Boston City Council wrestles with the mayor's proposed budget cuts

Facing budget pressure, the city of Boston plans to cancel $12.2 million in grant programs that provide services for veterans, survivors of domestic violence, immigrants and an array of others.

On Wednesday, Mayor Michelle Wu released a list of 31 specific grants that would be gutted in her $4.9 billion proposed budget for the fiscal year that starts in July.

“These decisions were not made lightly and do not reflect the value, effectiveness, or importance of these programs and the work supported through these grants,” Wu wrote in a letter to the city council. “In fact, many of these programs were selected for grant funding precisely because of the meaningful benefits they provide to residents.”

The cuts would completely defund a youth development fund, which got $1.6 million from the city this year; a Legacy Business program that had received $1,000,000; and a legal access grant for immigrants, which previously had $879,000 in funding.

The grant cuts also will hit $300,000 that had gone to Bridge The Gap Veterans' Services; $50,000 each for a Domestic, Sexual, and Gender-Based Violence Prevention program and a Women and Girls Mental Health program; plus $275,000 for the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Advancement’s grant to teach English to parents and caregivers. There was also $700,000 to help people reentering society after serving a jail sentence.

The council’s Ways and Means chair, Ben Weber, said the body is looking to restore some funding, but it's facing a particularly difficult task this year. Where councilors’ amendments in recent years have totaled up to $8 million, he said, this year they’re ringing up to much more.

“The amendments I’ve gotten from my councilors are all good ideas and good projects,” he said. But, “All together they add up to over $100 million.”

That's with some overlapping proposals. While the councilors are divided over many issues, Weber in a statement Friday said there is consensus to "restore funding for critical programs like housing vouchers, youth jobs, immigrant services and senior programming."

The mayor has made clear she does not plan to raise the budget beyond her current proposal. It currently represents a 2% year-over-year increase — the lowest percentage increase since the Great Recession. In her letter to the council, Wu said the city faces “rising fixed costs and significantly tighter fiscal conditions than in prior years.”

On Thursday, the City Council began hashing out the budget and floating amendments to it in working sessions. Councilors are pushing hard to restore funding for their own priorities, and they’ve been hearing from constituents demanding full funding for programs they care about.

The grant cuts could affect numerous nonprofit organizations that provide the services. Wu’s office did not indicate which groups would lose funding; more than 1,000 organizations currently tap city grants.

“It low-key feels like a hidden betrayal,” 18-year-old Jerome Wells of Mattapan said of the mayor’s pitch to cut funding for 1,800 youth jobs. “Every single year we have this thing called the Mayor's Youth Summit … and she's there, she's talking to us and making it feel like people are seeing us.”

Now, he said, it feels like that’s changed.

“For it to be all stripped away at the end, it feels two-faced, like a facade — to gain the trust and then take it away,” Wells said.  

Councilors are expected to cast votes on the proposed amendments on June 3. Critics, many from local organizations facing cuts and some from within the council, are calling on the body to reject the mayor’s budget outright. After a tense debate last week, the council was deadlocked.

A range of potential solutions has been floated: dipping into the city’s free cash pot, pulling money from the Boston Police Department, adjusting the city’s revenue projections to raise the total budget, laying off municipal staff and using more of the Parking Meter Fund.

Should councilors reject Wu’s budget, the mayor would be forced to resubmit it.

“Increasing the bottom line of the budget by either inflating revenue projections or drawing from the City’s reserves would be fiscally irresponsible,” Wu wrote in a May 14 letter to the council.

In fact, she warned, any resubmitted city budget could actually decrease spending levels further because of developments on Beacon Hill involving the statewide budget.

“In terms of the strategy,” Weber told councilors during the Thursday working session, “I didn’t think rejection was going to produce any tangible benefits to us in this process in terms of added money and changing of programs.”

Still, Wu can push through her budget with or without including any of the council's proposals.

If the council votes to amend the budget, Wu then has a week to decide whether to accept the amendments, or return the budget to the council with modifications to any line item. The council can override her line-item vetoes with a two-thirds vote, by June 30.