By Ella Adams, State House News Service
Lamenting an “inactive” Legislature and speaking to an increase in ballot questions this election cycle, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said Wednesday that “we can’t have our own state Legislature also add to the headwinds” that she said are already being whipped up by the federal government.
At a “Keller @ Large: Live” event hosted by the State House News Service and MASSterList in downtown Boston, Wu spoke about the “proliferation” of statewide ballot proposals, suggesting that “maybe the urgency isn’t there anymore for certain legislators or chambers at the state level” to pass statewide legislation related to policies like rent control, a policy that many top Democrats are against.
The Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday tossed out the initiative petition that would have legalized the policy via ballot, deeming it unconstitutional due to its clause regarding religion. The SJC disqualified three petitions this year, leaving eight to go before voters, alongside a measure that would repeal the state’s 2024 gun law.
“It’s not because all of a sudden people, you know, decided it was a fun hobby to collect tens of thousands of signatures. It’s because the level of frustration about inaction at the state level, at the State House, has reached a boiling point,” Wu said. She named policies regarding transfer fees and rent stabilization as concepts that receive local support but stall out on Beacon Hill.
“We need legislative fixes, and we can’t have what we’ve been seeing, which is cities come to the table with solutions for real problems,” Wu said. “We don’t expect people just to agree with us, or, you know, we shun them. We want real dialogue about disagreement. Tell us what you don’t like. Let’s figure out what the compromise is, propose an alternative. Let’s engage. But even in my own experience on multiple issues, what you can get up there, particularly from certain parts, is just a blank wall of just, there’s no way to understand how to solve this problem at all.”
Wu clashed with the Senate over the past couple of years, after the chamber repeatedly killed the city’s property tax shift home rule petition. She has called out Sens. Nick Collins and Will Brownsberger for opposing the measure and utilizing a procedural maneuver to end its legislative fate. Wu’s petition (HD 4422) remains untouched by the Senate, though the chamber went on to pass its own tax shock bill and formally rebuke Wu’s tax shift plan.
“Our state senators have not been able to change that dynamic. If it had not been for Senator Collins and Senator Brownsberger two years ago, with our tax shift — the House had passed that provision twice. The City Council had passed it twice, with overwhelming margins,” Wu said. If the tax shift had been in place over the last two years, Boston residents would have saved over $150 million in property taxes, she added.
Speaking about her time on the City Council under former Mayor Marty Walsh’s administration and as an intern for former Mayor Tom Menino, Wu recalled that “the prevailing force that you had to deal with always was that it was impossible to get anything through the State House.”
“It’s nothing new that cities face this kind of restriction from the State House,” she added, noting that “over a dozen communities” have passed home rule petitions related to transfer fees, which would allow localities to place a fee on high-cost real estate transfers.
A local option real estate transfer fee has been pitched for years from places including Martha’s Vineyard, Somerville and Concord as a needed pro-housing tool. While they say it would be help attack the affordable housing crisis in Massachusetts, opponents like the Massachusetts Board of Realtors and the Greater Boston Real Estate Board have said it would negatively impact the real estate market.
On May 28, the House referred a Boston Rep. Brandy Fluker-Reid locally-approved proposal (H 5464) to the Revenue Committee relative to real estate transfer fees and senior property tax relief in the city of Boston. The Senate hasn’t concurred with the assignment.
“We need our state legislators, we need our state senators, to help drive us forward, not put up more obstacles for us to overcome,” Wu said.
This election cycle is “urgent,” she said, “Especially in this moment when the federal administration is attacking Boston, when AI and global forces are changing our economy, and climate change is here, there’s so many headwinds coming at us.” State and city officials have been operating under tight fiscal realities as they piece together their fiscal 2027 budgets and prepare for a decline in funding for sectors like healthcare from the federal government in the years ahead.
“We can’t have our own state Legislature also add to the headwinds,” Wu continued.
The offices of Senate President Karen Spilka and House Speaker Ron Mariano declined to comment on Wu’s dialogue.
Wu has endorsed primary candidates challenging Brownsberger and Collins. Her former aide Daniel Lander is running for Brownsberger’s Suffolk and Middlesex seat, while community organizer Latoya Gayle is running for Collins’ 1st Suffolk seat.
“Is it your theory that if you knocked out Brownsberger [and Collins], that the message to the rest of the Senate will break down their resistance to what you’re trying to do? Because I’m guessing the opposite is going to happen,” Keller mused to Wu.
Wu responded in part that, “We need to know and trust our leaders, and that’s really what’s at the core of how I make decisions about who I vote for and what my endorsements are.”
Asked to clarify whether the two challengers represent her sending a message to the Senate, Wu said, “I am always happy to send a message anywhere that our residents need to be defended. These two candidates, I did not recruit either of them to run.”
Keller pressed Wu about a “frosty” relationship with Spilka, to which Wu said, “I am always eager to try to have conversations, but I think at this point there is a particular job that the Senate feels they need to do in protecting their members, and there’s a particular job that I feel I need to do in protecting Boston residents, and I hope at some point those two missions will actually be aligned and driving towards the same results, so that we can actually start getting some things done.”
Spilka in February talked to Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung about Wu, commenting that “It’s wonderful to have smart, progressive, pragmatic, collaborative, women in government.”
“We agree on probably 99 percent of the issues,” she told Leung. On how to deliver property tax relief, she said, “So we differ on certain policies” … “That’s going to happen.”
A YouTube video link to Wednesday’s event can be found here.
