Weekly Transcript Round-Up for 7/18/25
This week's highlights 24-25 Council's lack of public hearings on hot-button topics; BPDA approves major Article 80 reform; Boston's Sidewalks generate Globe article & editorial
This week City Hall and the Council saw quite a bit of action, but much of it was in the newspaper and at un-televised meetings:
The Council had just one televised hearing, with an intense hearing about the Council handles resolutions on Monday and a briefing about hot button issues facing Boston Public Schools on Thursday both un-televised, and a hearing about recent corruption charges at a Boston Main Street program, scheduled for Wednesday, getting cancelled after senior City Hall aides were unable to attend.
On Wednesday Flipside News, a recently launched local news site helmed by long-time Baystate Banner scribe Yawu Miller, published an article laying out how the Boston Police Department was violating the spirit, and possibly the actual language, of a 2022 surveillance ordinance championed by the ACLU and signed by Mayor Wu. Commissioner Cox defended his department’s action by leaning on the ordinance’s “exigent Circumstances” exception, but it remains to be seen if the Council, and powerful outside groups like the ACLU of Massachusetts, will accept that argument. While the ordinance was passed in 2021 virtually none of the current Councilors were part of passing it: only 3 of the 13 current members had been sworn onto the Council at that point.
The same day that the Council got an un-televised briefing from Boston Public Schools on “Transformation Schools and State Accountability: support for BPS high-need schools,” the Dorchester Reporter published an op-ed written about a transformation school, the Dever, that BPS closed this year which asked “The question that still echoes for many of us is: Why close a school that was finally working? No clear answer was ever given — and that’s part of the heartbreak.” The Dever was mentioned at the Council’s briefing, but this question was not asked. No Councilor has filed a docket on the Dever’s closing, which was announced in December 2024, and the Council has not held a hearing on a docket filed by Councilor Worrell back in January about BPS school closing plans.
On Thursday, the Boston Planning & Development Agency’s board decided that Boston Civic Design Commission approval was no longer required for projects under 200,000 square feet, while a decision on proposed upzoning for downtown Boston was pushed back to the board’s September meeting.
Last Sunday the Boston Globe reported Boston was “coming up short” on a 4 year old consent decree to make sidewalks & crosswalks ADA compliant, and on Friday morning the Globe’s editorial criticized City Hall over the issue. A hearing on the issue that was touted in that editorial was announced on Wednesday, July 16, and scheduled for Tuesday, July 22 but was cancelled on Friday afternoon. This was an issue the Council discussed at length during the FY26 budget hearings earlier this year, and in those hearings Disability Commissioner Kristin McCosh told Councilors “Public works also just as part of the consent decree, just hired an ADA manager. So this manager is an ADA coordinator for the public works department, and they're overseeing this contract.” McCosh is Speaker 6 & starts at the 1:28:40 mark of the transcript. That person was not mentioned in the Globe article.
This coming Tuesday’s hearing on sidewalks wasn’t the only hot-button hearing the Council scheduled on Wednesday, July 16, only to cancel on Friday afternoon. A hearing on City Hall’s July 4th payroll snafu that was scheduled for Monday, July 21, was also cancelled. Both the Monday & Tuesday hearings were both before the Council’s City Services Committee, chaired by District 5 City Councilor Enrique Pepen.
This week highlighted just how few hearings the 2024-2025 Council has held on important issues happening inside Boston’s city government: Thursday’s Council briefing from BPS was on three important topics that no Councilor has even filed hearing orders on; the Dot Reporter’s op-ed by a Dever parent underscored that the Council hasn’t held a hearing on BPS’ school closure plan; the BPDA board meeting highlighted that the Council hasn’t held a hearing on Article 80 in a year even as major changes to the process are made; on Friday afternoon Councilor Pepen cancelled his committee’s hearings on the payroll snafu and the City’s crumbling sidewalks.
Boston’s City Council hearings are an incredibly important part of the public conversation in Boston and across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The 2024-2025 Council’s decision to hold fewer important hearings noticeably impacts the discussion on everything from the growing fiscal crisis in MA’s local governments to the state’s response to the housing crisis to how to shore up Greater Boston’s Meds-and-Eds dependent economy in the age of federal retrenchment.
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