MOST OF Beacon Hill’s a stage, but much of the action often takes place between players behind the curtain.
One such player who has avoided prime time finally stepped out into the open this week, when state Sen. Nick Collins took to the floor of the chamber to delay debate on Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s property tax shift proposal. Collins, a South Boston Democrat whose district also includes Dorchester, kept publicly quiet for months amid multiple hearings on the issue but opposed it behind the scenes.
A conservative Democrat who has previously clashed with Wu on other matters, Collins once considered a run for mayor in 2021, and is said to have eyes on a congressional seat. On Monday, he used a procedural maneuver to kick the Senate’s debate to Thursday as city officials are up against a deadline to get tax bills out to property owners.
Wu’s latest version of the proposal, which like its previous iteration passed the City Council with super-majority support and cleared the House, temporarily places more of the tax burden on commercial property owners in order to mitigate a potential spike for residential homeowners.
While the latest version now has the support of business-backed groups like the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, others like the Small Property Owners Association say they’ll get hammered as they’re still reeling from the pandemic-era effect of more people working from home rather than in offices.
The Boston proposal has also been caught up in the ongoing war between the House and Senate. The House, where Wu has top allies, has largely kept the proposal moving, while it’s stalled again in the Senate.
That’s atypical for locally focused legislation. Home rule petitions like this one – in which city and town officials beg benevolent state lawmakers for something they lack the authority to do themselves – usually don’t involve much drama. Watertown officials successfully made a request last year for their own property tax shift. The last time local proposals generated this much heat, mused one lawmaker who has been around since the late 1990s, was more than 20 years ago, when Fall River and Lowell sought to tear down public housing.
But this home rule saga involves power and money, and a cast of characters that includes a Boston mayor who is up for reelection next year, powerful business interests, and a Democratic state senator who represents a good chunk of the city.
Collins has for weeks dodged supporters of the proposal, including members of the Mass. Senior Action Council, elderly advocates whose blue shirts have become a constant sight inside the State House as they lobbied lawmakers to back the bill, fearful that their property tax bills next year will spike if it doesn’t pass. Before the Thanksgiving holiday break, one member trying to buttonhole the senator believed Collins was inside a bathroom around the corner from the Senate chamber, and started loudly banging on it in order to flush him out, without success.
Earlier that same day, Collins privately huddled with Ryan Fattman, a Republican senator from Sutton, pressing upon him his concerns about the proposal. Collins told reporters this week the concerns he’s raised are the “same things we’ve been hearing from constituents across the district that are concerned about the impact on retail and what that could do to a burdened commercial base that’s in some cases losing 50 percent of their value.”
On Tuesday, after Collins used a procedural maneuver to push off debate, several Mass. Senior Action Council members camped out at his office. “His office has never answered a phone call or an email from me in many years,” said Emmy Rainwalker, a social worker who lives in Dorchester, which Collins represents along with South Boston. “On this issue, it’s really big because some of us are risking losing our homes over this tax issue.”
Collins relented after senators finished, inviting the seniors to break bread, or rather talk taxes over pizza slices. They left the meeting unimpressed, as Collins had voiced the possibility of alternative measures, such as tapping the city’s rainy day fund to block an increase in residential taxes.
Collins himself emerged to speak with reporters he’d been avoiding, saying he wanted to see more complete financial figures from Boston City Hall, specifically numbers that were submitted to the state Department of Revenue just before Thanksgiving. “Concerns have been raised the whole time,” Collins said when asked about his timing.
Wu administration officials later said this was the first they’d heard from Collins about his particular concerns. A statement from a mayoral spokesperson suggested that City Hall was having as hard a time getting him to weigh in as the seniors outside his office.
“In addition to reaching a compromise consensus with business groups, we have testified at multiple City Council and State House hearings, provided available data as it has been finalized, held town halls across the city, and reached out to each Senator multiple times to ask for their feedback and concerns,” the spokesperson said. “We will continue to prioritize all possible outreach on this short timeline before tax bills must be finalized to protect residents and stabilize bills for all taxpayers.”
Lawmakers are meeting in informal sessions, meaning further delays are possible since one lawmaker can gum up the legislative process. After Collins made his move, senators turned their focus to finishing a spending bill that plugs a state budget hole and closes the books on fiscal year 2024 four months after it ended.
Michael Rodrigues, a Westport Democrat who serves as the Senate’s budget chief, cheerily greeted reporters outside the chamber and expressed relief that he was balancing budgets rather than standing in Collins’ shoes.
“It’s nice to be an observer of drama, rather than up to my eyeballs in it, as I usually am,” he quipped. “We’ll let the Boston folks deal with the Boston issues.”
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