Note: This article was originally published in the Beacon Hill Times, May 24, 1997.

A small revolution happened last week. No shots were fired and one doubts it will leave its mark on the history books. But a majority of the City Council broke rank, quashing an ill-conceived referendum question and passing Boston’s fiscal year 1998 budget in one tumultuous day marked by bitter personal attacks and the threatened resignation of the Council President.

Most years the Council begins holding hearings in April on the proposed budget and, as a matter of form, rejects it in early June “without prejudice.” The rejection is a procedural device that allows the administration to re-propose the budget with a few changes that respond to individual councilors’ concerns. Most of those changes are rather small — more money for a police substation here, a few extra trees planted there — but they are enough to secure a vote.

This year that seemingly routine rejection of the budget failed. The president of the council and the two chairs of its most powerful committees, Ways & Means and Education, were caught by complete surprise. The dissenting councilors made a series of motions to pass the city’s education and operating budgets. After a recess that lasted two hours and a series of bitter and caustic speeches attacking the dissenters, both budgets passed by a 7-6 vote.

So what happened? Were the dissenters “in the tank” to the Mayor, as alleged by Council President James Kelly? Did the council abdicate its responsibility to scrutinize the Mayor’s budget?

In the weeks preceding the budget vote, debate over the budget had become increasingly rancorous. Several councilors had talked openly of delaying adoption of the budget or of forcing the city into a so-called 1/12th budget, literally a monthly budget. The motivations varied. For some, it was a way to express anger at an administration they felt had slighted them. For others, it was a means to score political points in the upcoming citywide elections. For still others, it was a stick to bully the administration into accepting a citywide referendum on busing, something a majority of councilors believed would accomplish little except to inflame, not heal, racial tensions.

Delaying the budget or going to a 1/12th format would have been a disaster for Boston, undermining key services, delaying the training of new police officers, holding back summer jobs for youth, and wreaking havoc on the city’s bond ratings. Yet, except for an ongoing uneasiness with the year-old merger of Boston City Hospital and Boston University Medical Center (a contractual, not a budget matter) and a desire to increase AIDS education funding (to which the administration agreed), there were no fundamental budget issues in dispute. The disputes were personal and political; they were not substantive.

Last Wednesday marked the last time that a simple majority could pass the budget. If it had been rejected and sent back to the Mayor, the council’s rules were such that a supermajority — nine councilors, not seven — would be required almost until the end of July to pass it. That procedural rule made real the possibility that a small faction of five could effectively hold the budget, and the city, hostage.

That was not acceptable. Over several days a new coalition developed. It was not a coalition bound together by ideology. Few would lump together Roxbury Councilor Gareth Saunders and At-large Councilor Dapper O’Neil. But it was a coalition bound by a sense that the long-term interests of the city mattered more than the short-term political gains of a few. It was a coalition that believed the stability of Boston’s city government and meeting the needs of its more than 600,000 citizens took precedence over the acting-out of personal grievances.

In short, it was a coalition brought together by common sense and a concern for the city’s future, a coalition fed up with petty gamesmanship and back-room dealing. That’s not a bad start, and not a bad place from which to build.