Chicago’s Saul Bellow once wrote, “City politics are comic opera.” But in Boston at this time, they’re more like the pages of a comic book as the slugfests outnumber the arias.

Last week’s City Council meeting featured bits of both, as councillors maneuvered to approve their version of Acting Mayor Kim Janey’s multibillion-dollar spending plan a day before the start of the new fiscal year.

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A mayoral race, with three councillors running for City Hall’s top job, served as a backdrop. But most of the sharp punches came from the East Boston brawler who isn’t running for mayor: District 1’s Lydia Edwards, who said she still had reservations about the budget and called the budget-writing process “this merry-go-round, this little farce.”

Earlier in the month, she had hit back at remarks made by Jon Santiago, the South End state representative who is one of the six major candidates running for mayor. Watching the back-and-forth contretemps play out between the acting mayor and the councillors, he took to Twitter to urge them make peace instead of turning the budget into a “political football.”

Edwards was ready. “Maybe you should worry more about getting your own budget done than about what’s happening in the council,” she said. (As of this writing, Beacon Hill lawmakers still haven’t sent their annual state budget, which is expected to be ten times bigger than the city’s, to Gov. Baker’s desk, even as the new fiscal year started July 1.)

Edwards ultimately voted for a budget, but once again she pitched a proposal she’s been spearheading that would expand the council’s budget-writing powers. Attorney General Maura Healey’s office has given the proposal the go-ahead to appear on the November citywide ballot.

“We are powerful, we can go toe to toe” with the mayor, Edwards said. “I think this budget will pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass,” she added before the vote.

Kidney Stone No. 1, the city’s $3.67 billion operating budget, passed,10-2 vote, with Councillor At-Large Michelle Wu and District 4’s Andrea Campbell, both mayoral candidates, casting the “no” votes.

Wu said she voted “no” because the budget it does “not meet the moment.” “We need to get to a place where we’re addressing the underlying set of challenges,” she said.

Campbell said she voted no on both the operating budget and the separately parceled school budget ($1.3 billion) because they fall short in providing police accountability, improving BPS infrastructure, and creating solutions to the issues at “Mass and Cass.”

“This isn’t political for me; this is about doing the job and standing up for those who are unseen and unheard,” Campbell said, who mentioned that she recently fielded a phone call from a police union leader who apologized for attacking her personally as she pushed for greater reforms within the scandal-ridden Boston Police Department. According to Campbell, the caller said that when he saw his former union chief, who stands accused of molesting children, benched by his superiors, “I thought he was on desk duty because it was a domestic violence case.”

Campbell told her Council colleagues, “I refuse to say we have to wait until the next budget cycle to deal with those issues that continue to get worse.”

Passage of the operating budget came at a low point in the relationship between the City Council and the acting mayor.

The Janey administration last week sought to throw in a $31.5 million mini-budget as a sweetener for councillors open to getting to “yes” on her spending plans. That budget sends $3 million in federal funding to the area known as “Mass and Cass,” which has grappled with drug dealing and homelessness. The smaller budget, which passed, 11-0, also includes $2 million for full-time social workers in Boston Public Schools, money for youth jobs and for the new Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, and permanent outdoor dining within the city.

This being their last meeting before the summer break, the councillors skirmished one more time after passing Janey’s spending plans. District 3’s Frank Baker made a last-minute bid for the Council’s sign-off on an $850,000 grant for an already existing information-sharing center for police, but he was blocked by Councilor Campbell and others who said the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) lacks transparency while maintaining a gang database. The grant was blocked by a 4-8 vote.

With that, the council meeting was done, and the slugfests shifted from City Hall to the campaign trail.