Mayor Wu Vetoes City Council’s Proposed Transportation Department Layoffs

Mayor Wu is rejecting the Boston City Council’s effort to cut $1.4 million from the Boston Transportation Department’s payroll, and has submitted a new counter-proposal that would make cuts to the department’s “contracted services” budget instead.

By shifting budget cuts away from the payroll line-item, the mayor’s latest budget plan saves the city’s transportation workers from the prospect of layoffs.

The City Council’s budget proposal, which it approved last Wednesday, would have required “layoffs across multiple divisions – including parking enforcement officers, transportation planners, administrative staff, and employees who install signage and repair signals – impacting operations and reliability of core City services,” the mayor wrote in a memorandum to the Council.

“Therefore, I hereby return the City Council’s amended budget for the FY27 Annual Operating Budget for the City of Boston with a further modification to restore the $1.4 million cut from the Transportation Department personnel services line item and reduce the department’s contracted services line item by the same amount,” the memo continued.

“We want to thank Mayor Wu for addressing this budget issue head-on and preventing layoffs of transportation staff who work to keep our streets safe and properly maintained,” said Maha Aslam, a project manager for the LivableStreets Alliance.

The mayor’s new proposal now goes back to the Boston City Council, which could still override the mayor’s plan with a two-thirds vote.

The Council met on Wednesday morning for a brief 15-minute virtual meeting, but did not conduct any debate.

Instead, the Council formally received the new budget package from the mayor’s office and referred it to the Ways and Means Committee to discuss next week.

A whirlwind week for BTD staff

One week ago, the Boston City Council approved a new fiscal year 2027 budget based on a proposal that Mayor Wu had submitted in April.

Under the rules of the city charter, city councilors can amend the mayor’s proposal to increase funding for specific programs, but those must be balanced with equivalent reductions in funding from other budget line-items.

After several months’ worth of working sessions and committee meetings, the Council’s Ways and Means Committee submitted a revised budget proposal that rolled back some of the Mayor’s proposed cuts to popular programs by reallocating $7.6 million from new cuts in other departments.

But last Wednesday, Councilor John FitzGerald (Dorchester) introduced a last-minute package of additional 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.

There was little debate about FitzGerald’s proposal, which hadn’t been vetted in any previous public hearings.

The Council adopted his proposed amendments in a 9-3 vote, over the objections of Councilors Coletta Zapata (East Boston), Durkan (Back Bay/Mission Hill), and Council President Breadon (Allston/Brighton), who expressed concern about the possibilities of layoffs.

FitzGerald countered those concerns with a claim that “we looked at (BTD’s) 5-year underspend, and the average was $3.5 million. By taking $1.4 million, we believe … that they have the bandwidth to do that.”

However, a subsequent analysis of actual budget figures revealed that FitzGerald was misrepresenting BTD’s current budget situation.

In the immediate aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, BTD did indeed have large unspent surpluses in its personnel budget, because like many public agencies, it was struggling to fill vacant positions.

But by citing the average budget gap since 2020, FitzGerald was concealing the more relevant fact that, after several years’ worth of concerted hiring efforts, BTD’s personnel budget surpluses are currently approaching zero.