Weekly Transcript Round-Up for 6/27/25
Office towers over-assessment allegations prompt call for investigation, lawsuit threat; Exam School Admission policy gets Council discussion, possible hearing; IG effort blocked at 2nd Council Mtg
This week is usually an important one on the Council’s calendar, when the body votes on the Mayor’s vetoes of their budget changes (since 2021) and prior to that, on the Mayor’s amended budget. This year however Mayor Wu’s decision to sign the FY26 budget without vetoes on June 9, accepting the $7.95M, less than .2%, in changes the body made to her version of this year’s budget meant that this week’s Council meeting lacked its usual length and drama. Despite the early end of the budget process there was still a lot of policy action going on in both this week’s Council meeting, and outside the Council chamber:
A City Council and a local legal foundation both want to learn more about allegations from prominent real estate attorneys that City Hall is assessing downtown office towers above their fair cash value, then on Thursday Mayor Wu dismissed the allegations with an explanation that raised more questions;
The hearing order about exam schools admission that District 5 City Councilor Enrique Pepen touted on Instagram last week was filed with the Council this week as Docket #1282, with Council President Ruthzee Louijeune and District 6 City Councilor Ben Weber as original co-sponsors, and prompted a long discussion about Boston’s high schools, both open enrollment and exam;
At Large Councilor Julia Mejia faced a lack of cooperation and outright opposition from Council leadership at Wednesday’s meeting on her effort to put a non-binding ballot question about creating an Independent Municipal Inspector General on the November 2025 ballot, first from Government Operations Chair Gabriela Coletta Zapata, who failed to ask the Council to suspend & pass the Docket, then from District 8 Councilor Sharon Durkan, who stated that she would object to the suspension & passage, making this the 2nd straight Council meeting that the Council failed to take action on this docket;
This week’s Council agenda had a series of dockets that should have important hearings held soon, including:
Docket #1262 on p. 23-24, a $150,000 donation for Boston Family Days from the Boston Foundation was referred to the Council’s Arts Committee, where a hearing could reveal more about why City Hall is still paying participating institutions after reporting in the FY24 PILOT Recap Metrics those institutions “entered into an alternative [PILOT] system” - read more from the Boston Herald about this issue;
Docket #1281 on p. 111, a hearing order about the recent move by the Landmarks Commission to act on a 1995 petition to designate the Fish Pier a local historic landmark, which was also the subject of a letter from Councilor Flynn that was included in the communications section of the agenda as Docket #1269 on p. 46-47 - read more about this issue from NBC10;
CALL FOR INVESTIGATION & LEGAL THREATS ESCALATE BOSTON’S OFFICE TOWER ASSESSMENT FIGHT
This week saw a major escalation in a months-long fight over whether City Hall is fairly assessing downtown office towers. On Monday a City Council submitted a request for information about the allegations to City Hall, and on Tuesday a local legal foundation asked the state to investigate City Hall over the allegations. Then on Thursday, Mayor Wu responded to the allegations, the first time that her administration has provided any kind of detailed response.
On Monday Councilor Ed Flynn filed a 17F - the Council’s version of a FOIA - asking City Hall for more details on allegations included in three newspaper articles published over the last several months: a Boston Business Journal article in February; a Banker & Tradesman column in May; and a Boston Herald article in June. Each of those article reported that several prominent real estate attorneys in Boston, all of whom are closely involved in the City’s assessment process, had evidence “assessing officials are illegally raising building values if their owners have an appeal before the state board.” This is Docket #1286 and can be found on p. 119-120 of this week’s agenda packet.
On Tuesday the Pioneer New England Legal Foundation (PNELF), which is a part of the Pioneer Institute, sent a letter to the state Department of Revenue requesting DOR investigate Boston City Hall over the allegations laid out in those press reports earlier this year. Here is the specific request:
PNELF is hereby providing the Commissioner with written notice of the City’s unauthorized and unconstitutional property assessment practice. PNELF urges the Commissioner to exercise his broad powers and duties, under G. L. c. 58, § 1A, to investigate the matter and compel the City to cease and desist this unlawful assessment practice, and to provide a tax refund to all affected taxpayers.
