The Boston City Council deadlocked on a call to reject Mayor Michelle Wu’s proposed $4.9 billion budget, killing a bid from some councilors to put pressure on Wu to increase spending in a way that would prevent painful cuts.

Councilor Brian Worrell, the Ways and Means chair last term, called for the Council to reject the mayor’s budget on Wednesday — going against the recommendation of Councilor Ben Weber, the Ways and Means chair this term, who sought to keep the budget in committee for further discussion.

“For me, this is about whether the Council will use all the tools that we have before us to fight for what we’ve heard over the course of a month and a half,” Worrell said. “Residents have been clear they do not want fewer youth jobs, less housing support, or cuts to food justice, arts and culture, veteran services, age strong or the complete defunding of human rights.

“While services are being cut, homeowners are still facing double-digit property tax increases. People are being asked to pay more and get less, and that is a hard message to defend,” Worrell added. “The public came here asking us to use our power today. Using our power means sending this budget back and asking for a stronger one.”

Worrell’s call came after Mayor Wu issued a rebuke to councilors considering voting down her budget last Thursday, saying she would not increase spending and that requests for her to do so were “fiscally irresponsible.”

Weber, an ally of the mayor, cited the mayor’s comments when speaking against the effort to reject the budget, saying that the Council risks having Wu come back with a reduced spending plan due to lower state aid projections than initially anticipated, and losing its ability to amend the mayor’s budget.

The Council has the authority to amend, but not increase the overall budget, by moving money around between or within departments. Weber said the Council should stick to the amendment process, rather than look to “artificially inflate” revenue or spend from the city’s $1.7 billion reserve fund.

“The mayor’s made it clear that she will just resubmit the budget or a smaller one because state aid is less than expected,” Weber said. “Unlike under Menino or Flynn or White, the mayor doesn’t need our support. It is our job, if we have a problem with the budget, to amend it and override her vetoes if we have nine votes.

“So, a rejection now would be a gesture, just one with potentially serious consequences, and the hard work will still remain for us to do one week from now,” Weber said. “I deeply respect the advocates who have helped come up with these ideas, and I share the same goal — restore as much of the grant funding as possible — but I don’t want that to come at the expense of our financial future.”

Worrell argued that rejecting the budget early on would still allow the Council to go through the amendment process, given that the body has until June 10 to submit its amendment package to the mayor for consideration.

“We don’t lose anything by rejecting this budget,” Worrell said. “I don’t know what the mayor will do, but there’s an opportunity for all of us working together to make this budget better, and the only way that the mayor can help out in that process is if we send it back.”

Ultimately, Worrell’s call for a vote to reject the budget failed, as he needed a two-thirds majority, or nine votes, to allow the matter to be taken up.

The Council deadlocked, 6-6, to allow Worrell’s motion to reject the budget to come to a vote, in a split that’s become common this term, between Wu’s council allies and others who are either critics of the mayor or aren’t necessarily Wu allies.

Lining up behind Worrell were Councilors Miniard Culpepper, John FitzGerald, Ed Flynn, Julia Mejia, and Erin Murphy. Backing Weber were Council President Liz Breadon and Councilors Sharon Durkan, Ruthzee Louijeune, Enrique Pepén, and Henry Santana. Gabriela Coletta Zapata was absent.

The vote to block the matter from official consideration came after more than an hour of debate.

All councilors, depending on where they stood on the vote, expressed concern about the cuts that have been proposed in the mayor’s budget, which Worrell cited when urging his colleagues to vote it down.

“No one has got up and said this is a good budget, but we can’t get to nine to reject what everyone has said,” Worrell said.

Durkan said her vote was about “fiscal responsibility.”

“I can see places for cuts, and I can see places for restoration,” Durkan said.

FitzGerald, on the other hand, said his vote was about looking out for the financial future of the city.

“The City of Boston is on shaky financial ground, and the projections that we see … show even less and less growth and even less and less revenue,” FitzGerald said. “It is our duty to apply pressure to the administration when we see that the City of Boston is trending in the wrong direction.

It was pure déjà vu at the Pittsburgh Public Schools board meeting on Wednesday night.

