Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has fired the city’s director of green infrastructure and eliminated the office he headed, ending a short-lived unit she created in 2022 to carry out her Green New Deal promises. The move, announced as part of her fiscal year 2027 budget, removes a dedicated office just as the city says the work will be folded into another team.
Max Rome said the shift came abruptly. He wrote on LinkedIn on Wednesday that he had been laid off by the Wu administration a day earlier and told his job had been eliminated, after spending just six months in the role. Rome said he was hired at the end of last year and described the termination to the Boston Globe as “very sudden,” adding that he was escorted out of City Hall after the layoff was delivered by a Wu administration official.
The office was born shortly after Wu took office in 2021, when she set out a Green New Deal agenda aimed at reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. Kate England was installed as the first green infrastructure director in 2022 alongside Green New Deal director Oliver Sellers Garcia, who has remained in his role. By Wednesday, the office that was meant to help turn that campaign promise into city projects was gone.
Wu’s office says the work is not disappearing, only moving. City spokesperson Michael Osaghae said the green infrastructure office is being integrated into the Streets Cabinet’s infrastructure and design team so green planning can be built into projects citywide, with a narrower focus on streets reconstruction work where feasible. Two other staff members from the office will stay on, even as the dedicated director position is cut.
That is the part that makes the move harder to read as a simple reorganization. The city is keeping the work, but not the office built around it, and the budget savings from eliminating Rome’s post and dismantling the unit remain unclear. Wu’s office did not immediately provide salary information for Rome or say how much the office was budgeted at for this fiscal year.
The cuts land as Wu faces pressure over a $4.9 billion budget proposal that would increase spending by 2.1%, the slowest pace of growth since FY10. Her administration has already taken criticism for reductions across many departments, even as it points to other moves, including Diana Fernandez Bibeau’s new dual role as parks and recreation commissioner and deputy chief of open space, as part of the city’s climate and open-space strategy. For now, Boston is asking one team to absorb the work of another, but it has not yet said what the city actually saves by doing it.
