Amid Boston payroll hikes, city councilor says city should look to hire laid-off federal workers

Gayla Cawley, Boston Herald on Mar 18, 2025

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BOSTON — A city councilor says Boston should explore ways to hire laid-off federal workers as a means to start filling nearly 2,000 vacant jobs throughout city government.

City Councilor Benjamin Weber, in a hearing order filed Monday, suggested ways Boston can begin to provide employment for federal workers “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.”

While not providing specifics on how many federal workers he thinks the city should look to hire, Weber noted in his order that more than 100,000 federal employees have been laid off by the Trump administration in the last two months.

He also said more than 30,000 federal workers live in the Greater Boston area, and mentioned the impacts felt locally by the Department of Education’s decision to reduce half of its workforce. That decision, Weber said, led to the closing of the department’s regional office in Boston, “with at least 25 workers laid off.”

Weber’s call for additional city hiring comes at a time when homeowners, who fund municipal salaries, were hit with double-digit property tax hikes last January.

The City Council and state lawmakers spent the better part of the past year debating a shift in the city’s tax structure proposed by Mayor Michelle Wu, who said the bill was aimed at blunting the impacts of falling commercial values and tax revenue that shifted more of the budgetary tax burden onto homeowners.

Ultimately, the bill failed twice in the Senate, and Wu’s third attempt to get the legislation passed in recent weeks did not receive approval from state lawmakers by March 1, the deadline to retroactively change this year’s city tax rates.

The city, should the legislation pass on a third try, would pivot to providing rebates to homeowners from its budgetary surplus funds for the current year, according to the mayor’s office. The tax shift would still be on the table for 2026 and 2027.

While the post-pandemic shift in work patterns led to the vacant office space and falling commercial values that were cited as a main factor for the tax hikes by those favoring the stalled legislation, critics of the bill also pointed to city spending.

The city’s $4.6 billion budget grew by 8% this fiscal year. The city’s payroll grew by more than 2.28% last year, from $2.14 billion to $2.19 billion.

The Wu administration created 54 new positions last year, as part of the 301 new positions that have been created since the mayor took office in November 2021. A third of those 301 positions consist of employees who make more than $100,000.

The average city employee salary was $105,034 last year, compared to $74,300 in 2023, payroll records show.

Weber said his hearing order, which he plans to introduce at Wednesday’s City Council meeting, “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 said in a statement 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.”

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