THE TWO SIDES warring over Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s property tax shift proposal huddled in Senate President Karen Spilka’s office Thursday afternoon, but emerged with no sign of an agreement.
The property tax shift has been a top priority for the mayor, who filed the legislation earlier this year, saw it quickly clear the House, and then stall out in the Senate in the final hours of the formal legislative session on July 31.
The bill seeks to temporarily shift more of the city’s property tax burden to commercial real estate owners in an effort to avert a likely spike in residential tax bills in 2025. The spike is expected due to declining commercial values driven by pandemic-era shocks to the office sector through hybrid and remote work patterns. Some business groups have sought to kill Wu’s bill, particularly the real estate sector, which successfully knocked a transfer tax out of Gov. Maura Healey’s multi-billion dollar housing bond bill.
The meeting in Spilka’s office, which lasted about an hour, included Wu as well as her chief financial officer and assessing commissioner, and business community leaders, such as Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce’s Jim Rooney and the Boston Municipal Research Bureau’s Marty Walz, a former House lawmaker, who have said there could be alternative approaches to Wu’s proposal, such as budget belt-tightening. Wu has pushed back on that approach, arguing the city’s budget is already tight.
Spilka, an Ashland Democrat and former labor mediator, focused on the two sides being in the same room and sought to put limits on the discussion. The six senators who represent Boston – most of whom were said to back Wu’s proposal in the closing days of the formal session – stayed quiet throughout the meeting, according to one source in the room.
Leaving the meeting, Wu called it a “private conversation” and declined further comment to the group of reporters who were waiting outside the Senate president’s third floor office.
Other participants sought to slip out of other exits and avoid the media, with little success.
Sen. Nick Collins, who represents South Boston and opposes Wu’s proposal, said there was “no consensus” reached and the next step remains “uncertain.” He added; “There wasn’t an immediate follow-up meeting scheduled.”
“Look, we had a great convening and we’re trying to get the sides to work it out themselves,” Sen. Lydia Edwards, an East Boston lawmaker who is a Wu ally, told reporters after the meeting. “The conversation was between the mayor and the commercial folks.”
West Roxbury Sen. Michael Rush, who walked out with Collins and went on to headline a Thursday night fundraiser for Wu in her home neighborhood of Roslindale, declined to comment to reporters.
The other senators in the meeting who represent parts of Boston include William Brownsberger, Liz Miranda, and Sal DiDomenico. Wu’s bill currently sits in the Senate’s Ways and Means Committee.
The meeting between the groups came a day after Wu made her annual appearance before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. While Wu made her pitch to the business community inside a Seaport hotel, a group from Massachusetts Senior Action Council, many of them elderly Boston homeowners, roamed the State House, lobbying senators to back Wu’s proposal.
Twenty years ago, Mayor Thomas Menino made a similar request to temporarily shift property tax rates, and received approval from Beacon Hill.
“Believe me, if I didn’t have to ask for this, I would be trying to pursue a different method, because getting through all these levels of approvals is tough,” Wu told Rooney during a question-and-answer session after her speech.
After her speech, Rooney said that it was important for the mayor to have an opportunity to make her case in front of the business community. But asked whether she changed any minds in the hotel ballroom, Rooney said no. “I wasn’t going to turn it into a public debate. But there’s points that could be made that might say there were other approaches that could have been taken that would not have put us in this position,” he said.
Even so, Rooney said, the relationship between the mayor and the business community is “better than is discussed in the public domain.” Rooney, a former aide to Menino, and Mayor Wu, who interned for Menino, talk several times a week, “sometimes at night or on weekends,” he said.
“I think it would be unfair to both parties, the mayor and the business community, to describe the business community as something monolithic,” Rooney told reporters on Wednesday. “I think if there’s been some ups and downs it’s been much more the development community than the broader business community of Boston.”
The meeting in Spilka’s office was scheduled partly as an attempt to reset the conversation surrounding the property tax proposal, after a public back-and-forth between Wu and Spilka in August. Wu told GBH that if the Senate did not pass the proposal, “every single resident will know that their taxes are going up because the Senate did not vote through that last step.” That prompted Spilka to say in a statement that blaming the Senate is “politically convenient.”
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