A year after an unusually contentious budget battle split the Boston City Council along ideological lines over the future of police and social services, the council is again hunkering down for fiscal combat — this time with a one-time injection of federal pandemic relief funds to fight over.
Last year, the council passed Walsh’s budget on an 8 to 5 vote, with Councilors Ricardo Arroyo, Andrea Campbell, Julia Mejia, Michelle Wu and then-Council President Kim Janey voting against it. The only councilors of color to support Walsh were Annissa Essaibi George and Lydia Edwards, who said she did so reluctantly.
Earlier this month acting Mayor Kim Janey, who is one of six announced candidates for mayor, released her version of this year’s $3.75 billion budget. City Hall experts told GBH News that it takes about six months to construct a budget, which suggests that the fiscal 2022 budget is largely the work of the Walsh administration.
The proposed spending plan includes a one-time boost of $215 million dollars in federal pandemic relief. It also slashes the police department’s overtime budget by about 33% compared to last year’s actual spending — an expression of the persistent desire among some Bostonians to reduce and reallocate police funding. The police cuts and the added federal dollars are likely to emerge as flash points as the process unfolds.
What Mayoral Candidates Say
Janey’s proposed budget represents an increase of $142 million, or 3.9%, from last year’s.
In addition to cutting police funding, Janey’s budget proposes investing about half of the federal money into immediate recovery efforts then allowing a recovery coordinating committee to direct the rest of the funds.
“I’m looking forward to digging into the details, but now is the moment for bold proposals, not incremental change,” Wu, a mayoral contender, said after the budget presentation.
This month, the at-large councilor released a plan to reform the Boston School Committee into a hybrid — elected and appointed seats — model and improve Boston Public Schools facilities and services. She told GBH News that she would like to see the federal funds go towards school infrastructure upgrades and vocational technical education.
“This would be the ideal time to really dig in and make sure that by the time students and teachers are set to come back in the fall, that we have truly invested in world class, healthy, green, supportive facilities across the entire district,” Wu said, pointing to crowded classrooms that don't allow for social distancing and outdated ventilation systems.
Campbell, another mayoral contender, proposed a similar plan for the federal funds in March.
The Dorchester-area councilor criticized Janey’s approach to the police budget, which attempts a feat the Walsh’s administration tried and failed at: reducing overtime.
“They committed to $12 million, [but] the department has realized zero of that [and] has exceeded their overtime budget,” said Campbell, referring to Walsh’s attempt to reallocate a portion of the police overtime budget last year.
The police are one of two departments in the city legally allowed to exceed their budgeted costs. (The other is Boston Fire.) The department is now projected to run over Walsh’s allocated amount by about $15 million.
“I would’ve been more aggressive,” Campbell said, pointing to her own plan to reduce the police overtime budget by $50 million dollars, or more than 75% of this year’s police overtime spending.
“I think there’s a way to create a plan where we are redeploying our gang unit, our bike units [and] other units to be able to realize those savings, and of course dealing with the contract,” she said referencing the police union agreement, which has provisions that contribute to overtime costs.
The Janey administration argued that its overtime reduction will be more effective than Walsh’s attempt becuase it has identified sick-leave fill-in as one of the drivers of overtime and set a goal to add more officers to the force, reducing the need to pay extra when someone fills in for a sick colleague.
Essaibi George, an at-large counselor who is also running for mayor, said Janey’s goal of as many as 90 additional officers — 30 through member classes and up to 60 through the cadet program — seems “promising” but perhaps too small.
“It’s nice to say we’re going to cut overtime. But when we are understaffed, when our communities still are unsafe, we still have work to do,” she said, suggesting that the number of new officers needs to be “in the hundreds.”
At a recent mayoral forum featuring five of the six candidates for mayor, Essaibi George was the only who said that while she supports investing in community programs, those investments shouldn’t come at the police department’s expense.
In her comments to GBH News, Essaibi George said that “rallying around the overtime dollar amount is superficial if we can’t actually do it, if we are not making true shifts in the way we do this work and conduct the business of public safety in the city.”
Essaibi George, who voted in favor of Walsh’s budget last year, said she would also like to grow the line items that support Boston Emergency Services Team clinicians, who respond to mental health crises alongside police, as well as the city’s EMS services.
Janey’s budget allocates $2 million for the service providers.
When it comes to education, Essaibi George, who chairs the education committee, said she’s “excited” about the spending plan’s additional mental and socio-emotional health resources for students, but she still wants to delve more deeply into the details in other education areas that existed before the pandemic.
“That’s around specific community supports, especially as it relates to trauma and poverty and access to food,” she told GBH News after the budget briefing.
Essaibi George said she supports and will closely watch Janey’s plans to disperse federal funds to local businesses crushed by the pandemic’s impact to the city.
What Others Said
Pam Kocher, president of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, said her organization is still parsing the city’s spending plan, but it wants the city to “be smart” about pandemic funds.
