As Boston’s mayoral election nears, Kraft hits Wu on every topic possible

Behind in recent polling and with Boston’s Sept. 9 preliminary election quick approaching, mayoral hopeful Josh Kraft is hitting Mayor Michelle Wu from every angle possible.

On Thursday, Kraft accused the Wu administration of working with allies on the City Council to repeatedly delay hearings on controversial topics, an attempt to avoid the issues until after the election, he said.

He stood outside City Hall alongside Councilors Erin Murphy and Ed Flynn, Wu critics who had recently raised the issue in the press.

Kraft described how Flynn had put forth a resolution to declare a public health emergency in the area of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, known as Mass. and Cass, the center of the city’s substance abuse crisis.

But councilors friendly with the mayor had directed the resolution to a committee for further analysis — a place “where proposals go to die,” Kraft said.

Hearings and resolutions on lagging sidewalk repairs, trash pickup, school bus safety and school closures had all similarly been pushed to the side, he said.

“The mayor has a lot to say about democracy in the face of Donald Trump, but this is not how a healthy democracy operates,” Kraft said.

“The City Council needs to be heard,” he added.

The Wu administration has cited scheduling difficulties for some of the delayed hearings.

“We do our very best on the administration side to respond to the many, many requests that we get from councilors to come and provide information,” Wu said Thursday, according to the Boston Herald. “It’s not always possible to clear everyone’s schedules and show up for a city council hearing when they might want to have a particular headline happen right before a campaign, or this or that.”

At a news conference last week, Kraft seized on allegations from a watchdog group that city assessors had improperly raised some commercial real estate owners’ property valuations — and therefore taxes — if they challenged their valuations with City Hall. City and state officials rejected the claims.

Kraft, a longtime nonprofit leader and the son of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, launched his bid for mayor in February to unseat Wu after her first term. Both are running as Democrats, though the race is nonpartisan.

He has spent the months since hammering the mayor on a wide range of issues: Boston’s low housing stock and lack of sufficient new construction, the rising costs of renovating White Stadium in Franklin Park, public drug use that has spread from Mass. at Cass to other neighborhoods, and more.

Wu has fired back, going after Kraft’s campaign contributors and fundraising practices, his personal finances, his interests in a new soccer stadium his family is building just over Boston’s border in Everett, and his policy plans.

In July, after Kraft said the mayor’s plan to address homelessness and substance abuse was failing, Wu responded that Kraft’s own proposals weren’t up to snuff.

“It’s no surprise that, like with every other issue, Josh Kraft has plenty of criticism, but no new ideas,” the mayor said.

The city “has made real progress” in getting people living on the street into recovery and permanent housing, she said.

Wu also pointed to the city’s successes in lowering drug overdose deaths, the removal of a tent encampment near Mass. and Cass, where drug and human trafficking had flourished, and coordinated work between public health officials and police to reach people struggling with addiction and stop outdoor drug use.

Kraft is considered Wu’s closest competition, though a July poll from Suffolk University and the Boston Globe showed the mayor with a commanding 59% to 29% lead among likely voters.

The survey of 500 people also had two other candidates, Domingos DaRosa and Robert Capucci, respectively polling at 2.8% and 0.8%, with 6.6% of voters undecided.

As the summer wraps up and the election approaches, the Kraft campaign believes more voters will tune into the race.

“While insiders have been talking about the mayor’s race for months, most voters have been focused on other things and are just starting to pay attention to it,” Will Keyser, a senior Kraft adviser, told the Boston Globe last week.

Early voting opens for the city’s preliminary election starts on Saturday. Two candidates will move on to the general election on Nov. 4, still more than nine weeks away.