Mayor’s office salary central
Budget hits $6.5M as pay keeps climbing
Mayor Michelle Wu’s office is paying staffers $6.5 million, a mark that’s up from past administrations as policy advisers and program directors bring in substantial sums.
Wu’s office is composed of 61 employees including the mayor herself, amounting to $6,477,019 in annual pay, according to the results of a Herald records request.
The office includes 12 people who make over $150,000 and 25 who bring in more than $100,000 — two totals that are up from the administrations of former Mayor Marty Walsh and former Acting Mayor Kim Janey. Walsh had six people making more than $150,000 and 18 making more than $100,000 in 2020, his last full year, while Janey, who was acting mayor for most of 2021, had seven and 19.
The number of people in Wu’s office, which includes various chiefs, nebulous “staff assistants” and other advisers, the communications office and the New Urban Mechanics program, is now at 61, up from 59 under Walsh and 51 under Janey. Walsh’s office in 2020 ran $5.3 million, and Janey’s the next year $4.8 million.
The number-one earner, as is typical for the office, is the mayor. Wu herself is the office’s highest paid, making $207,000 a year.
Numbers two through five are Chief of Planning Arthur Jemison, Chief Operations Officer Dion Irish, Chief of Staff Tiffany Chu, Communications Chief Jessicah Pierre and Policy Chief Mike Firestone. In that order, they make $180,000, $175,000, $167,500 and $167,500.
Wu’s staff noted that some of these positions, such as Jemison, are expected to come off the mayor’s office books and find homes elsewhere in City Hall. This coming year’s budget is expected to create a formal city-side planning department as Wu begins transferring those responsibilities out of the quasi-independent Boston Planning & Development Agency — and Jemison will head up that cabinet.
The mayor’s office-as-funnel approach is hardly new, as both Janey’s and Walsh’s contained a chief diversity office for more than $100,000 each, but that position has been spun off in the creation of a department. Same was the case under Janey for eventual head of the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency Stephanie Everett, who the acting mayor brought on as a special adviser before the budget fully created the agency.
Wu, a noted policy wonk, also has more policy advisers on staff, her office said. Among the next chunk, following deputy chief of staff Yusufi Vali, are various “special adviser” roles in that vein, including Rebecca Grainger for youth and sports, Walsh/Janey cabinet holdover Chris Osgood for infrastructure, Oliver Sellers-Garcia as “Green New Deal Director,” Lou Mandarini under contract for labor relations, Kristin McSwain for Wu’s Office of Early Childhood and Tania Del Rio as Mass and Cass response coordinator. All of those roles make $145,000 and up.
Of course, one of the $100,000-plus earners, mayor’s office administration and finance director Freda Brasfield, isn’t currently making her scheduled $130,222 salary because she’s on unpaid leave following criminal charges two weeks ago that she had a role in an operation to smuggle drugs into a state prison. Brasfield, who has pleaded not guilty, was one of the handful of holdovers from Walsh’s office.
The total operating budget for office staff is actually quite close to what was approved last year: mayor’s office started this fiscal year in July with a $6,148,110 operating budget, according to the approved budget documents from then. That’s up from $5.4 million in both fiscal years 2021 and 2022 and $5.1 million in 2020. The mayor’s office also received in excess of $235,000 for contract workers such as Mandarini and one grant-funded position for $77,648 this year, making up the bulk of the difference.