“If you get a substantial infusion of money and it's and due to a particular concern like a pandemic, and it's not going to come around again, then you need to treat it as a one-time opportunity,” Kocher said.
The research bureau, Kocher said, is viewing this budget cycle as another opportunity for potential reallocation to help reel in police overtime spending, which has been a struggle for the city.
She pointed to her testimony last year, when the bureau recommended that the city begin to “redirect non-policing community needs to the appropriate departments” like the public health commission and start to identify positions within the police department that don’t require “sworn, highly-trained and well-paid officers to do the job,” like public safety dispatch.
“I think we might even see more of that going forward, particularly with acting Mayor Janey involved,” Kocher said.
The bureau, Kocher added, will likely release its review and recommendations after researchers have dug into its details.
Nearly three-quarters of the spending plan is built on property tax revenue, a point councilors may seek to address this budget cycle under pressure from home-owning constituents who saw both their assessed property values and their property tax rates increase.
Diversifying Boston's revenue stream is a subject that has long bedeviled elected officials.
“Folks are outraged and obviously bewildered as to why they would receive such a hefty increase when we’re in the middle of a pandemic,” at-large Councilor Michael Flaherty said at the council’s first budget hearing Monday morning.
Flaherty, who will chair the council’s recently formed committee to examine the details of federal spending, told GBH News, “As chair of COVD-19 recovery committee, my focus and expectation is that we’ll fund departments that will re-open the city,” he said, pointing to Neighborhood Development, Public Health, Boston Public Schools and Economic Development.
At the Monday hearing, Dorchester Councilor Frank Baker added to the concern over federal funds, saying that the council should not provide a blank check for the administration’s proposed recovery committee.
“Those discussions normally would happen in the city council … because we, ultimately, give the OK for the money,” Baker said. “To set up a committee that looks to me like it’s going to be in front of the city council, I think, maybe cheapens our job a bit."
Baker was one of the eight councilors who voted in favor of Walsh’s budget last summer.
Flaherty, who also endorsed Walsh's budget, said he is still reviewing the spending plan details, including the police budget, but added that he'll vote for a budget that "adequately fund public safety."
"I want to make sure that when it comes to public safety in Boston, we’re giving the police department the tools they need to keep our residents safe,” he said.
Councilor Lydia Edwards said Janey’s budget is a reflection of Walsh, describing the spending plan as “more of the same status quo than anything” in an interview with GBH News.
“I'm looking to see where acting Mayor Janey is making her voice known,” Edwards said, referring to last year’s budget process, when then-Council President Janey sent a five-page letter to Walsh outlining an agenda that “promotes and protects the advancement of Black lives” in the city of Boston.
“When I compare [the budget] to Councilor Janey’s letter that she organized last year, there were some truly transformational budgetary items and thoughts and suggestions in that letter that I don’t really see repeated at all in this budget," Edwards said. "So my first thought was just that this looked like a Walsh budget."
Last year, the East Boston councilor noted her reluctance but voted in favor of Walsh’s budget, citing potential uncertainty for city employees if the council rejected it, as well as a “ flawed, oppressive” process that doesn’t allow councilors to meaningfully shape spending.
“I supported it," she said. "I also supported systemic, actual change."
Edwards said this year that she’s making good on wide-spread frustration with that process via the charter amendment proposal, which is expected to appear on the ballot this year. The measure would give the council power to amend the mayor’s budget proposal without a request from the mayor.
When it comes to the federal money in the budget, Edwards, who will serve as vice chair of the council’s committee on COVID-19 recovery, said she would like to see it go towards rent relief and homeownership opportunities to stabilize Boston’s housing crisis, summer educational opportunities to address pandemic learning loss and neighborhood investments for multimodal transportation.
Council President Pro Tempore Matt O’Malley was reserved in his initial reactions to the budget, saying only that while the collective goal is responsible spending, the details are important.
“Every cent that is spent has to come through the council," he said. "Obviously, the bulk of power in the city lies with the mayor's office. But the council oversees all financial expenditures. So I know that we'll be playing a role with that." O'Malley added that he anticipates a good partnership between the council and the mayor’s office.
Beacon Hill-area Councilor Kenzie Bok, who chairs the ways and means committee, said the plans to spend federal money on small businesses and those hardest hit by the pandemic makes sense.
“I imagine [there’s] going to be lots of agreement with the administration about target areas. But the details are important here,” she said, pointing to the council’s upcoming 35 hearings as opportunities to examine those details.
“What we can’t have is a situation where we spend all the money quickly, and then suddenly we’re looking at big budget deficits in a year or two and we don’t have the means to make them up,” she continued.
Bok ended by noting that the city is at the very beginning of its budget process.
“The budget we vote on in June is never the same as the budget that gets introduced in April,” she said. “We should be grateful, all of us, that we are in the fiscal position we are at the close of a really hard year in the city.”
Correction: This story has been updated to specify that Janey’s proposed cuts to police spending target the overtime budget.