The PNELF goes on that to threaten legal action if an investigation is not launched, which the group believes will result in “broad declaratory and injunctive relief,” based on the legal cases cited. This is not an idle threat: in the 1979 Tregor decision the City of Boston was found to have systematically over-assessed commercial properties in Boston, and the Supreme Judicial Court forced Boston to pay $140M back to landlords, which according to Flynn’s 17F is more than $600M in 2025.
On Thursday Mayor Wu responded to the allegations. Here is what the Banker & Tradesman reports she said:
“The city has started making notes in the documents so everyone is on the same page about why something has been adjusted or not adjusted,” Wu said. “The process of going through to the ATB can take some time, and in the meantime, sometimes the city will make adjustments despite the ongoing [ATB] dispute. Most of the time that is when there are facts in question… and we had our numbers wrong.”
Re-reading the allegations, made by some of Boston’s most prominent real estate attorneys, it does not appear to BPI that the dispute can be explained as a misunderstanding about new methods of note-taking.
COUNCILOR FOLLOWS UP EXAM SCHOOL SOCIAL POST WITH HEARING ORDER
Last week Boston Public School staff presented an analysis of exam school admissions policy to the Boston School Committee. As a reminder, these policies say a major change in 2020, and each year since has seen the School Committee has approved smaller changes to the policies recommended by BPS. That presentation prompted public statements posted on Instagram from two City Councilors: District 1 City Councilor Gabriella Coletta Zapata and District 5 City Councilor Enrique Pepen. On Wednesday, Pepen presented his hearing order, Docket #1282 on p. 112. Discussion starts at the 1:49:33 mark in the transcript, and most of the Council spoke on this issue.
Exam School Admissions has been a major issue for the School Committee and in public discussions, but until now it has not formally made it onto the Council floor. No hearing order on this issue was offered in 2024, making this hearing order the first on exam school admissions for the 2024-2025 Council.
Now that this hearing order has been offered, attention will turn to whether Education Committee Chair Henry Santana will actually hold a hearing on this docket. That is because while Education is one of the Council’s most important committees and the news is full of education-related issues, from concerns about BPS transportation to the end of the 2022 agreement between the state and Mayor about BPS improvement, the committee itself has not been very active:
In 2024 out of 20 dockets that were referred to the Education Committee for a hearing, just 7 actually saw hearings held.
This week’s Council Agenda packet shows that so far in 2025 out of 18 dockets that have had referred to the Education Committee, just 2 have seen hearings held, with 3 more hearings scheduled for this September.
This hearing order makes 19 dockets referred to the Education Committee.
MEJIA’S INSPECTOR GENERAL EFFORT BLOCKED AGAIN
Councilor At Large Julia Mejia has been working on creating an Inspector General for Boston for most of this Council term, starting in 2024 and restarting that work in 2025. That effort, a home rule petition, has seen a series of hearings and working sessions before the Government Operations Committee, where it still sits. This month the home rule petition was joined by another effort to put focus on the creation of an Inspector General: a citizen petition to put a non-binding question on the November ballot asking voters whether they supported creating an independent Inspector General for Boston. That petition was on the Council’s agenda on June 11 as Docket #1187 and was sent to the Government Operations Committee. This week the citizen petition was again on the agenda as Docket #1274, where it was the subject of extensive discussion, which made clear that a number of Councilor Mejia’s colleagues oppose the effort to create an Inspector General:
At the 47:43 mark in the transcript, Docket #1274, the citizen petition, was sent to the Government Operation Committee;
At the 52:54 mark, Mejia asked to speak about the Docket, saying, “I have written communication that the chair said that we were going to do a suspend and pass,” referring to Coletta Zapata, who leads the Government Operations Committee;
At the 1:00:35 Coletta Zapata speaks about the issue, saying she thinks the citizens petition is “duplicative” before adding a few minutes that “I've heard from other colleagues, they might want to review it and see how it's gonna fully impact, although it is a nonbinding opinion”;
At the 1:06:20 District 8 Councilor Sharon Durkan tell the Council “I will be objecting to a vote today,” meaning that she would object to an effort to suspend & pass the citizens petition, and which Louijeune took as an opportunity to end discussion of the issue.
Durkan did not expand on her opposition to the docket.
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.