In her inaugural appearance on Boston Public Radio’s “Ask The Mayor” segment, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu suggested that the city is on the verge of implementing a vaccination requirement for indoor recreation sites, such as restaurants and performance venues.
Wu's statements built off an idea she mentioned in a late-October appearance on Boston Public Radio, before she was elected mayor. At the time, she said the city should require proof of vaccination at such venues to protect people in high-risk indoor settings, and to support individual establishments that might find it challenging to implement their own requirements unilaterally.
“We’re following the data very closely, and thinking about every tool that the city of Boston has,” Wu said Tuesday. “I still very much think that we should be taking all possible action to protect our community members, to protect customers.”
She spoke at one point as if it’s a matter of when, not if, she creates a citywide mandate.
“We’re looking internally, as well as externally, at all of the options available — working in close conjunction with [Dr. Bisola] Ojitkutu and the [Boston] Public Health Commission on what those standards will look like,” Wu said.
Wu did not officially announce a new requirement Tuesday, however, saying her administration is continuing to watch case data and that policies will follow that data. At another point in the conversation, she said of the city’s COVID situation: “We are seeing a surge in Boston already. … The message has to be, ‘Please get vaccinated.’”
Wu also said she hopes to begin the search for a new Boston police commissioner in earnest in early 2022, starting with a community-driven conversation about what qualities the Boston Police Department’s next leader needs to have.
“I very much want to have public engagement lead this process,” she said. “And so the plan right now is that we will work to identify a search committee of a few individuals. And their first charge — even before looking at any candidates, even before interviewing any potential commissioner — will be to go out and seek feedback, do listening sessions in the community, engage key stakeholder groups on, ‘What should we be looking for to begin with? What values and parameters and qualifications and skill sets should really drive the search?’”
Wu said she hopes for a thorough and comprehensive process, but also wants to move quickly, aiming to have the search last only a couple months.
Early in her appearance, after a caller asked about Wu’s plans to push for some form of rent control, Wu said she discussed the topic with Gov. Charlie Baker in their first meeting after her inauguration.
“The governor shared in that conversation what he’s shared publicly, which is that his own personal experience with an old style of rent control wasn’t positive in his mind,” Wu said.
Wu, though, seems to think she may be able to change Baker’s mind.
“I think there’s a wide range of what we can do at the city level, when cities are given the power to really explore all the nuances of how we can protect our residents, keep people in our homes,” she said. “It doesn’t have to look like how it’s looked in the past. And in fact, the places where it’s working today across the country, it looks very different,” Wu said.
Rent control is currently illegal in Massachusetts. Wu has called previously for putting a cap on annual rent increases, while also offering concessions to developers to incentivize continued housing production. For this to be possible, the State House and Senate would need to pass legislation empowering her to take those steps. If Baker vetoed that legislation, it would then need to be overridden by the Legislature for Wu’s vision to become a reality.
Wu also spoke briefly about her ambitious blueprint for a Boston Green New Deal, saying the city can quickly do “small things ... that will have a huge impact.” In the next four years, she added, her administration plans to double the number of street trees in the city, and to convert Boston’s fleet of school buses from diesel to electric.
Toward the end of the segment, when host Jim Braude asked Wu for her reaction to the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, she offered a blunt assessment.
“It felt,” she said, “like a punch to the gut.”
