Boston Mayor Michelle Wu on Wednesday criticized Senate lawmakers for killing a key tax proposal she had pushed for months, telling GBH that “people did not honor the results of the process.”
Wu’s remarks came after her months-long efforts to ease property tax increases on Boston residents by transferring some of that burden onto commercial real estate were declared “dead” in the state Senate. Wu expended significant political capital and reached a long-sought compromise with business leaders, only to see the chamber’s about-face deal her a political blow on the eve of an election year.
In an interview on GBH’s “Ask the Mayor,” Wu said she had taken the process seriously and “we don’t have time at the city level to play games.”
“People did not honor the results of the process, and it just felt like there was one goalpost after another,” Wu said, issuing her first public remarks since the Senate’s top leader said the chamber would not take up the proposal again this year.
“It’s just saddening to feel like this is the process that so much has to go through every single session,” she added, noting that even after a deal had been reached, “when there was an opportunity ... to point to some outside factors, it didn’t end up holding. So it’s been hard for me to feel like I can vouch for a sense of wanting to build trust in these processes.”
The City Council on Wednesday is expected to set the property tax rates for commercial and residential real estate next year, without the changes Wu sought.
The mayor announced in March she would seek to raise taxes on commercial properties in the city, after a post-COVID-19 pandemic slump caused commercial property values to decrease alongside the rise of remote work. Boston funds more than 70 percent of its $4.6 billion budget with property taxes, two-thirds of which comes from commercial real estate. Without changing its tax plan, which requires the state Legislature’s approval, the city would either need to raise property taxes for homeowners and landlords or make steep budget cuts.
Wu worked with business leaders and came to a compromise in October that would result in modest tax rate hikes for both residential property owners and commercial properties, based on estimated property valuations. She told GBH Wednesday those involved “struck a deal knowing that there was uncertainty in this process, precisely to give predictability, and to give the city the proactive tools.”
The state House approved the revised Wu proposal before Thanksgiving. But state Senator Nick Collins, a South Boston Democrat, derailed the proposal through several rounds of votes, pointing to data released last week that showed lower tax increases than anticipated. After it failed to move forward a third time on Monday, Senate President Karen E. Spilka issued a statement saying she would not take the bill up for another vote.
“Now, eight months later — I just realized the other day that I was not pregnant when we started this process, and I am about to pop now — we still never got a final vote on it from the Senate,” Wu told GBH.
Experts told the Globe the difference between the preliminary estimates that Wu based her compromise on and the final numbers was not surprising. The mayor argued the tax change was necessary regardless of this year’s specific projections, writing to business leaders over the weekend that “this bill is needed to guarantee stability for the next three years in a period of continued uncertainty.”
She told GBH the new numbers were within the range provided to business groups this fall, when the city had more complete data than they had earlier on.
Asked about Collins referencing a “campaign of fear and manipulation” about the expected tax changes, Wu said that Collins had not previously raised any concerns about the plan, and comments like his “could be misleading or misinformed.”
“When the senators from Boston sat at the table, the Senate president was at the table, they invited the business groups to the table, and all of the senators did not say a word about any individual changes they wanted to see,” Wu said on Wednesday. “The instruction was work it out with the business groups.”
But the changed projections were enough for business group leaders to urge a pause on the new proposal and key senators to withdraw their support. Groups such as the Massachusetts GOP accused Wu of having misled the public. And on Tuesday night, Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn, the only city councilor who opposed the tax effort, urged the state inspector general to investigate the discrepancy between the projections.
Wu, who has long engaged in fights against the real estate industry while trying to make Boston housing more affordable, said she had participated in meetings this year with “no one besides myself invited to that table to speak specifically for residents.”
“What’s most heartbreaking is that the very people who will be most impacted by this are used to things like this happening, are used to being ignored and left aside and pushed to a later date because big business interests say it’s not serious enough,” Wu said. “A lot of this is in a larger process where people who don’t have any direct stake in our neighborhoods have a lot of say.”
Anjali Huynh can be reached at anjali.huynh@globe.com.