Kim Janey
Kim Michelle Janey is an American politician, community organizer, and nonprofit executive who served as acting mayor of Boston for eight months in 2021. She served as president of the Boston City Council from 2020 to 2022, and as a member of the council from the 7th district from 2018 to 2022. As a black woman, her tenure as acting mayor made her the first woman and the first person of color to lead the city.
Janey began her career as a community organizer and education advocate, working for groups such as Parents United for Child Care. and Massachusetts Advocates for Children. A member of the Democratic Party and regarded to be a political progressive, she entered politics when she successfully ran for the Boston City Council in 2017. She entered the Boston City Council in January 2018, and was selected as president of the Council in January 2020. On the city council, she represented the 7th district. Being the incumbent City Council president, she became the acting mayor of Boston upon Marty Walsh's departure from the post when he resigned after being confirmed as the United States secretary of labor. She was a candidate in the nonpartisan primary of the 2021 Boston mayoral election, but had an unsuccessful fourth-place finish. She later endorsed Michelle Wu for the general election. Wu went on to win the general election, and became Janey's successor.
As acting mayor, Janey dealt with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. She launched a Vaccine Equity Grant Initiative to increase awareness and access to the COVID-19 vaccine in communities that were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. She announced a municipal eviction moratorium in August, after the United States Supreme Court overturned a federal moratorium that had been in place. She also dealt with the homelessness population in the Mass and Cass area, clearing the area's tent city towards the end of her acting mayoralty. She signed into law an ordinance which restricted the Boston Police Department's use of tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets, a measure similar to one which had been vetoed earlier in the year by Mayor Walsh. She launched a pilot program that made the MBTA Route 28 bus fare-free for three-months. This laid groundwork that her successor, Michelle Wu, built upon to launch an expanded fare-free bus service pilot program.
Since May 2022, Janey has served as the chief executive officer of Economic Mobility Pathways, a Boston nonprofit which addresses poverty. She has also held teaching fellowships at Harvard University and Salem State University and worked as an executive in residence at The Boston Foundation since leaving public office.
Early life and education
Kim Michelle Janey was born on May 16, 1965, in Roxbury, Boston, to Clifford B. Janey and Phyllis Janey, who divorced when she was young. Her father taught and worked as a school administrator in Boston, and would serve as superintendent of the Rochester City School District, District of Columbia Public Schools, and Newark Public Schools. The birthplaces of her ancestors include North Carolina on her mother's side, and Guyana, Virginia, Nova Scotia, and Massachusetts on her father's. One grandfather was born in Chelsea in 1915 and a great-grandfather in Medford in 1890. She "has had family in the city of Boston for six generations". Her family was well known in the Roxbury neighborhood. Janey has ancestors that escaped to Canada through the Underground Railroad before settling in Boston in the latter half of the 19th century. She is a relative of Daniel Janey.When she was eleven years old, Janey attended school in Charlestown, Boston. She, along with other students, was bused from Roxbury to Charlestown as part of Boston's controversial court-mandated school desegregation plan. She later attended high school in Reading, Massachusetts, under METCO, a program that allowed city students to voluntary commute to nearby suburbs for high school. She gave birth to a daughter at the age of sixteen. While continuing to attend high school, she also held a job in order to pay for expenses related to raising her daughter. Her father ejected her from his home, and she received assistance from the local nonprofit EMPath, who allowed her to use their shelter. She was able to graduate high school, and did so with her 18-month-old daughter accompanying her at her graduation ceremony. She also volunteered for Mel King's campaign in the 1983 Boston mayoral election.
After graduating from high school, Janey worked to raise her daughter and attended community college. She entered Smith College but interrupted her studies to care for her ill grandfather after the death of her grandmother. In 1994, she participated in the Ada Comstock Scholars Program designed for students who are older than the traditional age for college students. She eventually graduated from Smith College in 1994. She suffered from housing insecurity. In order to pay for her first apartment, which was located in the Dorchester neighborhood, she made use of a Section 8 voucher.
