Boston taxes: One of the uncertainties in life, as it turns out – The Boston Globe

No wonder Massachusetts residents voted in favor of auditing the Legislature, even if it’s not clear exactly what would be audited or whether it would make any difference. We just wanted some accountability.

Susan Clark

Brighton

My takeaway from the demise of Mayor Wu’s property tax proposal? The business and commercial property owners walked away from the negotiated settlement to share the burden of a tax increase with Boston residents and needed the Legislature to help them do it. Good lesson for voters, no matter where you live in the state: Ask your senators who they listen to when casting their votes.

Carolyn Royce

Jamaica Plain

In the article “Wu’s tax bid declared ‘dead’ on Beacon Hill,” the reporters suggest that the apparent failure of Mayor Michelle Wu’s plan to moderate property tax increases for homeowners is due to her “lack of pull in the upper chamber.” While the mayor may have foolishly thought the Massachusetts Senate would support her effort to help homeowners stay in their homes, the roadblock to the passage of her bill was one lawmaker, Nick Collins, who seems to be looking to become the Joe Manchin of the Senate, a Democrat in name only.

Collins was singlehandedly able to block a vote on the legislation, which the mayor had painstakingly and successfully negotiated until running into his power play. Collins has abandoned both homeowners and renters. His actions may be related to donations made to him recently from the real estate industry, reminding one of the frequent critique of federal and state lawmakers: that it is the best government money can buy.

Rosemary Kean

Dorchester

Re “In the end, the numbers didn’t add up for Wu” (Page A1, Dec. 12): A longtime commissioner of assessing who served under previous Boston mayors says that it was reasonable to expect property valuation numbers to change within a short period, with significant impact on the size of the increase in revenues required from Boston’s property taxes.

Therefore, some might argue that any compromise between representatives of the business community and the city regarding the bill that was reached based on estimates that proved to be incorrect should still be honored, and lawmakers should have passed the bill.

Yet strategic planning in the face of predictable uncertainty is a fact of life, not an oxymoron. Under these conditions, a responsible and competent mayoral administration should have had a fiscal plan B (and maybe even a plan C) ready to go to deal with the overall revenue shortfall the city is facing.

Such contingencies could have included choices of where to cut the budget and how to find additional revenues. These ideas were suggested by multiple parties including individuals and groups of residents, the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, and the Small Property Owners Association, with enough time for the administration to have had plans B and C at the ready. They were ignored. Now that plan A has not worked out, the administration is resorting to ad hominem attacks on those who refused to vote for it.

Martyn Roetter

Boston

The Senate’s refusal to take up Mayor Michelle Wu’s home rule petition to shift the city’s tax burden is a damning indictment of the home rule process in Massachusetts (“Wu’s defeat could put her on defensive: Tensions high with Senate, business leaders,” Page A1, Dec. 11).

Whenever a Republican Legislature in another state tries to block its liberal capital city from passing its own laws, liberals in Massachusetts are rightly outraged. But our Commonwealth beat those other states by almost half a century, reinforced repeatedly in the years since by Boston’s business class, who rallied behind Proposition 2½ in the early 1980s and against rent control in the early 1990s.

If the petitions from cities and towns to pass their own laws can’t even get a vote at the State House — and this is just one of a few examples from this session, including rejected petitions on real estate transfer fees and rent control — the fundamental mechanisms of democracy are not working.

Jonathan Cohn

Policy director

Progressive Mass

Boston