Rejoice Ejims of the Youth Justice & Power Union led a demonstration outside the Reggie Lewis Track and Field facility on Sat., April 18. Yawu Miller photo
Teen activists demonstrated outside of Mayor Wu’s City Hall office last week and again in front of the Reggie Lewis Track facility on Saturday to call on the city to fund more year-round jobs for youth.
The mayor’s 2027 fiscal year budget did not cut the six-week summer jobs program, but zeroed out the line item for year-round jobs programs that allows students to work after school.
“Michelle Wu has cut youth jobs for the school year,” said Rejoice Ejims of the Youth Justice & Power Union, speaking to passing students outside the mayor’s youth jobs fair at the Reggie Lewis Track on Saturday. “You won’t get academic year jobs because she’s cut the funding by $6 million and she has put $484 million into the police budget.”
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Wu said the city will rely on funding from the Private Industry Council to fill in the $6 million funding gap for after-school jobs.
“We are going to maintain the same access and number of jobs, but it will be funded by our partners who help supplement summer job funding,” she said. “They are going to absorb the school year jobs as well now.”
But youth advocates still say they want the city to maintain funding for school year youth jobs as a line item in the budget.
“The city has the funds,” said Nate McLean, an associate program coordinator with the Center for Teen Empowerment. “We want to see it go into youth jobs.”
McLean points to the Boston Police Department budget, which is seeing a modest increase of $7 million in next year’s proposed budget. Police overtime, which the mayor has consistently budgeted at $55 million in recent years, is expected to cost over $100 million this year. Efforts to curtail the growth in police overtime spending in recent years have failed.
McLean and other activists have long advocated for diverting funding from policing to programs that prevent violence.
“If the youth are given jobs and opportunities, they’re less likely to become involved with the police,” he said.
The calls for re-allocating funding from policing to services that directly benefit community members go back years. Back when she served on the City Council, Wu herself was a proponent.
“It’s more about how do we set up the investments in what we want to see from the beginning in public health, in housing stability, in food access and mental health, in transit access,” she said in a 2020 interview with NBC 10.
But since she has taken office, police budgets and overtime have continued to climb. Now as the city is facing revenue that has kept pace with increased costs, it’s funding for housing vouchers, immigrant legal services and youth services that are on the chopping block.
On Saturday, the teens outside the Reggie Lewis Track facility sought to illustrate their point with one wearing a mask bearing a photocopy of Wu’s face and dumping a trash bag full of cardboard discs painted gold to resemble coins in front of a sign that read “police budget.” No coins were dropped into a gab that read “youth jobs.”
“We are the future, so don’t defund our jobs,” the teens chanted.
Talking to reporters on Thursday, Wu said she is looking to private foundations to help fill other gaps. The Boston Foundation, Barr Foundation and The United Way of Massachusetts Bay are stepping in to help immigrant groups with food access and legal supports.
“We are trying to supplement and find new sources of revenue from public/private partnerships, now that we’re no longer able to continue that on the city budget alone,” she said.
Wu argues that this year’s fiscal challenges are the not the result of falling revenues, but rather inflationary pressures that are affecting every city in the commonwealth. Cities and towns in Massachusetts, however, are limited in how much they can raise through property taxes — the largest single source of revenue for local cities and towns — by Proposition 2 1/2, a ballot measure that took effect in 1980 that limits increases in property taxes by 2.5 percent a year unless residents override the stipulation .
“We have had the projected revenues in every budget come in at or usually above where they’ve been, but we’re in a huge inflationary environment with cost pressures that are going up far above 2.5 percent,” she said.
When inflation is above 2.5 percent, cities and towns in Massachusetts often have to make budgetary cuts, Wu noted. This year, health care costs have increased by 20 percent. She said the city has sought to increase other forms of revenue, appealing to local universities and hospitals to increase their voluntary Payments In Lieu of Taxes contributions to the city budget.
Wu noted that the Massachusetts Municipal Association — a body that advocates on behalf of local cities and towns — has called on the state to increase local aid to cities and towns. Boston’s pot of state aid accounts for 11 percent of its $4.8 billion budget.
“It’s our second largest source of funding,” Wu noted. “And back in the day, it used to be much closer to 20 percent or even more.”
