NORTHAMPTON — After another heated meeting of the City Council, it appears that Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra’s budget for fiscal year 2025 will move forward one way or another, resulting in the layoffs of around 20 educators from the city’s public schools.
City councilors failed to pass a full budget on Thursday evening. Three councilors — Quaverly Rothenberg, Jeremy Dubs, and Rachel Maiore — voted the spending plan down amid a push from students, unionized school employees, and community supporters for a “level services” budget to avert layoffs. Although the other five councilors voted in favor of the budget, council rules require a supermajority of six votes to pass the budget.
That means that Sciarra’s initial budget, which will boost school spending by 5% over what was allocated the previous fiscal year, will go into effect when the new fiscal year begins on July 1 unless she decides to add more money before then. That’s far less than the 14% increase the School Committee passed in April, which would have avoided layoffs. Sciarra had submitted a newer budget earlier this month that would have increased school spending by 8%, though if councilors don’t pass that budget by June 30, the older one will go into effect. Sciarra and councilors said they will can, and will, vote to approve the additional spending as soon as possible.
It doesn’t seem like the majority of councilors intend to meet to vote on the budget again.
“This has been a long and painful process especially for school staff, parents, and students,” Council President Alex Jarrett said during Thursday’s budget discussion. “I’m willing to vote for this budget, but I don’t like it.”
Jarrett said he would ask Sciarra for additional funds, as that would be the only way to add more money to the budget at this point. But since she has already indicated that she won’t do so, Jarrett said it wouldn’t make sense for the council to take up more debate prior to the required deadline of July 1.
“I’m personally not willing to attend a meeting before July 1 given that the mayor is not going to introduce anything more,” he said.
At-large Councilor Marissa Elkins also expressed that “the council’s tolerance” for entertaining further rounds of budget debate was “not high.”
Councilors also voted on Sciarra’s recommendation to add a property-tax override question on the upcoming 2024 election ballot during. The override, if voters pass it, would collect an additional $3 million in tax revenue “for the purposes of funding the operating budgets of the City and Public Schools for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2025.” Eight councilors voted in favor, with Rothenberg abstaining.
Thursday’s meeting, then, seems to have been the end to a dramatic budget season. In recent weeks, advocates for level-service funding held protests in front of City Hall and informational sessions for community members. Leading those efforts was a coalition of unions, including the Northampton Association of School Employees, who have insisted that the city has enough money to afford the increase needed to avoid layoffs, and the Western Massachusetts Area Labor Federation, the regional coalition that represents some 50,000 unionized workers in the region.
Ahead of Thursday’s City Council meeting, that coalition and other stakeholders held a rally in front of City Hall despite the 93 degree heat. Buckets of ice filled with drinks sat on the City Hall steps. Attendees held signs and chanted, “Hey, hey, what do we say? Fully fund our schools today!” Union organizers, labor leaders, health care workers, and students spoke to the crowd.
“Education is one of the most important social determinants of public health,” said Aaron Winston, a nurse at Cooley Dickinson Hospital and a co-chair of the nurses’ bargaining committee. “We are talking about the health of our community for generations.”
Winston drew parallels to nurses’ familiarity with understaffing and lack of institutional support, patient-to-provider ratios, and the resulting burden placed on staff to fill gaps.
That movement may continue beyond Thursday’s vote and have further implications for city politics, with one speaker suggesting this might be the first event of the 2025 campaign season. The rally came just a day after the Western Massachusetts Area Labor Federation rescinded its endorsement of Sciarra over what they described as her “underfunding public education and laying off crucial staff.”
At the rally, former Northampton Policing Review Commission co-chair Dan Cannity told The Shoestring that in addition to level service funding for NPS, he hoped for a plan from the city to increase public participation in the budget process.
“When hard choices have to be made, you can’t get anyone on board if the process is flawed and no one feels that they are listened to or heard,” he said
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Thursday’s council meeting public comment period was filled with residents venting frustration over the budget process. A handful of Northampton students criticized the behavior and demeanor of Sciarra and councilors during the budget process as disingenuous, rude, gaslighting, and expressed disappointment in their leadership. Residents also expressed concerns about seeing steadily increasing costs from water rates to property tax but not seeing balanced city budgets. Nearly every speaker expressed frustration around the budget process, specifically that the process was not equitable in how it weighed needs of the whole community.
The disagreement continued into the council discussion. Jarrett addressed decorum concerns about the council during opening announcements citing interruptions and “a lack of respectful dialogue” between council members.
Elkins requested to suspend the body’s rules that allow for voting members in the minority to request a reconsideration. A reconsideration would let voters of the minority outcome request a new discussion and trigger a new vote on the full budget. This failed in a 3-5 vote, not achieving the necessary two-thirds majority.
At-large Councilor Garrick Perry cautioned putting too much reliance on projected revenues in the budget based on tax revenue from restaurants and various small businesses, saying those industries were “still hurting” and that those figures could come in lower than anticipated.
Dubs voiced dissatisfaction with both the school budget and the Department of Public Works budget. He cited infrastructure, maintenance, and accessibility concerns he felt could not be addressed effectively by the DPW’s proposed budget. Sciarra replied that additional funding for sidewalks would be provided this year in the city’s capital improvement plan, but did not have that figure immediately available.
Maiore said collaboration among the council was not achieved during this process and felt that at least a few more jobs could have been saved through collective effort in the budget analysis.
“Even one or two positions makes a huge difference,” she said.
In answer to the question of additional funds, Sciarra told the room, “we have added as much as we possibly can to this budget responsibly.”
