Mayor Wu Defunded the JP Centre/South Plan (and Hoped You Wouldn't Notice)

Mayor Wu has zeroed out the funding for the plan to make Centre and South Streets safer, and every Boston resident — in Jamaica Plain and across the city — deserves to know it.

This is a corridor the city has promised to fix for fifteen years. Centre Street sits on Boston's own High Crash Network for cycling. The Route 39 bus, one of the four busiest routes in the entire MBTA system, crawls through traffic every day while its riders wait. The street is the commercial heart of the neighborhood, and everyone — residents, planners, the city itself — has agreed for years that it should be safer and easier to walk, bike, and ride through.

The work was already half done. The team had assessed the existing conditions, finished its early research, and held a first round of engagement at Open Streets last fall. They had built the next phase around something better than the usual community meeting: a series of block parties where neighbors could talk honestly with the people designing their streets. They were ready to go.

Then the Mayor took the money out of the budget. Her FY27 capital plan cuts the project's funding from $1 million to nothing, and the team has been told that unless that funding is restored, the whole effort will be cancelled with no further work done. The project started slowing down just before last fall's election and has been frozen since the end of the year. No one has given the neighborhood a reason why.

And the waste compounds. The work taxpayers have already paid for will not simply wait on a shelf — if the project is ever revived, much of it will have to be redone from the beginning. The Mayor is throwing away money the city already spent, along with the time of the residents and staff who showed up and did everything that was asked of them. Meanwhile the city's own project page, updated this month, still tells residents that public engagement is coming "this spring."

Here is what should make every Bostonian angry: the Mayor is counting on us not to notice. She is counting on us not to see that a project with no money in the budget is just hot air, no matter how nice the project page sounds. She is counting on us not to connect the dots between the cheerful talk of "community engagement" and the quiet decision to strip out the funding that would let her own experts actually build something. The planners at BTD know how to fix these streets. They were ready to. She is the one standing in the way — and she has surrounded herself with staff whose job is to absorb our questions, run interference, and keep the gap between her words and her budget out of view.

JP is not alone. The same FY27 budget zeroes out dedicated bus lanes downtown, safety redesigns on Commonwealth Avenue, and major street rebuilds in Roxbury and East Boston. Over the past year the Wu administration has removed bus lanes on Boylston and North Washington Streets, let federal grants for Roxbury and the Fenway slip away, and stalled Hyde Park Avenue for years after a resident was killed at Forest Hills. One of BTD's most respected planners retired rather than keep watching it happen. JP Centre/South is one line in a long list, and the list keeps growing.

Mayor Wu campaigned as a champion of safe streets, and she still tells anyone who will listen that she is delivering them. Her budget says otherwise. A mayor shows you what she values by what she pays for, and project after project, neighborhood after neighborhood, she is quietly defunding the safer city she promised while asking us to trust her. We see it now. We have read the budget, we have walked the streets, and we know the difference between a mayor who is fighting for us and one who is hoping we look away.

What you can do: Email Mayor Wu and your city councillors. Tell her plainly that we see what she has done to the JP Centre/South plan, that we are disappointed, and that we want the funding restored in the next budget — along with a straight answer for why it was cut. The team is ready, the community is ready, and these streets are dangerous right now.