Meet the candidates: Northampton City Council at-large

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Northampton residents will cast ballots in a preliminary election taking place between Saturday, Sept. 6 and Tuesday, Sept. 16, to narrow the field of City Council and mayoral candidates down to the final ballot, to be decided on Nov. 4. Among the races on the ballot next month is a six-way contest for two at-large City Council seats. Two of six candidates will be eliminated in the preliminary election.

The at-large candidates include Garrick Perry, the only incumbent in the race after Marissa Elkins declined to seek reelection, and five challengers: Deb Henson, Benjamin Spencer, Meg Robbins, William O’Dwyer, and Yakov Kronrod. There is one political action committee involved in the race, the Support Our Schools Political Action Committee, which has endorsed Henson and Robbins. PACs can donate up to $500 per candidate per year while also spending independently without coordination with the candidates. City Council candidates are not required to disclose campaign fundraising or expenditures until Sept. 8.

The Shoestring asked each candidate a set of five questions in preparation for these profiles, which are presented in the order the candidates will be listed on the ballot.

Deb Henson

Deb Henson, a lawyer and clinical social worker, felt moved to enter the at-large race over the fight for more school funding. 

“People are furious,” she said.

Henson said her background has prepared her well to deal with conflict, which she said has been “the tenor of City Council recently.” She has consulted for therapists to deescalate cases before they go before licensing boards, and defends therapists who do end up in court. She has also been the plaintiff in two civil rights suits: one against the University of Pittsburgh for not extending employee benefits to same-sex partners, and another in Tulsa over sex discrimination in the restaurant industry, which was backed by the National Organization for Women.

As at-large city councilor, Henson said she would want to base her budget decisions on feedback, via email listservs and other electronic formats, and through regular town-hall style meetings. 

“People pay a pretty good amount of taxes here,” she said, “yet they don’t have input as to where their tax dollars are spent.” 

Henson accused Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra of prioritizing capital projects and underfunding city services, and called for greater transparency from city government. She said she doesn’t want leadership that says, essentially, “this is coming down the tube, hope you like it.” 

Among Henson’s other priorities are pausing Picture Main Street and doing a “trial run” of some of the ideas for the redesign, as well as getting more community input on the city’s housing priorities. She contrasted her housing hopes to the condo complex that a developer is building on Hawley Street, which she called a “behemoth” and criticized for having no affordable unit requirements.

“Some of the people that are running are very much pro [Picture] Main Street, they’re pro everything that has been coming down — they’re basically status quo,” Henson said. 

“I am not status quo,” she said. “I am for change.”

Benjamin Spencer

Benjamin Spencer is an architectural metal shop worker who says he brings to the race a years-long track record of being an engaged resident of Northampton. Most recently, he has been an advocate of Picture Main Street, and has been leading tours around the downtown area to explain the plan to city residents.

For Spencer, making the streets safer for all users is a priority, and Picture Main Street is part of that. He also cited plans for improvements around the high school, but hoped the city would “go a little bit further.”

“There’s a lot of students you can see riding up the bike path to go to school at [John F. Kennedy Middle School],” he said. “I think you see a drop off in that when the students move on to the high school.”

Spencer also expressed concerns around affordability, noting he has several coworkers in Florence “who would like to be living closer to where they work, but because the prices are so high they have to commute.” His hope would be to encourage new housing development, something he has already worked toward by engaging City Council to disallow car dealerships in the gateway districts at the north and south ends of downtown.

Regarding budgetary priorities, Spencer said he felt that increases to the school budget in recent years are a good indicator that the mayor is trying to get the schools as much funding as possible. He hopes that the community can have “clear-eyed” conversations about the subject in the future. He also said that the capital projects the city has funded recently have been the right choices, citing a “legacy of deferred maintenance.”

At the ballot box, Spencer hopes voters consider his track record of engaged citizenship and his experience as a team leader in his current work, and previously at several college museums in the area, as assets that can help lead the city towards positive change.

Garrick Perry

Garrick Perry is the only incumbent in the at-large race, having served in that role for one term after a term as Ward 4’s councilor. While recognizing that it’s a short stint to qualify someone as the most experienced in the field, Perry hopes that his demonstrated dedication to educating himself about city governance will inspire confidence in voters.

“It takes a lot to learn how a city is run,” Perry said. He highlighted his efforts to serve on as many of the City Council’s committees and commissions as he could, including community resources, legislative matters, ordinance review, reparations, and barriers to service.

Perry jumped into the Ward 4 race in 2021. Two years later, he said he felt it would be “important for representation” for him to succeed Jamila Gore, who had announced she would not seek re-election after having become the first Black city resident to hold an at-large seat in Northampton. Perry, who is himself Black, won that seat alongside Melissa Elkins in a four-way race.

Perry’s background is in the entertainment sector, where he still works as the director of venue operations at the Iron Horse Music Hall and fronts the reggae band The Alchemystics. These experiences, he said, help inform his perspective on the city budget, which he said is still recovering from the COVID pandemic.

“It’s difficult to budget properly when you don’t know what the next day brings,” he said, and blamed recent years of “conservative budgeting” on volatility in meals and hotel taxes, cannabis income, and federal contributions. With some of those streams stabilizing, he said, the city can project revenue higher. But Perry still hopes that revitalizing nightlife can be a priority, to help boost those revenue streams further and keep young people interested in living in the city.

