By Ella Adams and Sam Drysdale, State House News Service
The solutions are vThe solutions are viewed as either a Band-Aid or desperately needed residential relief, but property taxes in the city of Boston are again a focus of City Hall and State House debate.
According to Boston seniors, labor unions, and city councillors, the blame for projected residential property tax increases lies within the state Senate, which has taken no action on a Mayor Wu proposal to temporarily shift some of Boston’s residential property tax burden onto commercial property owners.
“Why are they not being brought to the floor for us to know where they stand?” Massachusetts Senior Action Council’s Adonika Chaplin, a retired Boston police officer, said Monday at City Hall about tax relief proposals before the Legislature. “We elected them to act on our behalf, not on their behalf. One day, they will be where we are. We are struggling to make ends meet at the grocery store, at the prescription lines.”
Wu last week urged business leaders and the Boston City Council to support her proposal in the face of projected 13 percent property tax increases for Boston homeowners. The council and House of Representatives passed two different versions of Wu’s proposal last year, but it died both times in the Senate and continues to face scrutiny from business and real estate groups.
The House referred Wu’s proposal to the Committee on Revenue in March. The Senate has not sent the bill to any committee and until there is a referral, the bill can’t get a number or have a public hearing.
Ella Adams/SHNS photo
According to Boston Policy Institute figures, the total value of commercial property in Boston dropped $2.3 billion in fiscal 2026, compared to a $1.9 billion drop in fiscal 2025.
“This was always a short-term solution to what the administration said was a short-term problem last year. But what these numbers show us is that this is not a short-term problem. This is not smoothing out. This is very likely a structural thing,” Boston Policy Institute (BPI) Executive Director Gregory Maynard told the News Service.
Wu’s estimates project that overall residential property values will increase by 2 percent and overall commercial values will decrease by 6 percent when adjusted for new growth. Her proposal would not increase commercial property taxes but reduce the extent that they decrease.
“I don’t think it can be understated — the fact that commercial values fell more this year than last year is very bad and indicates that what is happening is different than what happened in the Great Recession or under Menino, and that Boston needs to take a different approach to it,” Maynard said. “This is the kind of thing that happened to the city before the office building boom this century. The tax shift is a Band-Aid, and it seems like the patient might need surgery.”
In the Iannella Chamber Monday morning at City Hall, the council’s Ways and Means Committee held a hearing on a docket about residential property tax exemption and classification.
Through the “routine annual exercise,” Boston Chief Financial Officer Ashley Groffenberger said the council traditionally votes to maximize property tax exemptions to provide the most relief possible to residents. The residential exemption last fiscal year saved qualified Boston homeowners up to $3,984.21 on their tax bill, according to the city.
Councillor Brian Worrell filed the docket on Dec. 3, and the council plans to cast votes on it Wednesday this week. Councillors will be voting on estimated rates, as final rates are dependent upon the final vote of the council and final approval of the state, Boston’s Commissioner of Assessing Nicholas Ariniello said.
If the order were to pass on Wednesday, Ariniello said that his calculations suggest the maximum amount of residential exemption in Boston is projected to be $4,353.74.
“Today we’re doing something cursory that we do every year, but we’re doing it with the background of a home rule petition that this city council has passed three times. I truly believe if you represent Boston you should represent Bostonians, and it’s with a lot of, honestly, anger at the Senate that I am here today,” Councillor Sharon Durkan said.
After rescinding their support last December for a “compromise” version of Wu’s proposal, business and real estate groups are still skeptical of the measure. They argue the shift would place additional burden on an already-struggling commercial sector and have suggested that the state address targeted tax relief through stand-alone bills, or that the city determine how to diversify its revenue sources.
“Here we are one year later, and Mayor Wu is doubling down on her failed, anti-competitive property tax shift while pushing Boston’s economy over the cliff. The mayor is again targeting the beleaguered business community struggling for years with high taxes and increasingly empty office and retail spaces,” Small Property Owners Association of Massachusetts (SPOA) Vice President Amir Shahsavari said in a statement.
