Earlier this year, when a study produced by Tufts University’s Center for State Policy Analysis suggested Boston reevaluate how it finances government services, city officials pushed back, initially dismissing concerns and defending exponential spending increases. That defensiveness, though, quickly shifted to panicked claims of a dire economic scenario and prompted Mayor Michelle Wu to seek legislative approval to raise taxes on businesses more than state law allows. Such an abrupt and dramatic about-face was notable, to say the least.

The Wu administration then went on to suggest that residents would see a 33 percent increase in their taxes and risk losing their homes if this new tax increase did not pass the City Council and the Legislature. For months, city officials escalated their rhetoric, while refusing to share official data that would, in fact, show that Boston’s fiscal issues were not unmanageable. Even if the business tax hike passed, the city still planned to raise residential taxes by 9 percent in 2025, just as it did in 2024. Residential relief was never on the table.

The City Council and the House of Representatives passed the legislation without the city’s official valuation data, so I called for a pause in the Senate until the city disclosed the data. Upon their release, the data showed that the economic sky was not falling. They also showed that lawmakers did not have to accept the false choice of having to risk cratering the Boston economy to mitigate a spike in residential property taxes.

Ample due diligence is required to make informed public policy decisions. Matters that impact residents and businesses must be debated based on objective data and facts — not guesswork, conjecture, or political agendas.

When this matter came before the Senate at the end of its formal session this summer, I made my concerns known. It was clear that downtown businesses were not the only entities that would have suffered disproportionately under the city’s proposed tax increase. Small businesses would have suffered just as much, if not more.

According to the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, raising commercial tax rates beyond the current state limit is “not good public policy.” Doing so raises “constitutional issues” and poses “an impediment to attracting and retaining business.”

There are other tax relief options, such as increasing exemptions for homeowners, low-income residents, and seniors. Working together with Governor Maura Healey, the Legislature did exactly that this session by passing the largest tax relief package in a generation along with sweeping housing and economic development legislation. The tax relief package includes significant increases to the Child and Family Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Senior Circuit Breaker Tax Credit.

We did this collaboratively while also increasing wages for state employees, improving the Commonwealth’s bond rating, and managing a 2.7 percent growth in our budget while providing record levels of local aid to Boston. Boston, on the other hand, grew its budget 8 percent year over year — a total of $350 million — and 21 percent over the past three years.

What this 10-month process has shown is that City Hall must be more transparent and demonstrate fiscal restraint — not pile more costs onto residents and businesses. To provide residential tax relief, the mayor and City Council should increase the maximum residential exemption from 35 percent to 40 percent.

The city could pay for this by:

▪ Drawing from the surplus rainy day fund without impacting the city’s bond rating, per the recent Moody’s report;

▪ Redirecting funds generated via the Article 80 process from the Bluebikes program to residential relief;

▪ Cutting redundant external programs;

▪ Executing other prudent but targeted cuts like the governor did in mid-fiscal 2024 to balance the state budget.

Whether taxes go up on Boston residents or by how much is strictly up to the mayor and the City Council. Like the state, the city can provide relief for taxpayers, stimulate economic growth, and balance a budget. But it requires being data driven and fiscally responsible.

There’s still time to do so. For the sake of Boston’s taxpayers and the city’s fiscal health, I hope they take the time to get it right. Because it’s clear: the numbers don’t lie.

Nick Collins is state senator for the First Suffolk District in Boston.

Among the several things that need to happen for the Cincinnati Bengals to defy the odds and make the NFL playoffs: Cincinnati needs to beat Denver on Saturday in Week 17, and the Bengals also need the Broncos to lose their Week 18 game against the Kansas City Chiefs.

The Chiefs haven’t clinched the top seed in the AFC, but they can do so with a win or a Buffalo loss. The Chiefs’ Week 17 game is against the Steelers in Pittsburgh on Christmas Day.

The Chiefs won’t have anything to play for in Week 18 if they win in Pittsburgh, and likely would be inclined to rest their starters. That would not be a favorable scenario for a Bengals’ team rooting against Denver.

The Chiefs won’t rest their starters if the top seed remains in play in Week 18.

NFL.com estimates the Bengals’ playoff probability at 8 percent.