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Earlier in the week, after she said the mayor denied her a meeting to discuss the budget, Rothenberg led a special City Council meeting to discuss an alternative plan for next fiscal year’s school budget. Joining Rothenberg during her 30-minute presentation were: Bridge Street School first-grade teacher Joanne Morgan; Al Simon, a former deputy mayor and city councilor from Windsor, Connecticut, who now lives in Northampton; retired Smith College economics professor Tom Riddell; and Kate Fontaine of the Northampton Association of School Employees, the union representing all eligible employees across the district.
Rothenberg said the school budget had a predictable annual operating-cost increase of around 4%. However, she said city leadership has kept a rigid commitment to budget formulas that have shortchanged the schools, resulting in a hole that has grown bigger every year. Now, it will take a much larger increase to plug that hole, she said. She said elected officials could take immediate action to fill the funding gap this year, pointing to various city reserve funds that money could be drawn from. She also proposed a commitment to annual operational audits of all departments prior to union bargaining, as well as additional financial housekeeping, to ensure the NPS budget is fully and sustainably funded in future years.
Rothenberg also said she had been in conversation with a representative from the state’s Department of Revenue about the city’s reserve and saving structure. Rothenberg said she told that DOR employee that Northampton has been “perpetually” putting away 5% of its revenue into savings each year. She claimed the DOR representative told her “that makes no sense.” Rothenberg did not immediately respond to an email inquiry Friday trying to verify those communications.
Rothenberg and Simon pointed to available state data to raise speculation about the city’s funds and the use of the word “deficit” to describe the NPS budget. They presented figures from the Department of Revenue’s independent audits, which exclude federal COVID relief funds and any other certified free cash, suggesting the city has had at least a $4 million surplus each year since 2016, with the exception of 2020.
“So you cannot obviously have a deficit and a surplus at the same time,” Simon said. “This surplus is certified by the state of Massachusetts, and are independent auditors, so I have every reason to believe this is correct.”
Simon also claimed the city had been quite successful in its saving and stability planning and was sitting on a “mountain of cash” that was unlike anything he had seen in his experience. Simon further supported his assessment of the city’s finances with publicly available data from the state’s Division of Local Services’ Data Analytics and Resources Bureau, which consistently ranked Northampton highly against other Massachusetts cities in categories like percentage of stabilization funds relative to total budget.
Sciarra and city Finance Director Charlene Nardi pushed back on those ideas. Sciarra immediately responded to the presentation saying what the city needed at this moment was a plan to deal with the “deficit” this year.
“What we’re facing is not a $4.77 million deficit in [fiscal year] 2025 just for one year,” Sciarra said. “We have a structural deficit that’s been growing rapidly for the last three years and will continue to grow if we don’t address the disparity between the fast rise and the recurring expenses in the Northampton Public Schools and the city streams of recurring revenues.”
Nardi said each time the city used reserve funds without “rolling it into the budget,” they were creating a deficit that will grow from $4 million this fiscal year to $4.8 million next fiscal year, $5.6 million in FY27, $7.5 million in FY28, and $9.1 million in FY29.
Perry, Jarrett, and Ward 1 Councilor Stanley Moulton all asked questions around recurrent budget expenses and the current city budget structure. Jarrett expressed skepticism at the figures Simon collected – which amounted to $50 million – saying that the total available funds he was able to track through city documents appeared to be around $34 million.
Elkins and Ward 2 Councilor Deborah Pastrich–Klemer put pressure on Rothenberg and the panel. Elkins raised issues with the state-collected finance figures and asked Simon if he had reviewed the city’s budget and Nardi’s quarterly finance reports, to which he responded he had not.
“You didn’t look at the actual budget or the quarterly reports,” Elkins concluded.
Pastrich–Klemer accused Rothenberg of working with “outside people” instead of with other councilors and of dismissing the “advice of the qualified city financial director” and Sciarra. Rothenberg explained that she worked with three councilors, and that the state’s open meeting laws prohibit elected officials from meeting outside of a public forum in a large enough group to form a quorum.
Councilor Marianne LaBarge also accused Rothenberg of not working with other counselors and Sciarra.
“You did mention at City Council that you were trying to make an appointment with the mayor … and was that appointment made?” LaBarge asked. Rothenberg said that she had asked for a meeting with Sciarra, and in response to that request Sciarra told her that she would be giving this presentation instead.
Dubs, the Ward 4 councilor, said Rothenberg had made attempts to include the full council. As evidence, he pointed to the discussion in May around opting into a state law that would have allowed the City Council to increase the amount of funding the mayor had requested for the city schools by a two-thirds majority vote. (That vote failed, with only Maiore, Dubs, and Rothenberg voting to opt in.) Dubs also said that many areas of the city were facing funding cut backs including the Department of Public Works, but that he still saw the school budgeting issue as a crisis he hoped there was still time to solve.
The next day, the Western Massachusetts Area Labor Federation announced it had rescinded its endorsement of Sciarra. In a press release, the organization said the decision resulted from an internal vote taken during their June delegate meeting.
“This vote follows the mayor’s proposed budget that would eliminate classroom teachers, specialists who work with children with disabilities, and support staff in each of the Northampton public schools,” the press release said.
According to the release, WMALF President Jeff Jones was not only unable to get Sciarra to meet with labor unions about the issue despite repeated attempts, but received no response from Sciarra at all.
“We reached out to Mayor Sciarra on four occasions to try to work with her to find creative solutions to the budget that would meet the economic priorities of members and communities,” he said. “We heard nothing back.”
During Sciarra’s 2021 campaign run, she promised voters she would do all she could “to provide our schools with the resources they need” and address the “state government’s chronic underfunding” of the city’s schools. At the time of this publishing, Sciarra’s campaign website features a photo of children and adults holding signs that say, “fully fund our public schools,” a slogan featured on many signs held recently on the steps of city hall.
Shoestring investigative editor Dusty Christensen contributed reporting to this article.
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