City officials who drafted Mayor Michelle Wu’s Plan for a Safe, Active, and Healthy Summer last year cited input from focus groups and interviews with more than 500 Bostonians in putting together a program that included youth programming and support for community-based organizations.
A combination of higher costs for services like snow removal and health care for city workers has caused a nearly $50 million gap in revenue needed for the $4.9 billion FY27 budget proposed by the mayor last week.
Cuts in spending for youth jobs in the mayor’s budget have ignited outrage among many of those same people who benefitted from employment programs in the past.
“It is very discouraging to see that Mayor Wu is decreasing the amount of money for youth jobs while increasing the budget for Boston Police,” said Deborah Ejims, who works with Youth Justice and Power. “It shows that Mayor Wu doesn’t really care about the upcoming generation and the youths living and working in Boston.”
Wu’s proposal funds a popular summer jobs program for teens, who work during a six-week period in July and August, but it defunds entirely the year-round jobs program, which accounted for $5.9 million in last year’s budget.
Ejims and other teen activists decried the proposed cuts during a Monday Zoom meeting with Trinh Nguyen, the city’s chief of Worker Empowerment.
Activists on the call argued that the year-round jobs are a lifeline for teens, many of whose families depend on them for support. They contrasted the cuts with a $7 million increase to the Boston Police Department in the mayor’s budget plan.
In 2023, the Wu administration launched its Office of Participatory Budgeting, following a 2021 ballot referendum in which voters supported the city setting aside a portion of its annual budget for residents to determine funding priorities. City officials said the funding areas residents prioritized would help determine the city’s budget priorities.
While Boston residents have consistently called for increased funding for affordable housing, legal services for immigrants, and food access, critics say those areas are instead facing cuts in the latest administration budget.
“The budget definitely did not fund the priorities expressed during participatory budgeting,” said Eliza Parad, a member of the Better Budget Alliance, a coalition of Boston-based nonprofits. “There’s lots of data that shows that people need stable housing and access to food — these are the things residents are asking for to keep communities stable.”
Said Joaquin Atallah Gutierrez, a member of the Youth Justice & Power Union: “Boston is not a cheap place to live, and the city also cut the Office of Housing, which is crazy.”
The Better Budget Alliance last year conducted interviews and surveys of nearly 700 Boston residents on their budgeting priorities and found that 75 percent of respondents wanted to see the city’s funding for policing cut. The group’s survey found that 68 percent of respondents cited housing as a top concern, 44 percent mentioned health and mental health, 40 percent pointed to immigrant support, 33 percent to help with monthly expenses, 30 percent to food aid, and 28 percent cited the environment.
The $7 million increase to the $477 million police department budget doesn’t keep pace with inflation, and multiple city departments, including the schools, are facing personnel cuts. Parad and other activists note that police overtime spending last year was $96 million— nearly $40 million over its $57 million budget allocation. They maintain that the BPD’s budget could absorb cuts to protect the priorities about safety that residents have outlined. “Youth jobs are among the things residents are asking for to keep communities safe,” she said.
On the hour-long Zoom call, several teens blasted the administration’s budgeting priorities.
“Mayor Wu claims she cares about the youth,” Atallah Gutierrez said. “I remember a couple of summers ago she said all the youth in Boston are going to have a job over the summer and a significant amount of young people were left unemployed.”
After listening to their testimony, Nguyen told participants the budget is a first draft and encouraged them to advocate for more funding.
“We’re going to work really hard to do whatever we can internally,” she said. We have to figure out a way to move forward.”
