The Boston City Council today officially honored the city's four state-championship teams with proclamations - and pizza: Charlestown High School, whose boys basketball team won the Division 3 state championship, New Mission High School, whose boys basketball team won the Division 5 championship, the Josiah Quincy Upper School's girls wrestling team brought home medals in Division 2 and Boston Latin School, whose hockey team won the Division 2 championship. Read more.
City Council
The Boston City Council today approved a measure to set up a planning department as the first major step towards abolishing the BPDA and giving the mayor and the council - and residents more of a direct say in how Boston grows. Read more.
City councilors voted unanimously today to support the trans community in Boston and across the country on Sunday's Transgender Day of Visibility. Read more.
The City Council voted 11-2 today to seek permission from the state legislature to change the date on which councilors and the mayor are inaugurated following an election from "the first Monday" in January to "the first weekday after the second day in January." Read more.
The City Council will consider a proposal to grant handicap parking placards to pregnant people in their third trimester or who have given birth within the past six months.
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The City Council will consider a measure to permanently honor Crispus Attucks, the first man to die in the Boston Massacre. Read more.
The Boston City Council today unanimously approved a measure in which the city would shift federal Covid relief money originally targeted to increasing the composting of garbage to leasing a 5,500-square-food cold-storage facility to give food pantries and soup kitchens a central place to store refrigerated foods - including food "rescued" from restaurants and markets. Read more.
The Boston City Council today unanimously approved a measure that will make it easier for residents to raise bees.
Kelly Garrity reports that Councilor Erin Murphy (at large) is going to run this fall for the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County's clerk job that Maura Doyle recently announced she is retiring from. Read more.
The City Council this week approved a measure under which the city will hire two companies to install 250 chargers along Boston streets to let people without their own driveways top up their battery-powered cars. Read more.
City councilors yesterday denounced management at the Edgar P. Benjamin Healthcare Center, 120 Fisher Ave. on Mission Hill, for the way it's planning to close by July 1, frightening residents and delaying or bouncing employee paychecks. Read more.
Councilor Ben Weber (Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury) today withdrew his proposed resolution calling for a negotiated Gaza ceasefire to let him rewrite it so that it doesn't cause "more division" rather than lessen it. Read more.
City Councilor Sharon Durkan (Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Fenway, Mission Hill) says it's time for Boston to set up a licensing office to all the companies just dying to show off their Boston cred on clothing, mugs and anything else you can slap a bold underlined sans-serif B or some good old-fashioned "Sicut Patribus Sit Deus Nobis" - or even just a design featuring the city-owned Faneuil Hall. Read more.
Might be time for motorists to pay a toll to drive into downtown Boston at rush hour, councilor says
The Boston City Council tomorrow considers whether to let Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson (Roxbury) start up some formal consideration of a proposal for "congestion pricing" as a way to ease gridlock on Boston roads caused by narrowing car access because of bicycle and bus lanes - and maybe even provide enough revenue to help improve public transit. Read more.
The City Council agreed today to a hearing to press for action to keep BTD and other city workers safe on the streets following a Friday attack in Grove Hall that sent a BTD supervisor - just months from retirement - to the hospital with serious injuries. Read more.
Last week, Councilor Ed Flynn (South Boston, South End, Chinatown, Downtown) demanded and won immediate passage of a federal public-safety grant, which he said was too important to wait for a hearing so that the council's four new councilors and others could get up to speed on it. Read more.
City Councilors Ed Flynn (South Boston, South End, Chinatown, downtown) and Erin Murphy (at large) yesterday sounded an alarm about a for-profit company's plans to open an urgent-care clinic less than a block away from the South Boston Community Health Center on West Broadway, warning that the new clinic could skim patients with disposable income away, threatening the health center's long-term viability and its commitment to caring for people who couldn't otherwise afford to see a doctor. Read more.