The Boston City Council is set to take up a measure that would back a developer challenging the mayor’s plan to scrap its proposal and instead move toward building a new Madison Park high school on Roxbury land designated for economic development.

Councilor Miniard Culpepper, who represents Roxbury, filed a resolution that calls for the Council on Wednesday to support “extending the tentative designation of My City at Peace, LLC and the HYM Investment Group, LLC for Parcel P3 in order to preserve economic development options and maintain continuity.”

“Community members and stakeholders have expressed frustrations over a lack of consultation and communication regarding the city’s new proposal to prioritize the Madison Park campus, particularly its lack of explanation in how the proposed project aligns with prior planning efforts and economic development goals for Parcel P3,” the Council resolution states.

Culpepper’s resolution follows a letter the developers, My City at Peace and HYM Investment, sent to Mayor Michelle Wu last week requesting an extension of their housing and life sciences designation for the parcel the city is now looking to use as the site for a new Madison Park Technical Vocational High School.

“Since our selection in 2023, HYM and MyCAP have remained deeply committed to working in partnership with with the City of Boston and the Roxbury community to ensure that P3 delivers meaningful, lasting benefits to the neighborhood,” the Rev. Jeffrey Brown of MyCAP and Thomas O’Brien of HYM wrote in the letter.

“We believe the future of P3 presents a unique opportunity to bring together housing, community-serving uses, and public investment in a way that truly works for Roxbury,” Brown and O’Brien added.

While city officials have cited the developers’ lack of advancement on the project for the past three years and the plan’s lack of financial viability as reasons for letting the current designation expire, Brown and O’Brien said there’s been plenty of movement since their selection by the city’s planning board in January 2023.

“We have raised and invested substantial capital, advanced the project in good faith and met our commitments to the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan Oversight Committee and the broader community despite significant economic and political headwinds,” Brown and O’Brien wrote. “We disagree with the mayor’s representation of our project’s viability.”

The My City/HYM designation is for a mixed-use proposal that includes housing, commercial and life science lab space, workforce training facilities, cultural space, and community-serving uses, per the Council resolution.

The developers said they “recognize the importance of thoughtfully integrating a potential new Madison Park Technical Vocational High School into the vision for the site,” and have previously floated incorporating a high school into their plans.

This week’s Council action and the developers’ letter to Wu and her planning chief Kairos Shen comes amid community pushback to a Jan. 12 announcement from the city that it was changing course on a long-standing economic development plan for the parcel.

At least six city councilors, Culpepper, Ed Flynn, Ruthzee Louijeune, Julia Mejia, Erin Murphy and Brian Worrell, swiftly issued statements or wrote to Wu administration officials expressing concern about backing away from prior commitments made to the majority-Black and brown community.

“For decades, P3 has been promised to the Roxbury community as a site for meaningful economic development,” Louijeune wrote in a Jan. 15 letter to Shen. “That promise has carried real weight. Roxbury continues to face persistent inequities in access to jobs, ownership opportunities, and long-term wealth-building pathways, and this site has long been understood as one of the few parcels capable of advancing those goals at scale.”

Flynn and Worrell mentioned that the city has numerous unused former school properties to house a new Madison Tech.

Mayor Wu’s office did not respond to the Herald’s request for comment on the developers’ designation extension request and the Council resolution.

Wu defended the city’s plan to shift gears for the Roxbury site on GBH’s Boston Public Radio last week.

“The P3 economic development project was not happening on its own — they have had the designation for three years now,” Wu said. “This project for multiple years now was not able to advance or make meaningful progress towards a groundbreaking.”

Wu said the designation was made when lab space was hot in Boston and able to generate a profit that could subsidize affordable housing and other components of the developers’ proposal.

That is no longer the case, the mayor said, explaining that lab spaces are at 30% vacancy in the city, and “the economics do not work” for the project.

On the other hand, the city’s acceptance into the Massachusetts School Building Authority funding pipeline for the Madison Park rebuild in December made the $680-$720 million budget for that plan more “feasible,” Wu said.

City officials have said their new plan for the P3 site could additionally save between $84-$147 million for the Madison Park rebuild.

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“The long story short is the school and economic development will both happen, and now they have a chance of actually both moving forward to build wealth in our community, to reinforce and make real the dreams of community members who for 60-plus years have been working on this parcel,” Wu said.

“But it has to happen in the right order now, and we’re going to continue working on it so that we’re not just prolonging a pipe dream it became where promises were made to the city and to the community from a developer who said this is going to fund all of these additional things: a free nonprofit center, affordable housing.

“That hasn’t been true for some time,” the mayor said, “and it’s time to come to terms that those promises are not able to be delivered on by that developer, and now we are finding a way to make something actually work.”

Madison Park High School. (Staff photo by Stuart Cahill/Media News Group)