By Tréa Lavery
masslive.com
(TNS)
Members of Boston’s Assessing Department, tasked with setting each year’s property tax bills, have recently received death threats over their work, Mayor Michelle Wu said Wednesday.
The city’s property taxes have been under scrutiny in recent years as increasing tax bills have strained homeowners. Wu has petitioned the state Legislature multiple times, unsuccessfully, to allow Boston to shift some of that burden onto commercial property owners.
The department is also currently locked in a legal battle with a group of commercial property owners who claim they were retaliated against for appealing their tax assessments.
During an interview with political analyst Jon Keller at a Wednesday-morning event hosted by MASSterlist, Wu defended the assessing department’s work, saying it is very technical and has an “incredibly high standard of professionalism.”
“Members of the assessing department and our assessor have received death threats over the kind of coverage that the tax shift and all the back and forth have (received) under this current political environment,” she said. “Which is just completely unacceptable and really a sort of statement about where we are as a society, when people doing property valuations are subjected to that kind of politicization of their job.”
The December 2025 lawsuit from the owners of an 11-story office building at 148 State St. claims that after the owners were denied a tax abatement in 2024 and appealed to the state Appellate Tax Board, city assessors recorded a higher assessment for the next year’s tax bill.
The company’s attorneys wrote that in the city’s records, in 2024, assessors marked properties with ongoing appeals with “ATB Dispute” or “Override. Open Appeal.” For these properties, despite their recorded estimated value decreasing from 2023, assessors used the previous year’s higher assessment when calculating tax bills.
In 2025, the city followed the same procedure but added back roughly half of the amount by which the property’s valuation had previously declined.
The plaintiffs claim that the city has used the same strategy for other commercial property owners who have appealed their assessments to the state.
Wu and other city officials have defended the practice, saying that it was meant to establish a temporary assessed value while the appeal plays out in court. The mayor said Wednesday that when the case was finished, any difference between the tax bill for that temporary value and the final assessment would be corrected.
“They don’t get to pay no taxes in that period,” she said. “It’s just about, in the meantime, while it’s getting hashed out in the court system, what should the level of taxation be? And the city was saying we believe that our valuation should hold while this is being worked out.”
In May, a Suffolk Superior Court judge rejected the city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The case is currently in the discovery period.
At the end of May, Assessing Commissioner Nick Ariniello announced that he would be stepping down from his role at the end of June, Boston Business Journal reported at the time.
A spokesperson for the city did not provide further comments for this story. Ariniello could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Photo caption: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu (Boston City TV/YouTube)
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©2026 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit masslive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC.
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Tags: assessors, Boston, Michelle Wu, property tax, property taxes, tax bills, Taxes
