What Mayor Wu took away from this winter's snowstorms

This winter has been a new test for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.

The city’s weathered its snowiest months since Wu’s first winter in office in 2022, and forecasts show the possibility of more snow next week.

In an interview with WBUR’s Morning Edition, Wu shared what she’s learned about storm cleanup.

Boston needed a more aggressive approach to snow removal

After the winter’s first big storm in January, plows left snow scattered across Boston’s streets and sidewalks for days. When Monday’s blizzard dropped another 16 inches of snow on the city, Wu saw an opportunity for a do-over.

She chose to keep the city’s parking ban in place for nearly a full day after snow stopped falling, much longer than usual.

“ This is the first time that we tried it this way because we know it's a burden for residents to not be able to put their cars where they usually have them, often closer to their homes,” Wu said.

But the decision allowed work crews to get more snow off the street than they normally would. Wu said the gold standard for snow cleanup in cities is not just plowing, but snow removal.

“ It involves large front-loaders and trucks that then have to get the snow put in the back of it,” she said. “Once they're piled up – the trucks – they take them away to snow farms, where they can be stored or melted.”

Because the process is so disruptive to traffic, Wu said snow removal normally only happens at night. But this time around, the extended parking ban allowed crews to haul about 200 truckloads of snow off Boston streets during daylight on Tuesday.

She’s considering new tactics to clear sidewalks

Boston already has a system to fine property owners who don’t clear their sidewalks after a snowstorm. Now, Wu says she’s contemplating a program that would send city workers out to shovel sidewalks where owners neglect the responsibility – and then invoice the owners for the work done.

She says the program would target “certain priority sidewalk networks, whether it's by schools, senior centers, or just major thoroughfares,” with the goal of ensuring that heavily-used sidewalks are contiguous and accessible in the aftermath of a snowstorm.

On another topic: Take her support for rent control seriously, not literally

Wu says she would support a potential ballot question this year that would implement rent control in Massachusetts. But that doesn’t mean she thinks the proposal is a good idea as written.

The question would ask residents to approve a cap on rent growth at the annual rate of inflation statewide, with a hard cap at 5%. Were it to pass, it would be the tightest state-level rent control program in the country. Real estate developers, as well as Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, worry it would hurt housing production.

Wu says the ballot question is imperfect, but she wants to see the state Legislature take some action to limit rent increases. She’s frustrated that Beacon Hill has repeatedly declined her efforts to implement a somewhat less restrictive form of what she calls “rent stabilization” in Boston.

Wu sees the ballot question as an opportunity to get lawmakers’ attention. In the past, she said, legislators have sanded off the rough edges of ballot measures before they go into effect.

“They have gone back in to adjust the parameters, recognizing it as an expression of the will of the people, that something needs to change on this front,” she said.

She hopes that could happen in this case, too.