Budget animosity overshadows Boston City Council deliberations

Most of Mayor Michelle Wu’s nearly $4.3 billion operating budget will stand after the City Council rejected several overrides this week, ending a fraught legislative process that saw animosity over a controversial bid to cut spending for police and veterans services.

The proposed overrides would have channeled funding away from certain line items — for example, snow removal and Boston police equipment — and into services that included senior programming and expanding the city’s tree canopy, The Boston Globe reported. 

The City Council passed only one of the five proposed overrides, a $584,000 bump in pay for municipal officers who provide security at buildings like City Hall, according to the Globe. 

Lasting more than six hours, Wednesday’s meeting at times devolved into bitter commentary and tense stand-offs between councilors. 

Raising his voice at one point, Councilor Frank Baker described the budgetary process as “dirty pool” and accused councilors of acting “like pigs.” 

Baker’s “pigs” comment caught the attention of Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson, who chairs the council’s ways and means committee and noted earlier in the meeting that she had received death threats and derogatory messages targeting her Muslim faith during the budgeting process.

She shared one of the messages on Twitter earlier this month, an email from a self-proclaimed “veteran and a cop” who called her a “mooslam” and told her to “go the [expletive] back to where you came from.” 

She said she’s had nightmares in recent weeks about her children being killed, accusing some of her colleagues of helping to incite the threats. 

“In this city, … a Black woman cannot complain,” Fernandes Anderson said. “If her life is threatened, she cannot complain. If I am told to go back to my country as a ‘Muslim piece of [expletive],’ I can’t complain.”

She called for humanity in spite of different political leanings.  

In a statement posted to Twitter, City Council President Ed Flynn condemned the “repulsive” comments aimed at Fernandes Anderson.

“I have already requested the proper authorities to investigate threatening emails and social media comments, and will continue to report any such communications,” he wrote. “We need to treat each other with civility and respect, and I will stand up against any form of hate and discrimination.” 

On Wednesday, several councilors acknowledged the antagonistic turn this year’s budgeting process has taken.  

Councilor Ricardo Arroyo noted that the process was “highly emotional for many people, because dollars are values, and where we put money and who gets money and how that money gets distributed has always been a contentious process in this city, since budgeting has existed.”

Councilor Julia Mejia said she was “disheartened” that when it comes to politics, the City Council “take[s] on posture, and we take on a narrative, and we feed into that divisive narrative.”

“I don’t want to do that,” she added. “I think we have an opportunity to show that we could be adults, that we can put our differences in our political ideologies where they need to be so that we can pass this budget in a way that shows that we are listening to the community.”

Fernandes Anderson later lamented that “everything progressive that comes through here — not just this body, not just the handful of you who vote it down — the mayor votes it down, too.”

In a fiery tweet later that night, she called Boston a “racist city [with] conservative elected leaders plagued by systemic white supremacy, where power rests in the hands of elitist academics [with] a savior complex, completely indifferent to the struggles of the working class.”

Still, “I will continue to support progressive policies that uplift and move our city in the right direction,” Fernandes Anderson told colleagues during Wednesday’s meeting. “It’s a very lonely place … to sit here, to tell the truth, to fight, to be threatened, to be harassed. It’s a very lonely place to take the bullets by myself.”

The new fiscal year begins July 1.

Abby Patkin

Staff Writer

Abby Patkin is a general assignment news reporter whose work touches on public transit, crime, health, and everything in between.

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