It would be easy enough to write off Wednesday’s hours-long end-of-year Boston City Council session, of which a great portion included Council members praising each other’s work and celebrating departing Council members, as a pat political routine, a self-serving sideshow.
But it would be bad reporting.
Over the course of nearly four hours, Council members passed significant legislation pushing the city administration into requirements Mayor Marty Walsh has not proposed himself, bucked the mayor on recent school policies, and collectively cheered what seems to be an increasingly ambitious collective vision for the city’s legislative body.
In terms of hard legislation, the session included the passage of a bill that will encode reforms to city contracting that the administration of Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has supported in theory for years – but without much administrative action.
Nearly two years ago, Walsh signed an executive order aimed at better practices for including more minority and women-owned businesses in the often-lucrative city contracts that have historically been a mainstay of political patronage. But that order didn’t establish significant new policies; the bill passed by Council on Wednesday, championed by Council President Michelle Wu and Councilor Ayanna Pressley, requires city departments to actively solicit under-served communities for contracting opportunities and provide regular reports on the progress thereof.
Meanwhile, several Council members interrupted their own end-of-year ceremony to introduce last-minute motions calling on the Boston Schools Committee to reconsider or hold off on a recent decision to implement new start and stop times for Boston Public Schools students – a plan supported by Walsh.
In their remarks during Council, members Annissa Essaibi-George and Matt O’Malley were most vocal in their criticism of the BPS plan for school start and end times, saying in so many words each that while the motives behind the plan were good, the schools committee had gotten the final product wrong.
City Councilor Andrea Campbell, who represents parts of Dorchester and Mattapan and will take Wu’s place as Council president when the body reconvenes in January – was less antagonistic to the plan, noting that the changes seemed to benefit many of her constituents but also suggesting that the Schools Committee could have done better in the area of “communication.”
Councilor Tito Jackson, who gave up his seat next year to launch an ultimately unsuccessful mayoral campaign against Walsh, introduced his own proposal for a resolution-by-vote that day, saying that the alternate motion by his peers, which called for a hearing next January, would be too late.
Walsh, just minutes after he had honored departing Council members, played down objections, saying the Council had known for “months” of the plan.
Shortly after Walsh’s comments, at least two Council members took to Twitter to say that wasn’t the case.
But even outside of the political kerfuffles, the closing Council session seemed to resonate with notes of change in the wind.
There were the remarks of outgoing City Councilor Sal LaMattina who, frequently choking up as he spoke, noted the changing demographics of his native East Boston and the connection he felt, as the grandson of Italian immigrants and growing up in tough circumstances.
Recalling a chance to speak to graduates of East Boston High School, he said: “I really wanted to talk to the students – especially the Latino students, because I know a lot of them are nervous, and concerned with a lot of the rhetoric that is going on in Washington. And I wanted to tell them my story – growing up in East Boston, a single mother on welfare, four boys, in four rooms.”
“If you work hard in our city, there are opportunities for you,” LaMattina said. “I was the first one in my Italian immigrant family to go to college, the first one.”
Among the Council members who rose to reciprocate LaMattina’s heartfelt speech was Council President-Elect Andrea Campbell. A young African-American councilor poised to lead the Council as the second woman of color ever to have the job after current Council president Michelle Wu -- Campbell seemed to choke up herself addressing the older, outgoing Italian-American LaMattina, saying he had been a major support.
It was, perhaps, one more sign that the Boston City Council is an institution that, like many things, is changing rapidly. When it reconvenes next year, it will consist of more women and women of color than ever before.
City Councilor Tito Jackson, meanwhile, who gave up his seat to run against Walsh for mayor, had much to say -- including a pointed message to his soon-to-be-former colleagues:
“You’re going to read in the paper every single day that this body is a weak City Council, a weak body, we can’t do anything, we don’t make a difference – I absolutely disagree,” Jackson said.
Calling on Council members to push for more funding for Boston schools, Jackson added:
“Seven members of this body,” – a majority of Council – “can block any budget. The question is, are we going to use the most important bone in our body … our backbone.”
