City Government
Boston City Council
Late on a Sunday night in January 2026, two Boston city councillors drove to a colleague’s house in Brighton and knocked on her door. They wanted her to take the most powerful job on the Council, a job she had not campaigned for and had not asked for. The presumed winner had withdrawn hours earlier. Two days later Liz Breadon was elected Council President by seven votes to six. That is how power actually moves: not in a grand public reckoning, but in a living room, overnight, on a margin of one.
Thirteen people, two kinds of seat
The Boston City Council has thirteen members. Nine are elected by district and answer to a specific slice of the city, and four are elected at large by every voter in Boston. So you personally have five councillors: one who represents your streets, and four who represent everybody, including you. Terms run two years, which is short enough that a councillor who ignores their district for one year is already running again.
- Writes the ordinances. The Council makes city law, on everything from rent to rats to what a landlord must disclose.
- Votes the budget, and now edits it. Since 2021 the Council can move money line by line rather than swallow the Mayor’s budget whole. This is new, and it is the biggest change to Boston’s civic machinery in a generation.
- Holds hearings. The Council can haul any department in front of it, in public, and make it answer. Residents testify at these.
- Overrides a veto with a two-thirds vote, which means nine of the thirteen.
The night the presidency changed hands
The Council President runs the meetings, controls the committees, and decides a great deal about which ideas ever see a vote. The Council picks its own president, and only those thirteen people cast a ballot in that election. Your leverage runs through the thirteen, which is exactly why you should know how this one went.
Going into January 2026, Gabriela Coletta Zapata of District 1 was expected to win. Hours before the vote she withdrew, having lost the support she needed. Councillors Enrique Pepén and Sharon Durkan went to Liz Breadon’s house that Sunday night and asked her to stand as a compromise. On January 5, 2026, at the Council’s reorganization meeting, Breadon of District 9 was elected President by seven votes to six over Brian Worrell of District 4.
One vote. If a single councillor had gone the other way, a different person would be running this Council. Anyone who tells you that individual votes do not matter has never watched a body of thirteen people pick a leader.
The power the Council won in 2021
Until 2021 the Council could do exactly two things with the Mayor’s budget: approve the whole thing, or reject the whole thing. Shifting a single dollar from one line to another was beyond its power. An up or down vote on the whole thing is a thin kind of oversight, and Boston ran that way for most of a century, right up until the people who live here decided it had gone on long enough.
Then Boston voters passed a ballot question, with roughly 68 percent in favor, amending the city charter. Now the Council can amend the budget line by line. It cannot spend more than the Mayor’s total, and the Mayor can push back, but the Council can override with two thirds. In the FY2027 budget the Council used that power to move $11.8 million, and passed the budget on June 10, 2026 by a vote of twelve to one.
Eleven point eight million dollars, moved by thirteen people, because voters five years ago said they should be allowed to. Read the budget page for where the rest of it goes.
Your nine district councillors
Find your district on the map on the neighborhoods page. Your street decides this, not your neighborhood’s name: Dorchester alone is split across three districts.
District 1
Gabriela Coletta Zapata
District 2
Edward M. Flynn
John FitzGerald
District 4
Brian Worrell
Brian.Worrell@boston.gov 617-635-3131
Enrique Pepén
Benjamin Weber
Benjamin.Weber@boston.gov 617-635-4220
Miniard Culpepper
District 8
Sharon Durkan
Sharon.Durkan@boston.gov 617-635-4225
District 9 · Council President
Liz Breadon
Your four at-large councillors
These four are elected by the entire city, so every Boston voter helps choose them, and every Boston resident can legitimately claim them. If your district councillor will not take up your issue, these are four more doors.
How a Boston ordinance actually becomes law
You have now read that the Council writes the ordinances, that a hearing is public, that the Mayor holds a veto and that nine of thirteen can override it. Those are four parts of one machine, and here is the machine, running in order. Count the steps you are allowed to stand inside.
- A councillor files it, and it gets a docket number. That number is how you follow it for the rest of its life. Anyone can read the docket on Legistar.
- It is read at a Wednesday meeting. Noon, the Iannella Chamber, fifth floor of City Hall. The public sits in that room.
- The Council President sends it to a committee. Which is exactly why it mattered that the presidency was decided seven votes to six in a living room on a Sunday night. The person who assigns the bills has quiet power over which ones live.
- The committee holds a public hearing. This is your step. You testify here. There is no age requirement and no citizenship requirement, and you can send written testimony instead if you would rather not be on camera.
- The full Council votes. In public, on the record, and the roll call is published.
- The Mayor signs it or vetoes it.
- Nine of the thirteen can override the veto. Nine is a hard number, which is the point.
The committee reports it out, or it sits on it. A bill the committee sits on ends there for the session, with no floor vote ever taken on it.
Three of those eight steps happen in a room you are allowed to sit in, and one of them has a microphone pointed at you. Then there is one more lever, and it is the one worth knowing: you can ask any councillor to file a hearing order. The Council can haul any department in the city in front of it and make it explain itself in public, and a resident asking is a perfectly ordinary reason for them to do it.
A councillor went to federal prison. You should know that.
Tania Fernandes Anderson, who represented District 7, was indicted in December 2024. She had hired a family member onto her staff without disclosing the relationship, arranged a city-funded bonus for that staffer, and took a $7,000 kickback, in cash, handed to her in a bathroom at Boston City Hall. She pleaded guilty in May 2025 to wire fraud and theft of federal funds. She resigned from the Council effective July 4, 2025. On September 5, 2025 she was sentenced to one month in prison, three years of supervised release, and $13,000 in restitution.
That is a federal conviction, not an accusation, and the source is the United States Department of Justice. Miniard Culpepper won the seat and was sworn in on January 5, 2026.
Two things are true here at once. A person elected to serve District 7 stole from it, and the system caught her, tried her, convicted her, and replaced her, in public, on a schedule you could follow in the newspaper. Both halves are the civics lesson. Accountability gets measured by what happens next, never by whether anything ever goes wrong.
Show up. Here is exactly how.
- When: the Council meets every Wednesday at noon in the Christopher A. Iannella Chamber, Room 550, Boston City Hall, 1 City Hall Square.
- Agendas: posted on the city’s Legistar site after 4 p.m. on the Monday before. Read it before you go, and find the docket number of the thing you care about.
- Hearings are where the real work happens. The Wednesday meeting is often the formality. Committee hearings are longer, smaller, and far more open to public testimony.
- Contact: the Council office is 617-635-3040, or city.council@boston.gov. Every councillor also has a direct office and email listed on boston.gov.
- Anyone may testify. A hearing puts a fifteen year old from Roslindale on the same public record as a lawyer from a firm downtown. The only difference between them is which one showed up.
What this seat decides
Your Town or City Council
A local ordinance, the city or town budget, or a problem in your own ward or district. The real testimony happens at committee hearings rather than at the full council meeting.
Seven votes to six, in a room of thirteen people, decided who runs this Council. Nine of them work for a district. One of those districts is yours.