“While offering minuscule savings on the residential side, her plan would devastate small businesses and property owners who will continue fleeing Boston because of its high taxes and hostile attitude toward business,” Shahsavari added.
SPOA suggested Beacon Hill take up a bill filed this session by the two senators who led last year’s opposition to the bill, Sen. William Brownsberger and Sen. Nick Collins.
The new bill, meant “to prevent property tax bill shocks,” appears to be their counterproposal to Mayor Wu’s stalled tax plan and, unlike the mayor’s proposal, offers narrowly targeted relief without changing tax-cap rules. The proposal would allow municipalities to shield certain property taxpayers — those over 65, MassHealth-eligible or unemployed — from large third-quarter tax increases in any fiscal year when residential property taxes rise by more than 10 percent.
The Brownsberger-Collins bill had a July hearing scheduled, but it was cancelled. It never received a turn before the Joint Committee on Revenue. The Senate initially planned to extend the decision deadline from December to March 6, but during its Monday session the chamber took an action that will likely end the bill’s progress.
Collins and Brownsberger filed an amendment to an extension order, which covered five other bills and would have allowed delayed action on them. Their amendment removed their own property-tax relief bill from the extension. According to the Senate clerk, this move will send it to a study order — typically the end of the road for most legislation.
The amendment also removed another Collins bill from the extension order. That bill would have let cities and towns issue uniform rebates to households that received the residential exemption in the previous fiscal year.
Collins did not return a request for comment.
Although it appears this Senate alternative for tax relief has reached a dead end, Brownsberger and Collins have again made clear their resistance to Wu’s bill and the statewide ripple effects they believe it could trigger.
Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr also added his voice that despite the bills’ removal from the extension order, “that we will stay focused on this issue.”
“I’m hoping that notwithstanding the withdrawal of the two bills in question from the extension order… that the opportunity to study them further, hopefully for not an extensive period of time, will allow us to continue to find a path forward to be able to offer property tax relief, particularly for seniors in our communities across the commonwealth,” Tarr said.
Durkan on Monday called Wu’s proposal “the only available lever to prevent extreme residential tax hikes.”
She added: “I’ve heard from commercial real estate owners that they do not care what happens here, that this is like — this is a media fight. I heard from commercial owners that this is the cost of doing business, this change and this temporary shift. They would be able to absorb this. The seniors and the young families I’m talking to in my district cannot absorb this.”
Wu’s proposal includes an expansion of the Chapter 41C senior tax relief program and would give the city the authority to pull from surplus funds in order to issue rebates to residents on their fiscal 2025 taxes. The proposal would also create an abatement fund to provide relief to small businesses and double the number of small businesses exempt from the city’s personal property tax, like last year’s version, the petition’s filer Boston Rep. Rob Consalvo said.
“Anyone who tries to downplay the moment that we’re in right now is not representing our constituents,” Durkan added.
Asked by Durkan about city communications with the Senate, Groffenberger said that “we remain open to have conversations with anyone who wants to talk to us about this, but we’re here today because we are sort of under a time clock and need to proceed with adopting a docket that gets us the maximum under the law that exists today.”
Wu’s office said last Friday that Department of Revenue certification of the city’s property valuations backed up their figures, writing that “we can say with certainty that unless the Legislature takes action on Boston’s residential tax relief home-rule petition, the average single family homeowner’s tax bill will go up by another 13 percent next year, with many households having even higher increases than the average.”
Councillor Ed Flynn called on his colleagues and those involved at Monday’s hearing to not cast blame toward the State House.
“In my opinion, it is not the time for finger-pointing between the city of Boston and the State House. What is needed is to lower the political temperature in the room. Have coffee, work together, find common ground, move forward in a respectful manner and listen to each other,” Flynn said. “To call out the state Senate as if they’re not concerned about the residents of Boston is false.”
