“Be bold,” Mayor Marty Walsh said to the state legislature on Friday during his monthly “Ask the Mayor” appearance on Boston Public Radio. Speaking a few days after his State of the City speech, Walsh called on the state legislature to either move swiftly on overhauling the MBTA or allow the city of Boston to be given the freedom to raise its own revenue for transit projects.
“I hear it the most, the lack of having a 21st century transportation [system] in Boston,” Walsh said. “When it comes to our public transit, we’re not [the] first in the country.”
Walsh said that the state’s control over its ability to raise revenues has made it more difficult to compete with other major cities across the nation. Taking inspiration from a recent ballot initiative in the Los Angeles metro area to impose a surcharge on the sales tax to fund transportation projects, Walsh said that he had been in talks with other mayors such as Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone and Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria, Jr to push for a similar regional ballot measure in Massachusetts.
On Friday, Walsh stressed the importance of working with other municipalities, and said that funding initiatives to improve the well-being of Boston will also lead to gains for other cities.
“At the end of the day, Boston is the capital city. It’s not a competition between Boston and Falmouth,” Walsh said. “There’s a spin off effect. So, as Boston and Massachusetts attract companies to the city whether it’s in Boston or somewhere else, there’s a spinoff effect that impacts the entire state, entire commonwealth, [and] our entire economy.”
Despite laying out an ambitious agenda, Walsh’s vision is not without its critics. City Councilor Andrea Campbell said she was skeptical of the mayor’s plans to improve the Boston Public Schools and attacked Walsh’s oversight of the system while in office.
“The administration has failed to address our most pressing structural and systemic inequities in BPS: stalled progress on universal Pre-K, crumbling buildings and infrastructure, and high schools that aren’t preparing children for success,” Campbell wrote on Twitter on Jan. 7.
City Councilor Michelle Wu, often seen as a potential opponent of Walsh’s in 2021, praised the mayor’s address, but said she didn’t think any of Walsh’s statements regarding transportation were bold and accused Walsh of failing to understand the root of the city’s traffic congestion.
“I’m not sure what the major transportation announcement was,” Wu wrote on Twitter on Jan. 8. “We all must keep pushing to abandon [Walsh’s] mentality—it’s not a “few bad drivers” causing our transportation crisis. It’s policy & infrastructure choices that deprive us of reliable alternatives to driving & force us to risk lives at the mercy of human error.”
Ultimately, Walsh is proud of the agenda he has laid out which calls for spending $500 million over five years on constructing affordable housing, increasing classroom funding for BPS by $100 million and pushing for Boston to have its own seat on the MBTA’s oversight board. On Friday, Walsh sought to position himself as a progressive mayor who governs as a realist. Noting recent calls to make bus fare free, Walsh said that while he’s idealistically in favor of the proposal, he’s unsure where the current revenue would come from and if the idea would possibly work in Boston right now.
“If we come up with free public transit that’s the way to go,” Walsh said. “The problem...is gonna be is how do you pay for it. How do you make up the money on the MBTA? And we need to have that conversation.”
