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Boston City Council President Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Breadon is calling for greater investment from the city on the Jackson Mann Community Center and Allston-Brighton capital projects ahead of the capital budget plan.

A financial feasibility plan for Jackson Mann, which evaluates the potential costs of adding housing in combination with a community center and/or schools, was initially scheduled to come out in February 2026. 

It is unclear what is causing this delay. Breadon says that a report exists, but Public Facilities is making final edits before releasing it. After its release, she expects that there will be a public meeting.

“I would expect that they would have their report available by the end of this month,” says Breadon.

The timing of the financial feasibility plan will come before an important milestone for the city’s capital budget. Every year, the Mayor of Boston has until the 2nd Wednesday of April to submit a recommended five-year city and capital budget. Between April and June, a series of public meetings will help revise the budget, and the City Council will then return the budget to the mayor at the beginning of June. The Mayor then must approve the final budget before July 1.

Breadon says that this year’s budget will signal how serious the city is about moving forward with the Jackson Mann. She hopes to see a clear financial trail that will see the project through from a study that will determine future programming for a new Jackson Mann to construction.

According to the FY2026 to FY2030 capital budget for Boston Centers for Youth and Families (BCYF), Jackson Mann was allocated over four million dollars of the 182 million total BCYF budget across five years to perform a siting and programming study. 

For the upcoming budget, Breadon is asking for budget commitments to Jackson Mann that are comparable to reconstruction of other community centers. For instance, she points to the reconstruction of Grove Hall Community Center in Dorchester, which was allocated 2.5 million dollars in FY2025, 40 million in FY2026, and 22 million spread across FY2027 to FY2030 — totalling to 65 million dollars across five years. 

The design and reconstruction of the Nazarro Center, a BCYF community center in the North End, was allocated a total of 88 million dollars (one million in FY2025, two million in FY2026 and over 84 million from FY2027 to FY2030). 

“We need to see a clear timeline, lickety-split, bang, bang, bang, year on year on year, a commitment to put serious money into that, and that’s not what we’ve seen up to now,” she says. 

“If we see any voids and any breaks in the process, then that’s going to be an alarm bell for us to say that the city is not planning on moving forward in a timely way.”

Another key factor is whether Boston Public Schools (BPS) will cede ownership of the Jackson Mann, which previously had a K-8 school that closed in 2022. In FY2023, its capital planning office had previously allocated 150,000 dollars to study the possibility of opening a preK-6 school. 

Breadon says that she does not anticipate that BPS will build a new school at the Jackson Mann, but the key actors — Mayor Michelle Wu, Superintendent Mary Skipper, and Chief of Capital Planning for BPS Delavern Stanislaus — have yet to reach a final decision. She believes that unpredictable enrollment numbers over recent years has stalled BPS’s decision-making on Jackson Mann. 

“I can understand why they are taking their time to make a decision,” she says. “That said, we do want to push them to make a decision.”

Breadon encourages Allston-Brighton residents to maintain community pressure on the city to move forward with Jackson Mann. She says that letters of support for Jackson-Mann to her office and to the Mayor’s Office will help. She also says that the community must rally at the next public meeting once the results from the financial feasibility study are released at the end of March.

Despite being the second largest neighborhood in Boston, Allston-Brighton is the only one without a fully functioning community center. Breadon is pushing back against the perception by those in city government that the neighborhood consists of people who do not stay and do not vote. She points out that the number of voters during the last election exceeded that in South Boston. 

“The scale of the inequity between what our neighborhood has in terms of a community center and what other neighborhoods have is astounding,” she says. “We contribute a lot to the city’s finances, but we need to get more back in terms of capital investment. For this particular project, this is a deal-breaker for us.” ■

Joanna Lin contributed reporting.