A metropolis councilor says Boston ought to discover methods to rent laid-off federal employees as a method to start out filling practically 2,000 vacant jobs all through metropolis authorities.
Metropolis Councilor Benjamin Weber, in a listening to order filed Monday, recommended methods Boston can start to supply employment for federal employees “who have recently fallen victim to draconian, mass layoffs” carried out by the Trump administration.
“Many states and municipalities have been working to mitigate the impact of cuts to the federal workforce,” Weber wrote in his order. “For example, targeted efforts to recruit fired federal workers have been launched in places such as Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York state, Montgomery County in Maryland and Fairfax County in Virginia.
“As of April 2024, the City of Boston had nearly 2,000 vacancies across multiple city departments, including many of those positions remaining unfilled for extended periods of time,” the councilor wrote. “The City of Boston should examine whether it should recruit and train federal employees who have recently fallen victim to draconian, mass layoffs without cause.”
Whereas not offering specifics on what number of federal employees he thinks the town ought to look to rent, Weber famous in his order that greater than 100,000 federal workers have been laid off by the Trump administration within the final two months.
He additionally mentioned greater than 30,000 federal employees dwell within the Higher Boston space, and talked about the impacts felt regionally by the Division of Schooling’s determination to scale back half of its workforce. That call, Weber mentioned, led to the closing of the division’s regional workplace in Boston, “with at least 25 workers laid off.”
Weber’s name for extra metropolis hiring comes at a time when householders, who fund municipal salaries, have been hit with double-digit property tax hikes final January.
The Metropolis Council and state lawmakers spent the higher a part of the previous 12 months debating a shift within the metropolis’s tax construction proposed by Mayor Michelle Wu, who mentioned the invoice was geared toward blunting the impacts of falling industrial values and tax income that shifted extra of the budgetary tax burden onto householders.
In the end, the invoice failed twice within the Senate, and Wu’s third try and get the laws handed in latest weeks didn’t obtain approval from state lawmakers by March 1, the deadline to retroactively change this 12 months’s metropolis tax charges.
The town, ought to the laws cross on a 3rd attempt, would pivot to offering rebates to householders from its budgetary surplus funds for the present 12 months, in line with the mayor’s workplace. The tax shift would nonetheless be on the desk for 2026 and 2027.
Whereas the post-pandemic shift in work patterns led to the vacant workplace area and falling industrial values that have been cited as a major issue for the tax hikes by these favoring the stalled laws, critics of the invoice additionally pointed to metropolis spending.
The town’s $4.6 billion funds grew by 8% this fiscal 12 months. The metropolis’s payroll grew by greater than 2.28% final 12 months, from $2.14 billion to $2.19 billion.
The Wu administration created 54 new positions final 12 months, as a part of the 301 new positions which were created for the reason that mayor took workplace in November 2021. A 3rd of these 301 positions encompass workers who make greater than $100,000.
The common metropolis worker wage was $105,034 final 12 months, in comparison with $74,300 in 2023, payroll information present.
Weber mentioned his listening to order, which he plans to introduce at Wednesday’s Metropolis Council assembly, “is more of an issue of filling long-term vacancies in the city workforce that we already budget for than increasing the budget.”
“These mass layoffs are being done without any thought to the impacts that may have on the public or to the workers themselves,” Weber mentioned in a press release to the Herald.
“Where people like our veterans are going to be denied basic services, and where we have some long-term job vacancies in the city government, I think it makes sense to see if we can bring in experienced government workers to provide some of the basic services that our residents are going to be deprived of if we don’t take action.”
