Boston mayor, Senate president duke it out after Wu blames inaction for failed business tax bill

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu took a shot at the Massachusetts Senate for failing to move on her bid to raise commercial tax rates, prompting a sharp retort from the Senate president who indicated in her remarks that the city-sponsored bill is all but dead.

There’s been no movement on Wu’s tax-classification bill since it cleared the House last week — after the mayor struck a compromise with ally and House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz to limit the scope and length of her initial proposal. The bill then immediately hit a wall in the Senate where it failed to come to a vote by the end of formal sessions.

While Wu continues to pressure the Senate to take up the legislation again during informal sessions, where a single objection can stall a bill, Senate President Karen Spilka indicated Tuesday that there’s likely not enough support for the measure to advance.

“The Senate president has received no indication that there is sufficient support among senators for this policy proposal to move forward,” Spilka’s office said in a statement to the Herald.

The revelation came in a pointed response to the mayor’s comments on GBH’s Boston Public Radio Tuesday, when Wu made it clear that she blamed the Senate for the bill’s failure, and any impacts that may be felt by residents.

“I am holding out every hope for this extraordinary step of reconvening,” Wu said. “If this does not happen, every single resident in the city of Boston will know that their taxes are going up because the Senate did not vote through that last step.”

Wu reiterated prior remarks that she has no intention to withdraw the legislation, saying that “there is a proposal on the table that was balanced, proven to have worked because it was used in the past, very reasonable, and protects residents and protects small businesses,” and “we’re going to stick with it.”

The mayor has argued that the bill is necessary to blunt the impact of what would otherwise be a double-digit tax increase for homeowners, brought on by declining commercial property values. But the plan has been slammed by business, real estate and fiscal watchdog groups, which Spilka alluded to when hitting back at Wu.

“Blaming the Senate may be politically convenient for the mayor, but it does nothing to improve a policy proposal that has been widely questioned by watchdog agencies and could do serious damage to Boston’s economy,” a spokesperson for Spilka said in a statement.

The statement from Spilka’s office builds off the frosty relations between the House, where the mayor has a powerful ally in North End Democrat Michlewitz, and the Senate, where Wu saw much less success with getting her three major legislative pushes over the finish line by the end of formal sessions last week.

The tax bill flared up as a point of contention on Beacon Hill last week after the mayor negotiated major last-minute changes with Michlewitz to limit the scope and length of the proposal and provide tax relief for small businesses. Those took Spilka by surprise and she said the Senate had not yet seen nor debated the changes and would likely not be prepared to vote on them.

In that instance, Spilka criticized House Speaker Ron Mariano, using nearly-identical language he had used to bash the Senate’s last-minute release of a different bill.

On Tuesday, the Senate president appeared to throw the mayor’s words back at her from a day prior, when Wu accused two city councilors of favoring higher police staffing levels, after voting against the tax shift legislation “that would maintain the city budget” and impact all city staffing, because it was “politically convenient.”

Ultimately, the mayor’s tax plan failed after running into the buzzsaw of Beacon Hill politics, along with legislation she championed that would allow the city to legally restructure the Boston Planning and Development Agency. Both cleared the House, but did not come to a vote in the Senate.

The city’s push to create hundreds of new liquor licenses was approved by both chambers, but in different versions, and lawmakers were unable to hammer out a compromise in time — although legislative negotiators have indicated they’re close to coming to a final agreement on that particular bill, according to a State House News Service report.

Wu said that while she sees the liquor license legislation as having “momentum,” and noted the city’s three legislative pushes may have been held up as state lawmakers focused on “high-priority” items like the economic development bill, she remains “very disappointed” that all three local bills stalled out.

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“I truly hope that some of these provisions can also be included in that and we will do whatever it takes to make ourselves available at the city level, to share information, to advocate, to work with the Senate, in particular,” the mayor said, “because several of our items were voted through overwhelmingly on the House side and then didn’t make it through that final later step.”

The spat between the mayor and Senate president prompted the Boston Policy Institute to weigh in with a cheeky statement, as “one of the fiscal watchdog agencies referred to” by Spilka’s office.

“The decline in office values has raised serious concerns about Boston’s fiscal health,” BPI Executive Director Gregory Maynard said. “The Wu administration has done little to allay those concerns with its refusal to either produce its own analysis, or provide straightforward responses to analysis produced by outside experts.

“This is an issue that will continue to face Boston and the Commonwealth for many years to come, and if solutions are going to be found it is vital that the Wu administration provide more public information about the actual state of Boston’s finances.”

Senate President Karen E. Spilka (Stuart Cahill/Boston Herald, File)

 

 

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