Boston Mayor Marty Walsh laid out his priorities for the next fiscal year on Wednesday as he presented Boston’ City Council with his annual budget proposal.
 
The $3.3 billion budget proposal represents a slightly more than four percent increase in spending, backed by increased city revenues coming primarily from taxes on the city’s booming real estate values.    
 
In his speech to the City Council, Walsh cautioned that despite healthy revenues this year, the city is hobbled by what he called a consistent failure by the state to adequately reimburse Boston for charter school costs.
 
Taking aim at Governor Charlie Baker, Walsh told the councilors that under Baker’s own proposed budget, “we lose another $27 million dollars in charter school reimbursement. That money, that $27 million, is made up by the budget you’re going to vote on.”
 
Among the big-ticket items in year’s budget proposal: A nearly $100 million, three-year plan to rebuild the Long Island bridge, which Walsh ordered closed in 2014, citing its deteriorating state.
 
In closing down the bridge, Walsh also ended the controversial placement of homeless individuals at a shelter on the Island.
 
Walsh said he does not intend to return to a practice of housing – or, as the mayor said, “hiding” – the homeless on Long Island.  
 
But he does want to re-establish an addiction treatment center there as part of the three-year, nearly hundred million dollar proposed bridge project.  
 
That plan has already met opposition from some residents of Quincy, which lies on the route between Boston and the island.  
 
Speaking to reporters after his budget presentation, Walsh had little patience for those objections:
 
“I’m not going to get into a public fight over this,” Walsh said. “We have a perfectly good piece of land, where we could do some incredible recovery services on and create halfway house beds for people of the entire Commonwealth to be able to use it.”
 
“You know, I don’t say at our methadone clinics, I don’t want people from other parts of the state coming to Boston,” Walsh added. “That’s not how it works, we have to work together.”
 
Walsh’s proposed budget would also make permanent an addiction engagement center in the city’s South End.