Weekly Transcript Round-Up for 4/11/25
FY26 budget released, hearing schedule set; Council, City Hall senior staff holds another closed-door meeting; Mass & Cass in Mayors race, Council chamber; Resignation could trigger Special Election
ICYMI: BPI has 11 takeaways from Boston’s FY26 budget release. Read them here or, watch the 11 takeaways on BPI’s YouTube Channel:
This week was dominated by the start of Boston’s official budget season. That started with Mayor Wu’s letter to the City Council, which was released on Monday as part of the agenda packet for the City Council’s regular Wednesday meeting and accompanied the formal budget actions. As with 2024’s budget release, the Mayor’s letter served as a script for the official release of the budget at Wednesday’s breakfast event, with Mayor Wu reading off the opening paragraphs, and Boston’s Collector-Treasurer & CFO Ashley Groffenberger going through the more detailed sections of the letter - read the transcript for the whole FY26 Budget Breakfast here.
Now action moves to the City Council, which will hold budget hearings over the next 6 weeks. That hearing schedule is now posted here on the City’s website, but if you are looking for a particular hearing, make sure to check back frequently: in 2024 the schedule repeatedly changed.
In addition to the budget, there was other action at the City Council:
Boston mayoral candidate Josh Kraft wasn’t the only person talking about Mass & Cass this week. The Council also got in on the action, with Public Safety Committee Chair & Councilor-at-Large Henry Santana filing Docket #0857, a hearing order that touted the Council’s work on Mass & Cass - read it on p. 156-157 of the agenda packet. One thing that stood out from Santana’s docket is the most substantive work on this issue - a controversial ordinance that Mayor Wu used to clear homeless encampments at Mass & Cass and later pro-Palestinian protest camps on Emerson’s campus - was done in 2023, before a number of City Councilors, including Santana, were on the Council. In his speech about the hearing order Santana said, “I really feel as Chair of Public Safety on the Boston City Council that our committee is responsible for holding the administration accountable,” - he is Speaker 14 & starts at the 1:24:06 mark in the transcript - and with this hearing order & the upcoming budget hearings he will have a lot opportunities to do just that.
Santana also hosted an un-televised, un-recorded policy briefing from senior BPS leaders for the Council on Thursday afternoon, in his capacity as the Education Committee Chair. This is the third such briefing Santana has hosted in the last few months - he also hosted an un-televised working session on nominees to Civilian Review Board and the Internal Affairs Oversight Panel in his capacity as Public Safety Chair in December 2024, and another BPS briefing as Education Chair in November 2024. Other Councilors have also done this, including Ways & Means Chair Brian Worrell who hosted an un-televised, un-recorded meeting with BPS senior leaders in February 2025 and Council President Louijeune, who hosted a norm-breaking, un-televised hearing on the Council’s use of NDAs in January 2025.
The other big news this week outside the budget was news that District 7 City Council Tania Fernandes Anderson was pleading guilty to federal corruption charges and resigning her seat. Exactly when she is going to resign will have a big impact on this fall’s elections. If Fernandes Anderson resigns more than 180 days the general election on November 4th - that means before May 8, 2025 - then she triggers the so-called “180 Day Rule” and forces a special election. The last time that happened was in 2023, when Kenzie Bok, the District 8 City Councilor, resigned to become Mayor Wu’s Boston Housing Authority Chief. On April 5, 2023 she announced that her resignation would be effective April 28, 2023. Docket #0798 was offered at the April 12 regular meeting, where it was co-sponsored by a number of the Councilors involved in this issues today, including Louijeune, Breadon, and Coletta-Zapata. At the City Council’s regular meeting on April 26, the body adopted Docket #0789, an order for a special election, by voice vote - vote occurs at the 33:41 mark in the meeting.
Starting this coming Monday BPI will be sending out a preview of the week’s upcoming budget hearings, which will include:
Which departments and offices are appearing at each hearing;
Where to find each hearing’s focus in the 1,205 page budget book;
The FY26 vs FY25 numbers from the budget book for that hearing;
Highlight which spending priorities laid out in the Mayor’s budget letter are for that hearing’s topic; and
What BPI is watching for in each hearing.
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