Boston Mayor Michelle Wu speaks with GBH News hosts Jim Braude (left) and Margery Eagan (right) during a live broadcast of "Boston Public Radio" at the Boston Public Library on Sept. 10, 2024. Screenshot | GBH News
Boston Mayor Wu is holding out hope that she can get Senate President Karen Spilka to come around to her proposal to temporarily increase the tax rate for Boston’s commercial property owners.
A month after her comments on GBH News’ “Boston Public Radio” program triggered an acid reply from Spilka, Wu returned to the show so say she was “eager to continue making our case” to the state Senate president.
“They’re still working through a lot of the important items that were left, sort of, on the cutting room floor when [the] session formally ended. They just moved, for example, liquor licenses for Boston, so we’ll be getting over 200 new licenses, and that happened after [the] session closed. And so we continue to be in conversation,” she said.
Spilka, Wu said, has told her “that she’s interested in good policy.”
Residential property values are holding strong, but the city’s office buildings are dropping by huge margins in value as many downtown class B tenants opt to go all-remote, trade up to nicer space and reduce the amount of space they rent. Boston office buildings that have traded hands following the pandemic have generally done so at a 30 percent to 40 percent discount from their pre-pandemic sales prices. One commonly-cited estimate by the Tufts University Center for State Policy Analysis, says the city could face a $500 million budget shortfall by 2029.
In response, the mayor is asking Beacon Hill permission to temporarily raise the share of the city’s tax bill that is borne by office buildings and lower the share borne by single-family homes, condominiums and apartment buildings so that residents, particularly senior homeowners, have a chance to spread out the impact of a double-digit jump in property taxes.
Office buildings’ taxes “will still go down under this proposal, but they just won’t have a massive tax break as would be the natural outcome given the rigidity of our tax laws,” Wu told “Boston Public Radio” hosts Margery Eagan and Jim Braude.
Real estate groups say the tax plan will hurt small retailers, who frequently pay the property taxes for their shops under “triple-net” lease structures, and will make downtown’s office woes worse by further driving down the value of properties that can’t be converted to housing and siphoning money away from the kinds of makeovers second- and third-tier office properties need to compete for tenants in today’s market.
The mayor told Eagan and Braude that press reports were wrong that tied the tax proposal’s fate to her reluctance, citing the lack of robust transit access, to support a controversial New England Revolution stadium just over the city line in Everett. That proposal is part of an economic development bill that’s still stalled in negotiations between the Senate and the House of Representatives. Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll said Tuesday that the bill is still alive and she was “getting very promising signals” but that it’s “just not there yet.”
“I’ve always wanted a Revs stadium in the city of Boston and certainly nearby would be great, as well,” Wu told the GBH News hosts. “I don’t really by into the media narrative that these two might be linked and that there’s some conspiracy in the background”
Boston tax bills will need to be finalized by December, Wu said, and more data should be available – data Spilka is “eager to see,” Wu said – in the next month about just how much a residential tax bills might go up in 2025, a year in which the mayor will also be running for reelection.
