBJECTIONS OF SOME COUNCILORS
Every regular Council meeting, the 9th section of the agenda is “Green Sheets” where Councilors are allowed to pull up previously filed dockets for action. This allows the Council to act on dockets that have not yet had hearings, and that is what happened on Wednesday when Councilor Coletta Zapata pulled three dockets out of Green Sheets: all three are nominations of a person to the Building Emissions Reduction And Disclosure (BERDO) Review Board, which Mayor Wu submitted to the Council on February 12, just two weeks ago - she is Speaker 13 and starts at the 4:01:56 mark in the transcript.
Using Green Sheets is rare, and even rarer is pulling things out of Green Sheets and then overriding a Councilor’s objections and immediately voting on the dockets. That is what happened: Councilor Flynn objected to pulling the three dockets out of Green Sheets - he is Speaker 4:04:11 and starts at the 4:04:11 mark in the transcript - and the Council President polled the members of the Environmental Justice, Resiliency, and Parks Committee. Here is that vote:
After winning that polling, Councilor Coletta Zapata acknowledged how unusual this action was - she is Speaker 13 and starts at 4:06:16 mark in the transcript:
This was just brought to my attention. Of course, I always want to abide by the informal rules, I guess, when it comes to Green Sheets. I do know that the the BERDO board has many items on their agenda.
Councilor Coletta Zapata then read out the nominees biographies and the Council approved all three nominees on a voice vote.
It is important to note that the Council had an opportunity to hold a hearing on these nominees, it just chose not to. The Council held two hearings last week during February school vacation and held four meetings on Monday & Tuesday this week, including two chaired by Coletta Zapata, who also chairs the committee that the BERDO nominees were sent to.
Council leadership’s decision to avoid a hearing on these nominees is a choice to sidestep a public conversation that started last year, but has been super-charged by the recently begun race for Mayor: the role that Mayor Wu’s new environmental regulations are playing in the dearth of new construction in the City. The Council briefly touched on this issue last year, during the fight in public and on the Council over the replacement of long-time Ironworkers Local 7 leader Jay Hurley by Wu ally & UNITE HERE Local 26 chief Jamie O’Neill on the Zoning Commission after Hurley helped vote down the Mayor’s Net Zero Carbon Zoning Initiative. The Boston Foundation’s 2024 Housing Report Card found - find this quote & graph on page 22:
The costs associated with materials, financing, and regulatory hurdles combine to significantly slow housing production in our region, and even when housing is built, high costs make it increasingly difficult to deliver units that are affordable to low- and moderate-income households.
AFTER BEING IGNORED FOR WEEKS, SCHOOL COMMITTEE GETS BPS FIRST PRESENTATION OF MADISON PARK’S MSBA APPLICATION
On Wednesday night Boston Public Schools official presented the School Committee was Madison Park High School’s application to the Massachusetts School Building Authority’s Core Program. This presentation is the first time that MPHS’ future has been discussed with the School Committee in months. It comes weeks after the January 22 hearing where the City Council was informed that the City would seek state aid rather than pay for MPHS’ renovation, and a January 28 community meeting where City Hall officials made a much more detailed presentation, though it isn’t clear whether any of those details will actually carry through into the MSBA process.
Looking through the three presentations to the Council, the public, and the SC, three things stand out: community activists who have been involved in the MPHS process feel misled by City Hall & BPS officials; BPS is still resisting admitting that resources spent on the orginial pay-out-of-pocket plan were wasted; MPHS provides enormous amounts of evidence that there is no BPS long-term facilities facilities plan.
COMMUNITY ACTIVISTS & BPS HAVE DIFFERING ACCOUNTS OF COMMUNITY OUTREACH BPS’ defensiveness about that process was palpable in Wednesday’s presentation, accompanied as it was by angry public testimony and a series of recent news articles and opinion pieces describing the community’s frustration with the Kafkaesque BPS building process.
