Wu says full White Stadium cost won’t be known til end of 2025

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu says it’ll be months before the city has an updated cost estimate for White Stadium.

Speaking with WBUR’s Morning Edition this week, Wu also defended the city’s bike lanes and addressed concerns about disorder and drug use in the area of Mass. and Cass.

Wu defended her administration’s approach to the troubled neighborhood, citing a decrease in overdoses since she cleared encampments from city sidewalks in late 2023. But she acknowledged that disorder has spread outward from Mass. and Cass to other parts of the South End.

”We cannot tolerate or accept that Boston should be a city where people have to live outside on the street or where there will be pockets of outdoor congregate drug use,” Wu said.

A “ramping up” of police and public health resources in the neighborhood is already underway, she said, as well as an effort to “streamline” involuntary commitments for some people with serious mental illness.

Wu’s plans to rebuild Franklin Park’s White Stadium as a facility that can host both Boston Public Schools athletics and an expansion National Women’s Soccer League franchise is underway. But the project is overshadowed by projected cost overruns — amplified by Wu’s political opponent, Josh Kraft. He claims the stadium will cost city taxpayers more than $170 million.

Wu disputed Kraft’s figure, but acknowledged the price tag for the stadium renovation is getting bigger.

“We are seeing cost escalations in terms of the cost of steel, for example,” she said. “Tariffs have certainly been a big part of this.”

She says her office will have a better sense of total project cost once various construction elements have been bid out.

“Later this calendar year, all the bids should be out the door,” she said.

“We have to make it safer for people to bike when they want to bike,” Wu said in response to a Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll that showed dismal support for bike lanes in Boston. Getting people out of cars and onto bikes, Wu argued, is one key opportunity for the city to lessen traffic.

Wu noted she’s also pursuing a number of non-bike methods to ease congestion on Boston streets. That includes, she said, better “curbside management” to reduce double-parking and a collaboration with Google AI to optimize stoplight timing.

Transportation policy, Wu acknowledged, requires making tough choices — balancing the interests of commuters, pedestrians and people with disabilities. But at the end of the day, she said, it’s a unifying issue: “Everybody hates traffic.”