Advocates Call for Accountability From Boston’s Streets Cabinet As a Condition for Budget Approval
Interim Chief of Streets Nick Gove faced tough questions about cancelled projects, delays, lost funding, and a general lack of transparency at the City Council’s annual budget hearing for the Boston Streets Cabinet on Monday.
“We are in a financially bad year. We need to be very sure about where we spend our money,” said Maha Aslam, program manager for the LivableStreets Alliance, during the hearing’s public testimony.
The LivableStreets Alliance has called on the City of Boston to align its spending with long-standing transportation plans like GoBoston 2030 and the Vision Zero strategy, which was last updated in 2023.
“Don’t sign off on a budget that doesn’t have timelines, that doesn’t have detailed deliverables,” Aslam urged the city councilors.
Stacy Thompson, a Boston resident and volunteer for the LivableStreets Alliance (as well as a former StreetsblogMASS board member), asked the City Council “to step up” and demand better clarity on what the Streets Cabinet is spending its money on.
“Councilor Flynn, years ago, we worked with you to get two positions through the budget process to make sure we would get monthly Vision Zero data. We’re not getting that data any more. Those positions exist. I’m calling on you to find out why,” said Thompson.
More asphalt, fewer sidewalk repairs
In a slide deck presentation at the beginning of the budget hearing, city staff revealed that they aim to re-pave about 45 miles of streets and re-build 75,000 square feet of city sidewalks this year.
That latter number sounds impressive, but in fact, it would cover only about 1.4 miles (7,500 feet) of a single 10-foot-wide sidewalk, in a city with over 800 miles of streets.
In the Streets Cabinet’s 2025 budget presentation, Gove’s predecessor, former Chief of Streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge, reported that the city had repaired more than 14 miles’ worth of sidewalks in 2024.
City Hall is also devoting a major portion of its capital and engineering resources to building wheelchair-accessible sidewalk curb ramps, as required under a 2021 Americans with Disabilities Act consent decree.
That settlement requires the city to upgrade at least 1,630 ramps per year until all sidewalk ramps are accessible.
In the next fiscal year, curb ramp work will consume “nearly 30 percent” of the department’s capital budget, Gove said.
“Costs to continue to rise,” said Gove. “We have reconstructed many of the easy ramps in our program, now we need to move onto some of the more complicated locations.”
Notably absent from the city’s budget presentation were any goals or benchmarks related to improving safety, reducing crashes, reducing residents’ transportation expenses, or meeting the city’s greenhouse gas reduction targets.
Projects cancelled, funding lost
Gove also addressed the disappearance of several high-profile projects from the city’s proposed capital budget.
“27 projects have been removed from this capital plan,” admitted Gove. “Several projects are now complete, and others were merged into other annual programs. Other projects were tabled due to constraints that make continued planning design and construction unfeasible at this time.”
Gove explained that the city’s Commonwealth Avenue Phase 3 and 4 projects, which have been in the city’s capital plans for nearly a decade, have been consolidated with the MBTA’s planned work to make stations along the Green Line accessible and compatible with new “Type 10” trains.
“We’re working closely with the MBTA on their work plan for the B and E lines. So there is some short-term work that’s going to happen on Commonwealth Ave. in terms of upgrading stations for accessibility, but as far as the larger project is concerned, we are going to work with the MBTA on both the B and E lines as they go in and make these track, station improvements… We are going to take that opportunity to make pedestrian, cycling, motorist safety improvements at those intersections and all along the corridor,” said Gove.
City Councilor Ben Weber, who was also chairing Monday’s hearing, also asked about the proposed de-funding of a project to improve safety along Centre and South Streets in his city council district.
Just one year ago, in spring 2025, City Hall signed a $600,000 contract with Kittleson and Associates for “public engagement, planning, and design services” for Centre and South Streets.
“The planning effort – that work is done,” Gove told Weber (in fact, the contract’s public engagement and design work had not yet begun). “Unfortunately, this is one of the projects we had to make a decision on that we can’t afford to move into design and construction at the moment. But that doesn’t mean it goes away, it just has to go on a project bench until funding becomes available.”
For the advocates at the hearing, it was yet another example of how the current administration hasn’t followed through on its commitments.
Amira Patterson, community engagement specialist for Transportation for Massachusetts, asked for the city for a “transparent explanation of the criteria used in deciding which projects to pursue, re-evaluate, or scrap.”
“We would have a lot more money to work with in our budget, if these earmarked dollars had not been shoved to the wayside due to inaction,” observed Tiffany Cogell, executive director of the Boston Cyclists Union.
Watch the full hearing here:
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