COUNCILORS LOOK TO PULL WU TO THE LEFT IN YEAR 2
Michelle Wu spent years as the progressive outsider on the Boston City Council, advocating to pull policy to the left. Now she’s on the inside looking out at a council where a contingent of members to her left are trying to draw her proposals further that way.
“Her greatest challenges will come from the left,” Larry DiCara, a former city council president and longtime chronicler of Boston politics, told the Herald.
The council and the mayor both want 2023 to be a year of action: last week the new “participatory budgeting” law went into effect. On the checklist for the council is a move to an elected school committee, rent control and a budget cycle where they hope to push the mayor more than they did last year.
This past week, the progressive bloc that is centered around City Councilors Ricardo Arroyo, Tania Fernandes Anderson, Kendra Lara and Julia Mejia, was frustrated. Through a couple of weird quirks of city rules, they had to vote on participatory budgeting — a process that in the future will allow residents to have direct votes on how to spend a chunk of the city’s budget — which failed with multiple members absent.
That, along with opposition from the body’s relative conservatives, meant that the amended-left version that Government Operations Chair Arroyo presented did not get the necessary seven votes, so Mayor Michelle Wu’s version, with a smaller and unpaid board, prevailed.
Lara tweeted after the meeting, “I’m disappointed in my colleagues and the administration for choosing the path of ease, for choosing to maintain power, instead of saying yes to the transformative vision set before us by our constituents.”
Fernandes Anderson vowed to “organize again — we’ll keep doing the work.”
Watch for this dynamic
as the year moves forward. Multiple councilors — and the progressive advocates they’re aligned with — already have signaled their displeasure with the details of what Wu’s been floating about rent control, calling them too loose to really do what they’re intended.
And then there’s what sneakily might be the biggest point of contention: the proposal to turn at least part of the school committee into elected positions, rather than the mayoral-appointed ones they’ve been for the past three decades.
Wu’s on the record over the years calling for a hybrid board — part elected, part appointed. But more recently she’s told the Boston Globe that she’s not too interested in doing anything right now with the school committee, and is more focused on “urgent” changes that need to be made to the near-failing
district.
The school-committee changes, supported by around 80% of the voting electorate in a non-binding question in 2021, are a major priority for progressives, who are holding hearings on the matter and want it to move in the next couple of months.
Also coming up is budget season; the council, with new amending power gained by referendum, took the fight to Wu and tried to slash the police budget and make other changes driven by progressives including Fernandes Anderson, who leads the budgeting process
for the council as ways and means committee chair.
The councilors gained some of the changes they wanted, but couldn’t override a Wu veto of the cuts to police funding — a topic Wu advocated for during former Mayor Marty Walsh’s tenure. With Fernandes Anderson in her second goround running the councilside budget and the body as a whole with new powers under its belt, expect more back and forth.
“Our budget needs to, as the old saying goes, ‘put our money where our mouth is,'” Fernandes Anderson told the Herald on
this front.
For Wu’s part, a spokeswoman said, “The Mayor looks forward to working with the City Council on the City’s priorities to best support Boston’s residents.”
Lara, Fernandes Anderson, Arroyo and Mejia all are in their first or second term and say that their job is to pull Boston policies in a more progressive direction, particularly in a way that, in their view, better benefits people of color.
While they each generally agreed with the premise that they’re trying to pull the mayor to the left, they took a diplomatic approach in interviews for this article, with each complimenting the mayor.
“I believe Mayor Wu has empowered her cabinet to make decisions that align with her vision, and in the event that those decisions don’t go far enough to either protect our most vulnerable
constituents or engage community in a robust and transformative way, it’s our job as the council to stand in the gap,” Lara told the Herald.
Fernandes Anderson said Wu’s doing “a good job,” but, “As a council, we are doing our job to push our perspectives and to be a conduit for the community’s concerns.
Arroyo noted that some of the big-swing items — like rent control and the school committee — would need the approval of the state Legislature, which isn’t renowned for a love of cities proposing sweeping changes.
“My goal is to create something that satisfies what I think the real needs are, but not at the expense of getting passed by the House,” Arroyo said. “I might not love what ultimately gets done, but I don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”