Mayor Michelle Wu is betting that her focus on the often invisible root causes of institutional issues will finally start to pay off in a way voters can feel, hopefully before election season starts up again.
At a September 27 meeting of the Ellis Neighborhood Association Wu spoke not just on abutter concerns about the upcoming South End tent clearing and funding for local volunteers, but also about how her administration has been approaching problems more broadly.
Mayor Wu says she’s been focused for her first years in office on fixing the institutional equivalent of a maintenance backlog, building recruitment pipelines and digging down into existing contracts.
For a more concrete example, she turned to the issue of late buses on the first day of school.
The easiest way to ‘fix’ the problem would be to announce that you’re hiring more drivers and put out a job posting for anyone with a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL), hoping that people will apply and that it will at least seem like something is being done.
Wu, however, says effective solutions are rarely so straightforward. Instead, she points to existing contract language that allows drivers to retroactively apply days off without notice and be twenty minutes late without losing their route. In practical terms, that gives less incentive to show up for the highest-stress days and forces organizers to hold each route for twenty minutes before reassigning it to a new driver.
Wu also wants to better compensate drivers for showing up to practice days and has started sponsoring locals who want the job to get their CDL, creating a supply of workers instead of just posting the job and hoping there are enough people with CDLs in the area who are interested.
This is the approach she’s taking to just about every major issue her administration faces. Go for root causes, sometimes at the expense of alleviating immediate issues constituents are facing, in the hopes it will pay off by the time voters are back at the polls.
The question then is when exactly people will see results. The drug market at Mass and Cass is perhaps the highest profile example of Wu’s tactics and the one that might pay off the soonest. Officials are now promising a “phase change” after over a year of building up teams, observing conditions and compiling databases.
“We feel very different today. In the past, sweeps have just been dispersing people because there’s nowhere else to go. Now we have an infrastructure built up and we feel confident about how it’s been fine-tuned over the last 18 months,” Wu said.
The focus on long-term solutions at the expense of short-term patches has implications throughout the city’s Mass and Cass response. For example, Wu and her team have taken a more skeptical stance in recent days toward the plan by South End stakeholders to create a short-term recovery complex at Widett Circle.
“I’ve been briefed fully by my team, who’s met with the organizers. I’ve read through all the material and presentations. I think there are some really important parts of the plan and how it approaches treatment, but we simply don’t have the resources or control of the land to stand up a temporary version of this kind of comprehensive campus at the same time we’re building the official one on Long Island,” she said.
Even after the next stage of government action on Atkinson Street, it’s an open question when background work will start to amortize elsewhere. Wu says there are layers and layers of organizational groundwork that need to be done on just about every issue for sustainable progress.
“We’re just now at the one-year mark for our school superintendent, police commissioner, fire commissioner, and they need to fill their own leadership teams. it took me a year to really have the full landscape,” she said. “As that becomes true for each cabinet, we’re starting to see their plans and vision be implemented as well. There are still challenges, but I feel very excited about the continual acceleration of what we’re able to do.”
