Wu, Walsh trade barbs
Get into it over virus’s Boston Resiliency Fund
Mayor Martin Walsh and City Councilor Michelle Wu are publicly trading barbs in the media over the city’s coronavirus response in an exchange that could be a preview of the 2021 mayoral race.
Wu on Thursday declared that Walsh’s Boston Resiliency Fund creates “conflicts of interest” — a criticism the mayor slammed as the councilor playing politics with an important COVID-19 measure.
“Some people that are criticizing the resiliency fund might want to run for higher office,” Walsh told reporters at a press conference on Thursday. “They better find a better issue than that to run for higher office.”
Walsh didn’t refer to Wu by name, but said he’d heard “a city councilor” who has “no idea what they’re talking about” when it comes to this topic “playing Monday morning quarterback on a radio show” about the fund, which routes donations to local nonprofits.
“If the city councilor just took time out of her schedule just to give me a call and maybe go on a call to talk to us about these things about the fund, she would understand what the resiliency fund has done,” a fired-up Walsh said.
Wu, an at-large city councilor who’s often discussed as a highly likely candidate to run against Walsh in 2021, earlier in the day had gone on WGBH’s Boston Public Radio and took aim at — among other things — the resiliency fund.
“Whenever we’re in a position where the mayor of Boston, and the official position of City Hall, is soliciting money from donors and corporations and then deciding which nonprofits get it in our city — that just creates a very disruptive and dangerous dynamic,” Wu said on WGBH.
“When that happens through city government and not through nonprofits and foundations,” Wu added, “we are distorting the political process, so nonprofits then are now having to compete for money that is going through the mayor instead of through private charities and philanthropy — and that means they have to say the right things, do the right things, show up to the budget hearings, testifying in support.”
Walsh touted that the resiliency fund has raised $33 million from 1,700 donors, and it’s distributed more than $24 million up to this point to businesses suffering under the coronavirus pandemic and to local nonprofits that provide testing, food and other services. The mayor announced the creation of the fund early on in the pandemic, chipping in half a million dollars from his campaign coffers, and regularly holds up the fund as an important part of his administration’s response to COVID-19.
“What we’ve been able to do with that money, quite honestly, is put food on people’s table so they don’t go hungry,” Walsh said at his press conference.
Wu later in the day responded to Walsh’s comments in a statement, saying, “Using the platform of city government to direct private fundraising in this way creates conflicts of interest under a troubling lack of oversight.”
“I would hope that Mayor Walsh has the capacity to understand that this was not a personal attack on him, but a call for Boston to do better,” she added, continuing, “Let’s be clear: I work for the people of Boston, not the mayor.”
Wu, the top vote-getter among the at-large councilors last year, is considered by many to be one of the strongest potential challengers to a bid by Walsh to seek a third term as mayor, though she hasn’t yet announced a run.
Walsh just earlier this week punted on a question about whether he intends to run for re-election, even though he’s nearly a year further into his second term than he was in his first when he announced he’d run again.
‘... nonprofits then are now having to compete for money that is going through the mayor ... and that means they have to say the right things, do the right things ...’ MICHELLE WU city councilor