Aaron Michlewitz knew what was coming.
The chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, a close ally of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu who shepherded her controversial push for higher commercial property taxes through the House last year, told WBUR the day before last Thursday’s Senate vote that it was time for Wu to scrap her two-year-long crusade. “She’s tried to put some public pressure on it. I don’t think it’s really changed the needle here,” said Michlewitz. “So I do think that she’s going to have to go back to the drawing board next cycle and see if she can come up with something that’s different and something that’s maybe more feasible.”
Ya think?
The 33-5 vote killing Wu’s bid for a multi-year lift in the legal cap on commercial tax rates wasn’t just a defeat – it was a rout that made a farce of months of Wu-world efforts to weaken Senate resistance. And it unnecessarily raised doubts about her political skills and judgment, just weeks after her slam-dunk re-election seemed to cement them as beyond reproach.
It’s been almost two years since a report from the Tufts Center for State Policy Analysis warned that collapsing commercial property values brought on by the work-from-home movement threatened to blow a massive hole in Boston’s revenue flow, a terrifying thought for a metropolis that relies more heavily on that tax stream than any other major US city. The study called for a “dramatic political response” but also noted that “Boston’s current and former leaders are in no way responsible for this coming crisis.”
Instead of pocketing that disclaimer and getting to work finding a workable solution, the Wu administration attacked the messenger, calling the study “misinformation.” Forced to grudgingly acknowledge the information was correct, she then trashed critics of her commercial tax-hike response, despite credible warnings of the damage it would do the already-wobbly sector.
With a big assist from Michlewitz, the House passed the Wu home rule petition in July 2024. A couple of months later, Senate President Karen Spilka convened a meeting between Wu and business community leaders that led to a compromise agreement in which the mayor won their support for a slightly smaller tax-rate hike without agreeing to budget cuts some of her critics had demanded.
But by year’s end, City Hall turned victory into defeat when property valuation data undercut their claims about the potential severity of residential tax hikes. Said Wu of the business officials who stuck their necks out to cut a deal under false pretenses: “They do not have the best interests of Boston residents at heart.”
That sophomoric rhetoric was next aimed at the Senate, the target of repeated political attacks by the mayor mixed with some of the more lame lobbying tactics ever seen on Beacon Hill. Along with vague threats of a statewide campaign to strip the legislature of its rarely-used home rule petition veto power, Wu-aligned candidates have been recruited, Trump style, to challenge two Senate critics who dared offer counterproposals they claimed could help ease the tax bite on needy Boston homeowners without accelerating the exodus of commercial capital.
None of it mattered. When the long-awaited debate and vote on the petition finally happened last week, even Wu-friendly members of the Boston delegation seemed resigned to its death.
The narrative of greed-crazed fat cat developers and their puppet Senate allies slamming the door on perfectly reasonable soak-the-rich policies at the expense of the poor and vulnerable may be gospel within Wu World, but it’s completely out of touch with economic and political reality.
One of their targeted senators, Will Brownsberger, argued that allowing Boston to by-pass longstanding state law capping commercial rates would open the door to similar, economically-risky moves by dozens of communities. “We put guardrails on municipalities, we say they cannot put up toll gates, for example,” he said. “If we did that, commerce would come to a stop.” And he punctured Wu’s populist claims of protecting the little guy while the fat cats pay more by noting that her plan would be “lowering taxes for very wealthy single-family homeowners perhaps living in something of a mansion and raising taxes on the little garage owner…lowering taxes on the luxury condo that may be occupied three days a year and you’re raising taxes on the local restaurant owner.”
Game over, with most of the Senate’s most-liberal members joining the majority.
Which leaves the mayor at a fork in the road at a moment when both funding for human services and the city’s main revenue-producing engine are at risk.
She can continue to try to threaten, bluff and propagandize her way past the graveyard, all in the name of punishing imaginary enemies.
Or she can, as Michlewitz advises, start over and reach for something “feasible,” which is what serious politicians do.
It shouldn’t be a tough call.