MSBA APP LACKS DETAILS BEING PRESENTED AT COMMUNITY MEETINGS The MSBA application presentation has far fewer details than were included in either the January 22 Council hearing or January 28 community meeting. That is because the detailed site plan described in those presentations is not part of the actual application that BPS is submitting to the MSBA. This underscores that if MPHS goes into the MSBA process, virtually none of the resources that BPS has dedicated to this project so far - including large amounts of money the district has spent - will be re-usable, and the entire school building process will need to be re-started.
THERE IS NO LONG TERM FACILITIES PLAN Despite claims from Mayor Wu and Superintendent Skipper, there is no evidence that BPS officials are making decisions about BPS’ construction projects based on any publicly available long-term facilities plan. Two statements from BPS’ Capital Planning Chief Delavern Stanislaus at Wednesday’s presentation highlighted that.
First was her claim that last fall the district got back MPHS’ feasbility study and realized that this project would not cost $500M, as the district expected, but more than $700M. What was not described on Wednesday, but hopefully will be explored by the City Council when they have a hearing on this application on Monday, is why MPHS was shocked by that cost. Boston’s next door Revere had been staring down a $500M high school since February 2023, and authorized a $500M bond in May 2024 - the same month that BPS was deciding on which design teams to hire for MPHS. Revere is building a college prep school, a less expensive proposition than MPHS with its expensive vocational program, for fewer students than MPHS is being projected at enrolling.
Second is that during Wednesday’s meeting Chief Stanislaus told the School Committee this - she is Speaker 33 and starts at the 3:02:58 mark in the transcript:
If the MSBA does not accept our application, if the MSBA board does not invite Madison Park into the pipeline for 2025, the City and the district, we remain open to funding the project entirely through City funds but we'll need to carefully and transparently evaluate the tradeoff associated with doing so.
There was no explanation of how Boston’s fiscal position in 2026 would allow that cost when it does not in 2025, or why the other moving pieces of BPS’ long-term facilities plan were flexible enough to allow such an enormous change in how the project was funded.
The Council will get this same presentation on Monday morning at 10 AM when Ways & Means Committee has a hearing on both the Core Program & Accelerated Repair Program applications.
BPI HAD 5 QUESTIONS ABOUT REVENUE FOR THURSDAY’S HEARING: DID CITY HALL ANSWER THEM?
On Thursday morning Boston’s Collector-Treasurer & CFO Ashley Groffenberger and the Budget Director Jim Williamson testified before four City Councilors at the Ways & Means Committee’s first hearing on FY26 Revenue projections. BPI produced a set of 5 revenue questions for this hearing, so did Councilors ask those questions, and did City Hall’s budget writers answer them? The Council did not ask any of BPI’s questions, but one question was answered in City Hall’s presentation. Keep reading for more:
Why have budget surpluses been so much higher under Mayor Wu than Mayor Walsh?
This question was not asked by a City Councilor, but the budget surplus was discussed in Budget Director Williamson presentation. Here is the closest he got to answer - he is Speaker 4 and starts at the 6:55 mark of the transcript:
Interest on investment, that's the real story. That's sort of the primary driver of of the overall surplus.
Does Boston think that the 4-decade high in residential property tax payers share of revenue is a 1-time event?
This question was not asked or answered.
What does City Hall need to see from a revenue source in order to consider not raising property taxes the maximum allowed by Prop 2.5?
There was discussion of other revenue sources, including a great question from District 9 Councilor Liz Breadon for the City to break out local receipts at the 1:05:23 mark, but no discussion of Prop 2 1/2.
Is there an update on PILOT negotiations & the status of the 2024 PILOT report?
There was some discussion of PILOT payments, but no discussion of the widely-reported negotiations that Mayor Wu began with the City’s major non-profit institutions last summer.
Will the City commit to again releasing property tax estimates in September as they did last year?
This question was not asked or answered.
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