Council caves in on budget issues

29 June 2001

This was to be the year the Boston City Council finally defied the mayor on the budget.

The mayor's only electoral challenger, Peggy Davis-Mullen, also chaired the council's budget committee and she was loaded for bear. Moreover, the council was angry over issues such as the South Boston waterfront deal, Fenway Park, and the renovation of City Hall Plaza. It was fed up with the mayor's take-it-or-leave-it style.

But instead we got lots of threats, a few changes amounting to $5 million and a classic inside-baseball tactic that supposedly cut the mayor's legal staff altogether but in fact may have backfired. The council unanimously passed the $1.8 billion budget on Wednesday, a comfortable three days before its June 30 deadline, making sure that budget negotiations would not interfere with the holiday we now call the "Week of the Fourth of July."

Budget season generally finds the council playing one of two roles. The usual is for the body to roll over and play dead, passing the mayor's budget with only the most minor tweaking. The price for these votes comes cheap: a police substation here, a few summer jobs there.

But on rare occasions - and this year was one of them - the council shows real gumption. It draws its lines in the sand and tries to withstand the political and public relations onslaught from the mayor's office. The mayor plays a game of "dare ya," threatening that failure to pass the budget in time will result in all sorts of dire consequences. (City workers will be without dental insurance! Senior citizens' concerts will be canceled!)

And this year, the mayor's office came up with a new trick: the Manuel Noriega Noise Torture.

Noriega, as you may recall, was the Panamanian dictator who also was a major drug trafficker. The United States invaded Panama in 1989 and Noriega holed up in the Vatican Embassy. He finally gave up after enduring days of hard rock music being blasted by soldiers just outside the embassy gates.

The same strategy has been at play in Boston. On Wednesdays when the council meets, lo and behold there is often some manner of noisy event down below on City Hall Plaza. One week it's former Bruin Ray Bourque parading around with the Stanley Cup. The next week it's singers. The councilors can barely hear each other over the din.

The message from the mayor? Mess with my budget and I'll drive you out of City Hall - or simply out of your skulls.

In truth, despite its early promises of radical revisions to the budget, the council wasn't asking for much. Its issues came down to three: money for housing, textbooks for kids and a counsel for the council.

On housing, the council wanted to create a permanent line item for affordable housing. The administration had already said it would spend $30 million over five years, funded out of its surplus property disposition fund. The reasonable compromise was to boost the amount to $33 million and to force the administration to commit the money for housing and nothing else.

The second issue was in reaction to news stories over the last several months that charged that kids in Boston's schools were often without textbooks. It was not a new problem; in fact, a year ago the school department's superintendent had promised the council that he would resolve it.

This year the council demanded an extra $4 million for textbooks. Ultimately, it got half of that.

The last issue for the council was internal: It wanted to be able to hire its own lawyer. I happen to agree with the council on this one: The mayor has his corporation counsel, why can't the city's legislative body have the same? But last year the council decided to litigate the issue and, so far, it's been losing. Armed with that - as well as the fact that five members of the council are themselves lawyers, making the need for another admittedly less than compelling - the administration stonewalled.

So when the council passed the budget, it simply deleted the $5.2 million budgeted for the city's legal department. One can argue that by banning lawyers altogether, the council may have inadvertently hit upon a solution to a lot of society's ills. Unfortunately for the council, it appears that by wiping out funds for an entire department, the budget reverts to the amount for the previous year, which was actually $100,000 more. Administration staffers can't contain their glee.

The counsel-to-the-council issue is of more concern to politicians than the public. But the housing and textbook issues were of public import. While the dollars involved were small, the council deserves credit for delivering two important political messages.

More important, with the budget now passed, perhaps the mayor will stop the Noriega torture tactics. Let the council meet in peace and quiet - at least until next year.