If you watched the Boston City Council’s 12-hour budget debate on June 26, you might not have known that three weeks earlier, on June 5, the same council voted to approve 99.67 percent of Mayor Michelle Wu’s budget, delivering her administration an unprecedented third budget in a row with virtually no changes. That is because on June 26, the council held a meeting that looked and sounded consequential, complete with tearful speeches, talk of “data-driven process,” and frequent recesses after which another “partial override” vote was announced.

On June 26, the council overrode about half of the mayor’s budget vetoes, and in triumphant social media posts later, councillors touted the $8.2 million worth of changes they made. Missing from the June 26 meeting and those posts was this important piece of context: It was all about less than 0.33 percent of the city’s budget. 

That percentage changes the perspective on the June 26 meeting, turning it into a Live Action Role Play of what the council thinks a robust legislative process would look like, if it had one. The councillors and their staff dress their parts, write speeches, and produce Excels with numbers in them, but citizens shouldn’t mistake all the activity for progress. City councillors play virtually no role in any important decision the City of Boston makes, budgets included.

Unlike their colleagues on Beacon Hill or in neighboring cities like Cambridge and Somerville, Boston’s city councillors have an increasingly small part to play in governing the Boston, and the current group of 13 has taken affirmative steps this year to ensure that their body remains powerless.

The best example of this is the passage of Wu’s planning department ordinance by the council back in March. As a report produced in 2019 by the office of then-Councillor Michelle Wu said: “When Boston’s planning board was dissolved in 1960 and its accompanying functions transferred to the BRA in order to streamline urban renewal, Boston became the only municipality in Massachusetts to have its planning board powers removed from oversight of the City’s legislative branch, the City Council.”

That means that the councillors have virtually no role in land use decisions and cannot copy the actions of their colleagues in Cambridge, who abolished parking minimums city-wide, or in Somerville, who legalized three-deckers city-wide. 

While reversing the 1960 change was a major part of then-candidate Wu’s 2019 white paper, it was missing from the planning department ordinance that she sent to the City Council earlier this year. Neither the mayor nor administration officials has ever explained why the central reform in mayoral candidate Wu’s “Abolish the BPDA” proposal was missing from that legislation. Instead, the council set aside its own demands – seeing an actual memo of understanding for an unusual funding arrangement – and passed the ordinance with virtually no changes.

The planning department is not alone. The council passed a huge tax increase on commercial buildings without analysis from the city on the impact of this policy. It accepted a long-term facilities plan from the Boston Public Schools that included no timeline, no budget, and no enrollment projections.

In other words: the budget is simply the latest example of the council’s decisive moves toward rubber stamp status this year. Now both of Boston’s legislative bodies, the voter-elected City Council and the mayoral-appointed School Committee, simply approve with few questions and little debate policies that are thought up and written inside the mayor’s office. 

This is bad for Boston because the city needs the council to be pulling its own weight to help solve the tough problems it is facing. Over the next decade, Boston will have to do things that are politically difficult and will attract significant public opposition: build many more homes, replace dozens of aging schools, and remake a property-tax dependent budget. Boston cannot do any of that with a City Council that does not even function as a debate club. It is time to demand more from the councillors. Hopefully, that will start with them demanding more from themselves.
Greg Maynard is the executive director of the Boston Policy Institute.