Boston mayoral candidate Josh Kraft continued to pound on Mayor Michelle Wu’s failure to release an updated estimate for the taxpayer-funded portion of the city’s public-private plan to rehab White Stadium for a professional soccer team.
Kraft said Wednesday that statements from the mayor, her City Hall office, and her campaign this week on his claim that the White Stadium rehab could cost taxpayers $172 million — nearly double what the city has been sharing publicly since last December — have highlighted her administration’s lack of transparency.
“It has been 48 hours since I called on the mayor to come clean about the true cost of White Stadium, but instead of clarity, the mayor, her official press staff and her campaign have provided a lot of words, but no answers,” Kraft said in a statement. “The taxpayers of Boston deserve a straight answer from Michelle Wu on the cost of a project that has gotten out of control.
“Michelle Wu talks about the importance of transparency, yet there’s no transparency at City Hall,” he added. “On Monday, she said she didn’t know anything about a $172 million price tag or where it came from, but on Tuesday, she admitted it came from her own administration, while claiming it was not accurate, but rather a worst-case scenario.”
Kraft revealed Monday that insiders at City Hall had provided his campaign with an internal city document that showed the city’s half of the White Stadium renovations, funded by taxpayers, was now budgeted at $172 million — a significant jump from the $91 million projected by city officials since late last year.
The project was initially budgeted by the city at $10.5 million two years ago, with a $30 million match by its for-profit partner Boston Unity Soccer Partners. The private group owns Boston Legacy FC, the National Women’s Soccer League expansion team that’s under a city lease agreement to share use of Franklin Park’s White Stadium with Boston Public Schools student-athletes.
The public-private split was later approved at $50 million apiece by the city’s planning board last July, but was revealed to have grown to $91 million during a below-the-radar meeting of the city’s public facilities commission last November.
Now, Kraft, citing the internal document, says the city has updated its budget for the project again, to $172 million, without telling taxpayers. The document also tacks on an additional $19.85 million, based on 8% inflation, over the two-year construction period.
Wu refuted the $172 million figure as “not the real cost” during her monthly appearance on GBH’s Boston Public Radio on Tuesday, but acknowledged that the document referenced by Kraft did, in fact, come from inside City Hall.
She said the document was a contingency budget prepared by the public facilities department, that encompassed “disaster planning” for an “absolute worst-case scenario” for the taxpayer hit for the controversial project.
“That is not the real number,” Wu said. “That is not the real cost.”
The night before, Wu told the Herald after a City Hall event that she was unfamiliar with the document referenced by Kraft.
“Not sure where those numbers are coming from,” Wu said on Monday. “Would love to see where he’s getting those.”
On Tuesday, Wu said that while she expects the city’s costs for its half of the project to exceed its previous $91 million estimate due to federal tariffs, design and construction changes, a $172 million taxpayer hit is “unlikely.”
“It is highly, highly unlikely that it will hit this sort of 172 number that’s been floated out there because that’s an absolute worst-case scenario,” Wu said.
Kraft, whose campaign offered no additional response to the mayor’s remarks on Tuesday beyond referencing statements he made a day earlier, countered Wednesday by saying the city had already reached the “worst-case scenario.”
“Given what Trump and his disastrous tariffs are doing to the cost of steel and construction, aren’t we in a worst-case situation right now?” Kraft said. “How much is going to be too much for the taxpayers of Boston, and don’t they deserve to know?”
The mayor on Tuesday would not state how much she anticipates the city’s portion of the public-private project will cost. She said the city will have a clearer picture of the final budget after putting different aspects of construction out to bid, which should begin later this summer.
“That will be the next point, where the budget is finalized based on what the market actually is, what the costs are,” Wu said. “The price of steel has gone up significantly since we started this process because of tariffs. Other construction costs have escalated with the uncertainty in the economy.”
Wu added that it was “harmful,” “disrespectful” and “offensive” for Kraft to make statements that lead residents to believe that they shouldn’t trust information on costs that are coming from “official city channels.”
“The residents of Boston,” Wu said, “deserve better in terms of real facts, real information and being able to have that context.”