When Michelle Wu met virtually with Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) staff in January 2022, a few months into her mayorship, she had just turned 37. At the meeting, the staff joined together to awkwardly sing “Happy Birthday” to the city’s new chief executive. In the new year, it’s an open question as to what song staffers will be singing in the new year, and whether it’ll be a dirge for their organization.

Wu campaigned for mayor, in part, on the abolishment of the BPDA, a proposal that dates back to 2019, when, as an at-large city councillor, she released a paper titled “Fixing Boston’s Broken Development Process,” and subtitled it “Why and How to Abolish the BPDA.”

Wu pulled together the 76-page paper, which she called a “living document” in her introduction, while she was chair of the Council’s planning and development committee. She and her staff had help from Kyle Clauss, a former reporter for the Lowell Sun and Boston magazine who that year was attending law school in Vermont. (Now a municipal lawyer in the Green Mountain State, he declined comment for this story.)

The document, which Wu later rolled into her mayoral campaign platform, carried a populist tone. “Created in the postwar age of urban renewal at the request of Boston’s business elite, the BPDA is an anachronism plagued by lack of transparency and misguided priorities,” the paper’s executive summary said.

Past reform efforts and a rebrand, which came after audits under the Walsh administration, fell short, Wu argued, as the independent quasi-public operation continued to depend on “political relationships and special exceptions.” It should be standardized and streamlined to promote predictability, she said.

Wu’s proposal encountered pushback from both inside the BPDA and on the campaign trail, from opponents who said the BPDA had improved in the last decade and noted that getting rid of the authority requires buy-in from the Legislature.

But abolishment of the “unaccountable super-agency” does not rest only on a home-rule petition that must pass muster up on Beacon Hill, Wu’s paper said. Property holdings that drive the BPDA’s operating budget can be returned to city ownership, and BPDA staffers can be shifted to the city’s budget. In other words, there is more than one way to skin a cat, even one that has already had multiple surplus lives, like the BPDA, which still goes by its original name, Boston Redevelopment Authority, in official documents.

Three years after the release of the Wu proposal, the mayor still appears to be on a track for moves that will that significantly reorder, if not outright abolish, the 65-year-old authority. Following the rendition of “Happy Birthday” last January, there was an exodus from the agency, including BPDA chief Brian Golden. Wu replaced him with Arthur Jemison, whose career spans all levels of government, from the BRA to HUD. He wears two hats – director of the BPDA and chief of planning. Hiring to fill open positions at the BPDA has continued apace.

The BPDA has long been a target of Mayor Wu. City of Boston photo

At a mid-December reporter roundtable inside City Hall, Wu and Jemison, joined by housing chief Sheila Dillon, laid out proposed changes to the city’s development process that involve increasing affordable housing commitments from developers.

The mayor continued to bang the drum on predictability, calling it a “huge part of what we hear” is needed in the development process. “We are project-by-project right now fighting to squeeze out these numbers and arriving there a good amount of the time, but with months of conversation and negotiation and working from every angle to get it done,” she said.

“The fact that we could make it consistent not only takes all of that time and puts it back into what the project can actually use it for to deepen affordability and get shovels in the ground,” she said, “but it’s also very important for how business is conducted across the city – that it’s not based on who has a better relationship or a more familiar lawyer with these systems.”

Near the close of the roundtable, a reporter asked what the future holds for the BPDA. Wu looked to Jemison, and then said they will have “more to say” in January.

The BPDA may not be the only entity that will encounter big changes in the new year. If 2022 was about resurfacing, mixing Zoom calls with in-person meetings as the pandemic thrummed in the background, then 2023 may be about restructuring. Here’s what else to look for in the coming months.

Plans for elected school panel could move ahead
The 2021 ballot that featured Wu facing off against fellow City Councillor At-Large Annissa Essaibi George also had a nonbinding question, which asked voters if Boston should return to an elected school committee.

The “yes” side picked up 99,000 votes out of the 125,945 cast on the school committee question, more than the 92,000 votes out of 143,514 people who cast ballots for mayor.

Last year came and went without much formal action, to the annoyance of proponents of an elected panel, but that could change this year.
According to Hyde Park Councillor Ricardo Arroyo, who chairs the Government Operations committee, which is crafting the legislative switch to an elected panel, two things still have to be hammered out.

First, there’s the student seat. Arroyo and others want the student member to have a vote, but they’re figuring out how the student would be selected and how she or he would participate.

The second thing is everything else: The size of the elected body and the time frame for implementation. There could be nine people, aligned with the number of City Council districts. There could be some at-large members, though keeping the panel at an odd number is key.

Wu prefers a hybrid, with both elected and mayorally appointed members. Arroyo told the Reporter that he doesn’t believe a hybrid is off the table, but it hasn’t surfaced in talks with his colleagues or in his frequent conversations with the mayor. “I’m open to hearing it if it comes up,” he said.

Asked if he has a preference, Arroyo said he leans toward all-elected. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense from the standpoint of good government to have half of the school committee responsive to the residents and the other half responsive to the mayor.”

He acknowledged the worries of a return to the bad old days of an elected school committee, and the racist reputation it gave the city. But he said the city is now in a different era, with different potential candidates.

It’s unlikely that school committee elections will appear on the municipal ballot this year 2023, with Arroyo discussing tying them to a state election before syncing them to municipal cycles.

Whatever form the final proposal takes, Arroyo is seeking a supermajority of his colleagues supporting what lands on Wu’s desk. “I don’t intend to send her something that passed 7-6,” he said.

The MBTA
Gov. Healey has been handed an MBTA in crisis by her predecessor, Charlie Baker. Just by looking at the Dorchester leg of the Red Line, you can see that stations are in disrepair, and JFK/UMass, a major transit hub, is in desperate need of an overhaul.

Healey, who will be hiring a new general manager for the T, has pledged to hire a transportation chief focused on safety, as well as a deputy GM of operations and a deputy GM of capital planning.

The transportation plan unveiled during her gubernatorial campaign indicated that more is in the works: The state’s transportation department system is a “patchwork” of different agencies, a “perplexing” structure, and a lack of cohesion, all of which have affected employees, who work long hours and feel demoralized. “A ‘righting of the ship’ needs to include both a governance structure overhaul with inspired leadership and a concerted effort to make transportation workers feel valued again,” her plan said.

The governor also has pitched transitioning the Fairmount Line, which runs through Dorchester and Mattapan, into a “rapid transit” system.

Odds and ends
City Council elections are on the ballot this year, and incumbents ramped up fundraising before the end of 2022, before finance limits reset….How far will rent control, or rent stabilization, get on Beacon Hill? Healey has said she is open to municipalities setting their own course…The city budget process gets underway again, as councillors get another crack at the expanded powers granted to them by a 2021 ballot question. (They can modify and amend appropriations in the operating budget but cannot exceed the total amount in what the mayor proposed.)

The first attempt didn’t go well, as confused councillors made changes they did not have the authority to make, according to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau. They eventually fumbled their way around to sending the mayor an operating budget that redistributed $9.9 million, or “0.6% of the appropriations the City Council had authority to amend,” the bureau said in its after-action review.