The Bengals also need the Miami Dolphins to lose to the Browns in Cleveland or the Jets in New York. And Cincinnati needs the Indianapolis Colts to lose to the Giants in New York or at home against Jacksonville.

As a 15-year veteran of the utility industry, I can tell you with certainty there’s nowhere like Connecticut. In other states, when utility companies receive downgrades in their credit rating, regulators and consumer advocates haul them into hearings, demanding to know their plans to rectify them.

Not so in Connecticut, where regulators themselves are named as the reason for the downgrades, and policymakers like the Office of Consumer Counsel and the Chairs of the legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee work overtime to provide political cover.

Meanwhile, the scope of these downgrades – from S&P and Moody’s, two of the most respected financial institutions in the world – extend statewide, from two Avangrid companies, Eversource and all its subsidiaries, to even a small water company.

Whatever the political rhetoric, the impacts are serious and the damage long-term. Building a grid for Connecticut’s future will require billions in new investment over the decades to come, and with the downgrades warning investors to be increasingly skeptical of Connecticut utilities, every single dollar just got more expensive.

The state has a long list of goals for its economy and clear objectives for its utilities: build a modern, sustainable, reliable, resilient, renewable, innovative electric grid capable of supporting massive capacity increases from electrification and data centers. Alienating the investment community does nothing to further those goals; it only makes them less attainable.

But until PURA and state policymakers abandon their anti-utility bias, they will continue to miss today’s golden opportunity to build the energy system of tomorrow –- an opportunity other states are rigorously pursuing. Instead, the excellent reliability that customers rely on, built through a long legacy of investment, will be whittled away even as costs continue to rise.

This, to a question that Sen. Norm Needleman and Rep. Jonathan Steinberg raise in their editorial, is why companies like ours “care” if our credit rating is downgraded. We are not so short-sighted as to shrug off the consequences of higher costs for our customers.

But even more significant are the consequences to long-term energy investment in Connecticut. Utilities are some of the most capital-intensive businesses in the country. We rely on selling bonds to finance safe, reliable, high-quality service through investments like new substations, battery storage, flood walls, microgrids and more.

Downgrades signal to investors they should pull their loans, leaving us with insufficient capital to advance these innovations. Instead, utilities are forced to put what limited capital we can raise (through higher premiums on our bonds) into the most basic, fundamental projects, like storm restoration efforts or pole replacements after traffic accidents.

Accepting – and even incentivizing – PURA to enable meager investments to support only the most basic service puts Connecticut out of step with our neighbors, as other northeastern states are doing the hard work of system planning for the future. It’s no coincidence that Eversource is putting forward 30-year investment plans in Massachusetts while pulling $500 million in investments from Connecticut. Nor should it be surprising that Avangrid company New York State Electric & Gas (NYSEG) is building two 1-megawatt battery energy storage systems that tap directly into New York substations, a major resiliency investment, while nothing of the sort is happening in Connecticut.

Regulators in Massachusetts and New York are far from easy or passive. They have high standards that utilities must work hard to meet, and they do not get everything they ask for, as Needleman and Steinberg baselessly claim is our demand.

What Massachusetts and New York do is set the rules of the road for utility companies. They set clear standards of performance they expect from utility companies – in everything from the level of detail in rate cases to their forward-looking investment plans – and they hold them accountable.

That is not the case in Connecticut. Legislators can obfuscate, downplay, or even offer fictitious conspiracy theories -– most incredibly, that we would pay credit rating agencies, which are independent referees under federal law, to downgrade our credit ratings when downgrades are good for no one.

But none of these political games change the fact that energy companies cannot invest in a state in which PURA puts politically expedient rate cuts over its stated objectives. Nor will they alleviate the underinvestment these policymakers are apparently willing to accept in favor of the fabrication that PURA is “simply holding utilities accountable.”

I fear Connecticut’s energy infrastructure, and the economy it’s built on, will be left behind as other states move forward with a clear vision. The golden opportunity for investment in the energy future is now, and we are at serious risk of missing it as our regulators and policymakers prioritize waging political war on the state’s utilities. The longer they dally, the more likely it is that PURA’s actions and inaction will leave us in the dark.

 Charlotte Ancel is the Vice President of Investor Relations at Avangrid, the parent company of United Illuminating, Connecticut Natural Gas, and Southern Connecticut Gas.