Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Wednesday debuted her second city operating budget, a $4.28 billion spending plan she said goes “back to basics” by adding staff to city departments and prioritizing families.
“While we’re no longer in as much of an immediate crisis and emergency mode, there are still many, many pieces where our young people, for families, for infrastructure that we’re seeing needing to continue getting attention,” the mayor said at the annual budget breakfast presentation.
Wu added that the past few budgets cycles have lacked the kinds of detailed departmental efficiency changes that inform the latest spending plan.
“We really tried to work with departments to get at those sometimes invisible, but so fundamental, core operations needs, whether it is administrative or on the technical and IT infrastructure side, or how to coordinate better among departments,” Wu said, noting that in some agencies, workers are stretched thin and wearing several hats.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to requests for a breakdown of the number and placement of new staff positions.
Another big piece of the budget, the mayor said, focuses on families.
“We want to be first for families anywhere across the country,” she said, pointing to one of five major banners under which the budget was organized.
The proposal would put $4 million toward the city’s growing universal pre-K program, allowing it to add 350 seats. It would also designate $500,000 to fund youth swimming lessons and another half a million to training for new life science jobs.
The four other budget banners include: supporting a green and growing city, ensuring public health and safety, closing the racial wealth gap and delivering exceptional city services.
The mayor also announced that the Boston’s Triple-A bond rating, a measure of fiscal stability that awards favorable borrowing terms, has been affirmed for a ninth consecutive year. That rating came despite concerns about Boston’s new budget process, which allowed the City Council to make line item amendments to the mayor’s budget proposal for the first time last year.
The change empowered the council to override a portion of Wu’s 2023 budget, redirecting about $2 million within the plan.
A source familiar with city budget proceedings suggested Wednesday that the council will work through its Ways and Means Committee Chair, Tania Fernandes Anderson, to make a more regimented process for councilors to propose similar amendments this year.
