Councilor FitzGerald Used Misleading Math In Pitch for Transportation Dept. Budget Cuts
The Boston City Council’s last-minute cuts to the city’s transportation office threaten to undo recent efforts to address disruptive worker shortages, and the City Councilor who proposed the budget cuts cited outdated pandemic-era budget figures in his arguments to justify them.
At the June 10 City Council meeting, Councilor John FitzGerald (Dorchester) introduced a last-minute package of budget amendments that took away $1.4 million from the personnel budget of the Boston Transportation Department (BTD) and gave the funding to other city programs instead.
In his introduction to the proposal, Councilor FitzGerald made the claim that BTD regularly underspends its personnel budget by millions of dollars.
“The reason we chose to focus in on the BTD personnel services is that we looked at their 5-year underspend, and the average was $3.5 million,” said FitzGerald. “By taking $1.4 million, we believe that the department can make the necessary changes within the department to decide what they want to do… We believe that they have the bandwidth to do that.”
According to available budget figures, FitzGerald’s arithmetic seems to be technically correct: BTD’s payroll did indeed have large unspent budget surpluses earlier this decade, when the department (like many other public agencies) struggled with worker shortages in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But by citing the average budget gap over the past 5 years, FitzGerald obscured a more relevant statistic: after several years’ worth of concerted hiring efforts, BTD’s unspent budget surpluses are currently near zero.
In the fiscal year ending last summer, there was only a $652,380 surplus between budgeted and actual payroll expenditures.
And Boston officials told StreetsblogMASS that BTD has spent $28.4 million on personnel expenses in the current fiscal year, as of June 15.
That would put the department on track to spend its entire personnel budget by the end of the fiscal year on June 30.
Boston Transportation Department personnel costs vs. budgets since 2023:
| Fiscal year | Budgeted expenditures | Actual expenditures | Unspent surplus (budget minus actual) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-2023 | $28,334,568 | $24,369,742 | $3,964,826 |
| 2023-2024 | $28,929,802 | $25,557,211 | $3,372,591 |
| 2024-2025 | $29,437,419 | $28,785,039 | $652,380 |
| 2025-2026 | $29,399,188 | $28.4 million as of 6/15 | TBD |
In a June 8 memorandum to the City Council, the city’s Chief Finance Officer, Ashley Groffenberger, warned that the proposed cuts to BTD could result in “layoffs across the Transportation department, including parking enforcement officers and other frontline employees who install traffic and parking signs, repair traffic signals and repair parking meters, with impacts to overall public safety and revenue, and also increasing the use of overtime.”
Cuts undermine recent years’ hiring efforts and will affect basic city services
The chief reason why BTD’s budgets exceeded actual expenditures earlier this decade was because the department – like many other public agencies – was struggling for years to fill vacant positions in a competitive post-pandemic labor market.
Although the city was spending less on BTD’s payroll, taxpayers ended up spending more money on deferred maintenance, higher consulting costs for engineering projects, longer waits for 311 service calls, and lost parking revenue.
In May 2023 budget presentation, former Chief of Streets Jashca Franklin-Hodge told City Councilors that it had been “exceptionally difficult” for the city to fill rebuild its workforce.
“We have significant areas of our cabinet that are understaffed. This is most acute in our operations team and our engineering teams,” said Franklin-Hodge in a May 23, 2023 hearing at the City Council’s Ways and Means Committee.
Two years later, at another budget hearing (which would turn out to be his last) on May 20, 2025, Franklin-Hodge had some better news to share.
“If you have been in these budget hearings with me for the last few years, you will probably hear the familiar refrain that we suffer from significant staffing shortfalls within the cabinet,” said Franklin-Hodge. “The good news this year is that we have started to reverse that trend after a lot of tremendous work by our HR team and the leadership team.”
![A screenshot from a City of Boston slide deck. The heading reads "BETTER OUTREACH IN HIRING". A photo to the left shows a white man in a suit shaking hands with a young Black man in a collared shirt. The bulleted list reads: "In BTD Enforcement, our vacancy rate was cut in half in the last 12 months, down to 20%, helping us close 311 cases faster and collect more revenue [next bullet] Since 2023 we’ve hired 115 people, with 92 hired in the last 10 months alone [next bullet] Parking ticket violation issuance is up 13% and issuance
revenue is up 9% (+$4.4M) in FY25 (vs FY24).[next bullet] 1,831 Abandoned Vehicles Ticketed, 435 towed since 7/1/24 [next bullet] Six hiring days thus far for Parking Enforcement Officers throughout the City: Allston/Brighton, Dorchester, East Boston, Hyde Park](https://mass.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2026/06/Screenshot-from-May-2025-Streets-Cabinet-budget-presentation-credit-City-of-Boston.png?w=1024)
“This is very good news,” continued Franklin-Hodge. “Ultimately, being able to have a fully-staffed cabinet is critical to being able to deliver public services and avoid contracting out unnecessarily, or avoid some of our overtime spending.”
On Friday, a large coalition of local environmental and community development organizations called on City Hall to undo Councilor FitzGerald’s $1.4 million budget cut.
In their statement, represenatives from WalkMassachusetts, the LivableStreets Alliance, Alternatives for Community and Environment, Boston Cyclists Union, Bikes Not Bombs, Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition, and several other groups warned that “the (BTD) staff at risk of losing their jobs fix our most dangerous intersections, improve pedestrian crossings near schools and health centers, and optimize our traffic signals to reduce delay for drivers and riders alike… We strongly urge BTD to investigate all possible alternatives to layoffs in order to preserve critical staff to keep our streets safe.”
Advocates also warned that layoffs at BTD could further jeopardize the city’s ability to execute federally-funded transportation projects, several of which have already been stalled or cancelled for political reasons by the both the Trump administration and by Mayor Wu’s office.
Councilor FitzGerald evades follow-up questioning
StreetsblogMASS reached out to Councilor FitzGerald’s office several times on Friday and Monday to inquire where his budget figures came from, and why he decided to cite a 5-year average that included pandemic years instead of more accurate budget figures from the past two years.
Neither the Councilor nor his chief of staff have yet responded to our inquiries; we will update this story if they decide to respond.
StreetsblogMASS also reached out to the mayor’s office to inquire whether Mayor Wu is considering vetoing the budget in order to send it back to the Council for a second try.
A spokesperson for the mayor avoided answering that question directly, and instead referred to an earlier statement that the mayor’s office provided on Friday.
“We are currently reviewing the Council’s full amendment package, including assessing operational and workforce implications for departments,” the spokesperson told StreetsblogMASS. “We will provide an update on the consequences of the Council’s decision as soon as our review is complete.”
Read More:
Streetsblog has migrated to a new comment system. New commenters can register directly in the comments section of any article. Returning commenters: your previous comments and display name have been preserved, but you'll need to reclaim your account by clicking "Forgot your password?" on the sign-in form, entering your email, and following the verification link to set a new password — this is required because passwords could not be carried over during the migration. For questions, contact tips@streetsblog.org.
