BOSTON — Sharon Durkan didn't raise a single dollar for her campaign in April. She still managed to spend nearly seven thousand of her donors'.

The District 8 city councilor — best known to readers of Mass Daily News as the Wu enforcer who killed a $100 million audit of how Boston spends its taxpayers' money — today filed her monthly OCPF bank report showing how she spends her own donors' money. The contrast is striking.

Receipts for April: $0.00. Expenditures: $6,845.74. Cash on hand at month-end: $32,883.26, down from $39,729 at the start of the month. In a non-election month, with the next council election more than 18 months out and a fresh two-year term barely four months old, Boston's most prominent Wu loyalist is not fundraising at all. She is just spending. And the donors who used to write her checks appear, for whatever reason, to have stopped.

A campaign account, or a personal expense account?

Sitting elected officials are supposed to fundraise constantly. Off-years exist precisely so politicians can build a war chest before the next race. A councilor pulling in eight thousand a month in 2026 would have nearly $100,000 by Election Day 2027 — a serious starter base if anyone gets bold and challenges her. Durkan, instead, is running her committee at a deficit: $24,265.61 raised against $27,509.12 spent in 2026 to date, an upside-down ratio that is unusual for any sitting officeholder this early in a term.

Where did April's $6,845.74 go? The receipts read less like a campaign budget and more like the personal-expense ledger of someone who really enjoys living in downtown Boston:

$1,900 for what her bank statement records as "BIZJTIX*40 UNDER 40 AW" — a charge consistent with tickets to a "40 Under 40" awards event
$1,673.52 to EveryAction, the campaign CRM software (the irony of paying for fundraising software while raising $0 is its own line item)
$500 to the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company
$500 to MLM Strategies LLC for "compliance services"
$108.55 for an Eventbrite ticket to a North End event her bank statement labels "9TH NORTH END CORN"
Roughly $405 across about 25 Uber rides, most billed at under $20 each — the kind of short trips a councilor representing the walkable Beacon Hill–Back Bay–Fenway corridor could plausibly have made on foot
More than $700 at Boston restaurants, including four separate visits to Flour Bakery, plus tabs at JM Curley, Peregrine, Cornwall's, the Tip Tap Room, Bon Me, the Laughing Monk Cafe, and the Bittersweet Shoppe
$235 in Google Workspace fees, $27.72 for a Boston Globe subscription, an $8.93 Squarespace charge, and a $14.99 Canva charge
$85 to ActBlue, routed to Mass Dems Federal

Councilor Sharon Durkan at a Boston event.

Mass Daily News readers will recognize the pattern. This is the same councilor who racked up 736 Uber rides and nearly $20,000 in payments to a relative over the course of her tenure, and who wants the MBTA to film you driving in bus lanes even as she charges donors for what her own filings show are short, low-fare Uber rides.

April is not an outlier. The pattern in March was identical — 31 Uber charges that month, the same restaurant rotation, and a cluster of expenditures her own committee labeled in ways that strain the definition of "campaign purpose."

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March was even worse

Pull up Durkan's March 2026 bank report and a familiar series of charges appears, each labeled by her own committee in the OCPF filing:

$338 to the Boston Athenaeum on March 20 for a private subscription-library membership. The committee's own description on the OCPF filing: "Membership for Networking."
$3,000 to Benjamin C Photography Studio on March 19 for "Photography Services."
$1,750 on March 6 to a vendor named Julia Berard for "Fundraising Support Services" — paid out as the committee continues to run a 2026 deficit.

It is one thing to hire a campaign photographer. It is another to charge donors $338 to belong to a private subscription library and $1,750 for fundraising consulting in a year the committee is running a deficit. None of those, on their face, is the kind of spending donors had in mind when they wrote a check to a sitting Boston city councilor.

The audit-blocker's own books

Durkan is the same councilor who used a procedural maneuver to block a resolution to audit roughly $100 million in city spending — a vote that took place during the same council session in which her colleagues had no trouble passing a "Cardi B Day" proclamation and raising the flag of Senegal at City Hall. Auditing Boston's books, she essentially told her constituents, would be a waste of the public's time.

Her own books, as it turns out, are the ones that read like a problem.

Public OCPF audit-issue records show 21 separate audit issues opened on the Durkan Committee since the committee's organization in 2023. Of those, 13 are "Clarify Expenditure Information" letters — the formal OCPF notice sent when state regulators look at a committee's spending and cannot tell what the money was actually for. Durkan has gotten one of those letters, on average, almost every single month for the past year and a half. The committee has also been flagged twice for accepting excess individual contributions, once for misreporting a union contribution as a PAC contribution, and most recently — in an audit letter mailed April 14 — for failing to file required reimbursement reports.

That violation has since been resolved by the committee. A separate violation flagged in the same April 14 letter remains outstanding. The Durkan Committee has not publicly addressed the OCPF audit letters as of publication.

In her own words

Sharon Durkan's official campaign bio, in case anyone was curious how the councilor sees herself, describes her as a hands-on transit and infrastructure advocate who is "leading the charge on infrastructure audits." A phrase that, in light of the $100 million city audit she actually killed, requires a moment to fully process.

The same bio reports that Durkan is "passionate about… improving public transit," a sentiment her 25 April Uber rides — most under $20 each, the size of short cross-town hops — may not fully reflect. She also "believes that by listening to neighbors and working collaboratively" Boston can "tackle [its] toughest challenges" — a belief now being tested by the very neighbors who, taken together, donated her exactly $0.00 last month.

For balance, the bio also confirms the councilor lives with "her cat, Ocho, named after the district she loves." Ocho the cat appears, on current evidence, to be the only member of the Durkan operation who has not run a deficit in 2026.

"We told them so"

On April 4, Mass Daily Media filed a formal complaint with OCPF flagging Councilor Durkan's pattern of personal-use spending, including the $338 Boston Athenaeum membership and a series of restaurant and rideshare charges. Ten days later, OCPF issued an audit letter on her March bank report flagging two violations against the committee. One — for a missed reimbursement-report filing — has since been resolved. The other remains outstanding as of today.

For now, the question Boston voters and the Beacon Hill–Back Bay donors who originally bankrolled this committee might want to ask their councilor is a simpler one: in a month with no opponent, no race, and no obvious reason to be drawing down her account, why is she charging her donors for a $1,900 in awards-gala spending she could have skipped, a $338 private-library membership, and 25 short Uber rides in a month, in a downtown district she could walk across in fifteen minutes?

She raised nothing in April. The donors who already wrote checks are the ones still paying.

Are donors abandoning Sharon Durkan after she blocked a $100M audit of Boston's books? The councilor raised $0 in April — but spent $6,845 of donor money on Ubers, dinners and a $1,900 '40 Under 40' awards gala

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