Three takeaways from Mayor Wu’s address to Boston think tank

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu signaled her intent to face agency on her reform agenda and that she’s bracing for opposition to her coverage targets in remarks she made Tuesday to the Boston Municipal Analysis Bureau.

The BMRB, which was established in 1932 as an unbiased coverage analysis group, promotes itself as offering “goal and neutral analysis” to encourage good governance.

Wu’s keynote handle on the bureau’s annual luncheon comes as she nears the top of her first 200 days in workplace. Her feedback contained three huge takeaways:

1. She’s sticking by her reform imaginative and prescient

Wu’s remarks have been laced with references to a few of her key reform gadgets from the marketing campaign path, each ones she has acted on — like fostering municipal contract fairness and proposing a plan to improve Boston Public Colleges amenities — and ones she has but to meet.

“We’re at a crossroads, and the notion that inaction is one way or the other safer, that the established order comes without charge, merely is not true,” she stated, pointing to inequities laid naked by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wu prompt native governments are finest positioned to deal with these inequities with new concepts.

“We’ll have to embrace the disruption that may accompany the form of transformative modifications we want proper now. We should transfer away from placing Band-Aids on the signs of our issues and make investments as a substitute in tackling root causes. Right here is the place our biggest alternatives lie,” Wu stated.

Provided that Wu gained the 2021 mayoral election with a decisive margin of practically two-to-one — a victory that some political observers interpret as a mandate — her adherence to this agenda is smart.

2. She’s anticipating naysayers

Wu opened her remarks with an historic reference to the arguments towards Boston’s early subway system within the late 1800s.

“Immediately, we take nice delight in the truth that we have been the primary metropolis within the nation to make this groundbreaking funding in public transit, innovating with the very first subway tunnel within the nation, however Boston did not at all times really feel that means,” stated Wu, pointing to opponents’ aesthetic, industrial and superstitious considerations earlier than Boston started working the subway in 1897.

“Actually, when it was first launched, the concept to construct an underground subway system was labeled harmful and radical… Now, as somebody who rides the [MBTA] to work regularly, I will not let you know that it is good, however I feel we are able to all agree {that a} Boston with none [MBTA] in any portion of the town, wouldn’t be a greater Boston.”

Regardless of the 125-year time hole, Wu’s subtext is quickly obvious, drawing a parallel between the opposition to a transit-related thought then, and now as she seeks to construct momentum without spending a dime public transit in Boston.

For Wu to make these remarks earlier than a company that, traditionally, has taken a cautious strategy to shifts in metropolis coverage suggests she is keenly conscious of potential resistance to a few of her extra formidable coverage targets.

3. She’s utilizing threads of Boston’s historical past to bolster her agenda speaking factors

Along with public transit, Wu made plenty of references to the town’s custom of “pacesetting” in different areas like authorities, public training, medication and healthcare.

She even referenced her personal place within the metropolis’s historical past, mentioning that upon reviewing letters addressed to future mayors from former mayors, she observed that none of them anticipated a girl sitting of their place.

“They every started with some model of Sir or Expensive Mr. Mayor,” Wu stated of the missives she learn from 1830, 1930 and 1981. “For all their dedication to dream huge and boldly about our future, not a single mayor imagined that sometime, somebody like me or Kim Janey earlier than me can be mayor. And nearly actually they could not have imagined the assets and momentum obtainable to us at this second to implement lasting modifications and construct a basis for a brighter future.”

It is a political approach Wu deploys continually, trying again to hyperlink Boston’s storied previous to the trail she’s making an attempt to forge.

Its effectiveness will nearly actually be assessed by voters when her time period as mayor attracts to an in depth.