Career as a community organizer
Janey worked as a community organizer and education advocate for Parents United for Child Care. She joined the Massachusetts Advocates for Children, a nonprofit, in 2001. At Massachusetts Advocates for Children, she worked for roughly seventeen years as an activist and project director, mainly focusing on eliminating the opportunity and achievement gaps in education for children of color, children learning English as a second language, children with special needs, and children living in poverty. During her time there, she was given the position of senior project director.Janey endorsed John Barros's candidacy in the 2013 Boston mayoral election. In 2015, Janey served on the transition team aiding Tommy Chang in his transition into the position of superintendent of Boston Public Schools.
Boston City Council
Janey served on the Boston City Council from 2018 through 2022. She was regarded as a progressive member of the Boston City Council. She was a district city councilor, representing the council's seventh district. Her district was centered in the Roxbury neighborhood, and also contained parts of Dorchester, the Fenway and the South End. She dubbed her district "ground zero" for issues in the city such as economic and racial inequalities, an insufficient supply affordable housing, traffic, and the opioid epidemic. Roxbury is one of the city's most impoverished areas. As a member of the council, she focused on social justice issues and matters related to education. She supported changing the method of choosing Boston School Committee members, replacing the current system of mayoral appointment with an elected school committee.First term
Janey was first elected to the Boston City Council in November 2017. In the September Democratic primary she led the field of thirteen candidates with 25% of the votes, and then she faced the other leading candidate, Rufus Faulk, in the general election. She won the election with 55.5 percent of the 8,901 votes cast. When she was sworn in in January 2018, she became the first woman to represent District 7 on the council.In July 2018, Janey, along with fellow city councilors Lydia Edwards and Michelle Wu, introduced legislation that would have removed as-of-right designations for chain stores, thereby requiring a conditional use permit for a chain stores to open and operate in any area designated as a "neighborhood business district". In promotion of the proposed legislation, she said, "While chain stores also play a role in our economy, it is imperative that community members have the opportunity to weigh in on whether to allow them based on the unique circumstances of their neighborhood business district."
Janey partnered with fellow councilor Michelle Wu to probe the city's process for awarding municipal contracts, finding that only 1% municipal contracts were going to women and minority-owned vendors. These findings were the impetus for the city to start looking at ways to diversify the recipients of city contracts.
In November 2019, the City Council passed an ordinance authored by Janey, aiming to increase equity in the legal cannabis industry. The ordinance included the creation of a new oversight board to assess and vote on applications for licenses based on a set criteria. Mayor Walsh signed the ordinance into law later that month. John Jordan of the publication Globest wrote that the ordinance made the city the, "first US city to prioritize cannabis industry diversity". The ordinance changed the way marijuana dispensaries were awarded licenses by the city, establishing an independent board to review applications. Previously, licenses were awarded by the mayor's office.
Janey and fellow councilor Lydia Edwards proposed a real estate transfer tax. Negotiations with other city councilors reduced this to a 2% tax on properties valued at $2 million or more, a decrease from their original proposal of a 6% tax. In December 2019, the Boston City Council voted to adopt Janey and Edwards' home rule petition requesting that the state permit the city to impose such as tax. Mayor Walsh advanced the home rule petition to the legislature. If the petition had been authorized by the state, revenue raised from the tax was to be placed in the city's Neighborhood Housing Trust to build affordable housing.
Second term and council presidency
Janey was reelected in November 2019 with over 70% of the votes cast in her district. In her reelection campaign, it attracted attention that she shared a campaign office with both the reelection campaign of at-large councilor Michelle Wu and the election campaign of at-large council candidate Alejandra St. Guillen. Wu and Janey were regarded to both be progressive members of the Boston City Council. After the election, Janey argued that the results, which delivered what was regarded to be the most diverse membership in the council's history, provided a political mandate for the city government to pursue more ambitious action and to work to better represent the city's population.In January 2020, Janey was elected as president of the City Council by her fellow councilors. Janey was the third consecutive female president of the Boston City Council. She was the second black woman to serve in the role, after only her immediate predecessor Andrea Campbell. Her presidency of the council marked the first time since Bruce Bolling's 1980s presidency that a council president hailed from the Roxbury neighborhood.
In 2021, Janey and fellow councilor Andrea Campbell proposed an ordinance that would have banned employers in Boston from running credit checks on job seekers, arguing that credit checks are most detrimental to low-income applicants.