District leaders are again deciding whether to close nine school buildings and reconfigure many more — a plan administrators failed to get board support for last fall. PPS board members are slated to take up another vote on the plan next week.

“We’ve had some conversations, we’ve had some decisions, but the plan that we’re voting on next week looks much like the same plan that we voted on in November,” said District 2 director Devon Taliaferro. “That still sits as a concern with me.”

If passed, the plan would permanently close seven buildings at the end of the 2026-2027 school year: Manchester K-8, Schiller 6-8, Friendship PreK-5 (Montessori), Fulton PreK-5, Miller African-Centered Academy, Woolslair PreK-5 and the Student Achievement Center.

Two more buildings, Spring Hill K-5 and the primary school at Morrow K-8, would close at the end of the 2028-2029 school year once renovations to reopen Northview PreK-5 in Northview Heights are complete.

Morrow’s K-5 program would remain intact, and the district plans to move Schiller’s STEAM-focused, middle school programming to Allegheny Traditional Academy, also on the city’s North Side. Officials also want to relocate the Montessori program to Linden PreK-5 in Point Breeze.

The rest of the schools on the closure list, however, would be dissolved, setting in motion a cascading series of school mergers, feeder pattern shifts and programmatic changes.

With many moving pieces and calls for more transparency, board vice president Yael Silk suggested that PPS hold quarterly updates as administrators implement the plan.

“There have been lots of questions, both from board members and also from community members, and the answer has often been [that] those answers will come once we’re in the implementation phase,” Silk said. “So I also see this as a clear promise to the community that, should this resolution pass, that we as a board will have a process in place for regular updates.”

Director Emma Yourd echoed those concerns, calling for the establishment of a temporary committee tasked with scheduling and communicating these updates.

Taliaferro said that while those amendments to the closure resolution would be helpful, they may not be significant enough changes to sway her vote.

She also urged the district to be more transparent about how it plans to utilize the buildings slated for closure. Five of the nine buildings on the closure list are located in Taliaferro’s district.

“And what I don’t want to see is that the buildings just sit there,” she said. “Although we have to still maintain those spaces at the bare minimum, they still become eyesores in [the] community.”

Taliaferro also raised concerns that selling the buildings without caution could leave room for new charter schools to sprout up in their place.

Several PPS buildings closed in the past two decades now house charter schools. On the North Side, Propel operates a K-8 school out of the former PPS Columbus Middle School. In Hazelwood, the charter network has taken over the former Burgwin Elementary School.

Kids at Environmental Charter School walk through the same halls that Regent Square Elementary School and Rogers Middle School students walked before their buildings closed in 2004 and 2009, respectively.

“My concern is that that can hit us later on down the road, should a charter school end up in one of those buildings, and now we are, um, paying for charter tuition in a building that we closed because we put no thought into what happens with those spaces,” Taliaferro said.

Board members will vote next Wednesday on whether to move forward with the closures.

(WFSB) – The Connecticut State Colleges and Universities Board of Regents met to discuss the search for an interim chancellor.

The meeting lasted about an hour and a half, with nearly the entire time spent in executive session. Before the board adjourned, they said no action was taken that needed to be publicly addressed.

The board elected a temporary chair who almost immediately moved to make the discussion private.

“The board will now go into executive session to discuss preliminary drafts and notes as well as personnel matters,” said Ari Santiago, Board of Regents, Connecticut State Colleges and Universities.

The meeting comes after the former chancellor, his replacement and the board chair stepped down in the last year amid controversies.

Last spring, former Chancellor Terrence Cheng was made a special advisor to the board after a state audit found thousands of dollars worth of questionable spending like travel and entertainment.

John Maduko was then named interim chancellor. Last month, he was put on administrative leave and then resigned. Documents obtained found Maduko was under investigation for sexual harassment.

This week, Board of Regents Chair Marty Guay resigned. In the complaint filed against Maduko, a woman says she did not report the harassment sooner because she says Guay told her he previously fired a woman for filing a sexual assault complaint.

Karen Bufkin, CSCU’s general counsel, is currently leading the system. She was part of the meeting.

Governor Ned Lamont says he plans to appoint a new chair for the Board of Regents by the end of this week.