Perry said issues like cost of living and the school budget impact him personally as a renter with two kids in the city’s school system. But he feels the school funding debate has dominated discussions in Northampton recently, and he hopes to make room for other quality of life issues, from sidewalk maintenance to providing more resources to the unhoused and “people who are struggling.”

Meg Robbins

Meg Robbins has been a resident of Northampton for over 50 years, where she attended Smith College, worked as a teacher and educational consultant, raised a family and now has grandchildren. She served on the School Committee representing Ward 1 for one term until she was redistricted out of that ward and lost a three-way race for an at-large seat in 2023.

Robbins said that, having knocked on lots of doors around the city, many people share her feeling that honesty and transparency have become major issues in Northampton.

“It’s as though there’s a group of people who say, ‘Just lie down, it’ll be good for you,’” she said. 

As examples, Robbins cited Picture Main Street, an effort to redesign the downtown streetscape that some residents oppose. She also criticized the city’s purchase of the former First Baptist Church from local real estate magnate Eric Suher, which has drawn ire from some of those same critics for what they say was an inflated price tag and the property’s slow development into the city’s new Community Resilience Hub. 

Robbins is not opposed to updating Main Street, she said, but emphasized that she felt that the city handled this and other projects in an undemocratic fashion.

Robbins also criticized what she characterized as the mayor’s “archaic” financial policy, which she said was inherited from previous mayor David Narkewicz. She said that plan relies on lean spending for city services in order to prioritize saving money for capital projects.

“We did a good job during the Great Recession,” she said, “but where we didn’t spend the money, it’s what everyone’s complaining about now.” It’s an approach that she said is a departure from the longer history of the city’s budgeting plans, which “always felt like city services were paramount.”

Asked what sets her apart from her fellow candidates, Robbins said she thinks the distinction is clear: “There’s those of us who are eager to be part of a sea change in government, and those who want to ride the coattails of the mayor.” 

Referencing her service on the School Committee, she said she has a background of “having paid attention for a long time.”

William O’Dwyer

Democratic Socialists of America member William O’Dwyer felt moved to enter the at-large race by the principles of democratic socialism, which he believes offers a strong framework of building worker and tenant power from which to approach individual issues in city government.

“I looked at the field, and there’s people here that I agree with, that I disagree with, but we’re kind of focusing on one or another issue,” he said. “I haven’t seen a candidate talking about how to make the city more livable and more affordable.”

The youngest candidate in the race, O’Dwyer has worked in food service and been a union member when working at a UPS warehouse. He also interned for the progressive advocacy nonprofit Act on Mass and volunteered as an organizer for Protect Our Progress to support the ultimately unsuccessful reelection campaign of Cori Bush, a progressive former U.S. representative from Missouri. He is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the history department, and has lived in Northampton for two years.

Aside from overall affordability, O’Dwyer said he wants to focus on the quality of public services — like supporting the higher school system budgets proposed by the School Committee in recent years, which the mayor and a majority of the City Council have declined to pursue — and on improving the quality and accessibility of public transit.

Since the Great Recession, O’Dwyer said, “the city adopted a very cautious and fiscally conservative, necessary path” in its budgeting. The persistence of that trend, he said, has become “more of what I call an austerity mindset.”

O’Dwyer hopes to see a city government that will “put its thumb down on the side of workers, tenants, and students.”

“If you’re concerned about affordability, if you’re concerned about conditions at your workplace, I’m a candidate who is speaking to that,” O’Dwyer said.

Yakov Kronrod

Yakov Kronrod has lived in Northampton for six years — a city he said he visited often during his undergraduate years at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and where many of his friends chose to settle during adulthood. 

Kronrod has a background in teaching, higher education, and organizing alongside current and formerly incarcerated people. He currently works as a senior engineering manager at Spotify overseeing AI safety. He said he will bring needed experience to the City Council, as well as a willingness to “look at problems deeply.”

Among the problems that deserve a close look, Kronrod said, is school funding. Kronrod believes there is little room to raise property taxes further, but supports other measures that could help raise revenues, like a luxury real estate transfer tax or pushing Smith College to contribute more to city coffers. He even suggested that the city could establish a private school-style endowment for the public schools.

“As a mathematical person, I am having a hard time getting to the raw facts,” he said of the school budget debate. “If we are underestimating income in a consistent, predictable way … that is not a viable long-term way to run the city.”

Kronrod went on to stress the importance of doubling down on the city’s commitments as a sanctuary city. Identifying himself as a refugee from the Soviet Union, Kronrod described immigration as a topic over which local governments are “effectively at war with our national administration.”

But Kronrod also hopes to take the city in new directions, particularly in the realm of technology. He believes that AI, despite acknowledged risks like surveillance and negative impacts on developing brains, can be a tool of local government, serving functions like determining the best allocations of limited resources or making decades of meeting minutes easily searchable and translatable into any language.

Considering himself “very progressive” and even “to the left of American progressiveness” on certain issues, he also believes there are lessons to be learned from the “business capitalist side” on “how to run a city, how to have a balanced budget, how to look at [returns] on our investments in infrastructure or educational attainment.” 

Drawing on his background “facilitating emotional intelligence trainings” for the U.S. Naval Air Command, Kronrod believes he is well equipped to address what he called “polarization” in the city and bring people together to work out solutions that more residents can be happy about.