Meet the candidates: Northampton City Council Ward 1

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Correction: This story has been updated to correct how a city’s charter can be changed. While Northampton’s next review of its charter is in 2029, the charter can be changed in the interim.

Northampton residents will cast ballots on Tuesday, Sept. 16, to narrow the field of City Council and mayoral candidates down to the final ballot, to be decided Nov. 4. 

Among the races that will be narrowed is a three-way race for one City Council seat representing Ward 1, where incumbent Stanley Moulton has declined to seek reelection after serving two terms. One of the three candidates will be eliminated in September’s preliminary election. Early voting begins on Saturday at City Hall. Scheduled voting hours can be found on the city’s website.

The Shoestring asked each candidate a set of five questions in preparation for these profiles, which appear in the same order as they’ll appear on the ballot.

Michele Ronco

Born and raised in Italy, Michele Ronco earned a master’s degree in industrial engineering and served as a city councilor in the northern Italian municipality of Beinasco. He is seeking a seat as Ward 1’s councilor after witnessing the strife over the city’s school budgets in recent years.

“The reason why I started going to City Council meetings last year is because the school committee requested a certain level of funding for the schools, the superintendent requested less than that, and [Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra] proposed even less than the superintendent,” Ronco said. 

Ronco said he has been a member of Support Our Schools, the grassroots group that came out of those frustrations, “since the beginning,” and he has been endorsed by the group’s political action committee.

Since moving to Northampton 15 years ago, Ronco has overseen train car production for CRRC, a Chinese company with a factory in Springfield, and green energy projects for the Italian company Enel Green Power; became a U.S. citizen; and served on the board of his condo association. He cited his experience, as a former member of the finance subcommittee in Beinasco and a supervisor of construction projects he said were larger than Picture Main Street, as reasons voters should support him over other candidates.

Ronco considers himself a progressive “change” candidate. He said he does not support the current mayor, and called her management of the city’s finances an “austerity regime.” The problems this causes, Ronco said, extend beyond the schools. He cited hiring difficulties at the city’s Department of Public Works as evidence of what he characterized as the city’s failure to prioritize competitive wages for essential services.

“I would like to change the charter,” Ronco concluded, recalling his surprise in learning that city councilors in Northampton do not give input as the mayor assembles a budget and, as is the case in cities statewide, cannot allocate funds during the budget process, only cut them. The exception to this rule is a state law that allows a city council, if its members opt into the law, to increase the school department’s budget under certain conditions. In Northampton, several councilors unsuccessfully attempted to opt into that law last year. 

While the city’s next review of its charter is in 2029, it can be changed several ways in the interim.

Ronco said he wants to focus on strengthening public education and city services and reducing “unnecessary surplus” in the budget, with the goal of making the city more affordable.

Niko Letendre-Cahillane

Niko Letendre-Cahillane wants to bring the perspective of low-wage workers to city government. A Democratic Socialists of America member, Letendre-Cahillane has been a grocery-store worker and a baker. He highlighted additional experiences doing strike and picket support for unionized workers, organizing for ballot initiatives, and canvassing for presidential candidates.

“I want to democratize things a bit,” he said.

Letendre-Cahillane said he is running not only for the ward’s residents, but for the people who work there, citing the cluster of grocery stores and retail outlets in the area.

 “There’s no way you can afford to live comfortably in Northampton if you work in one of those places,” he said.

As such, overall affordability of the city is a priority for Letendre-Cahillane. He said he aims to address the issue through efforts to comprehensively increase the city’s housing supply by bringing down vacancy rates, supporting new development, and by backing organized labor and worker organizing.

Calling the city’s recent budgets “austere,” Letendre-Cahillane said he believes the city can support the “strong budget” path proposed by the School Committee in recent years and fully fund the Department of Public Works.

“As it stands, we have a ‘strong mayor’ model in Northampton, and I believe we need to get a supermajority of folks on the City Council [to] opt into exercising a little more power,” he said of the budget process, referring to city councilors’ unsuccessful attempt in 2024 to opt into the state law that would have allowed them to increase funding for the city’s schools. 

“Mostly, I just generally am opposed to strong executive power wherever you find it,” he said. “I don’t think it’s worked well for the state or the country or local levels.”

Letendre-Cahillane acknowledged that his opponents share some similar visions for improvements to the city, but said his platform “has the throughline of being socialist, and tying all these struggles” — like those for universal health care and other public spending — “into one thing.”

“I am a democratic socialist, and we take the democracy part of that very seriously,” he said.

Gwen Nabad

Gwen Nabad comes to the Ward 1 race from the Northampton Housing Partnership — an appointed city board charged with identifying and addressing the city’s housing needs — where her current term lasts until 2028. 

Nabad previously lived and worked in eastern and central Massachusetts for decades, with jobs ranging from waitressing to professional tiling. In 2018, Nabad said, she broke two ribs and learned she had been a victim of wage theft, then became homeless after she was rear-ended while driving for a rideshare company.

That is what led her to Northampton, where she was able to access public housing and eventually a housing voucher. Coming here, she said, “was like a reunion” with the things she used to love about the central part of the state. 

“I got to see insects I hadn’t seen since I was young,” she said. “There are still farms here!”

Since moving to Northampton, Nabad has attended Holyoke Community College and later Hampshire College. She served on Hampshire College’s student advocacy board representing non-traditionally aged students, participated in groups like the Mass. Union of Public Housing Tenants and Climate Action Now, and served on Northampton’s Select Committee to Study Barriers to Service on City Boards.

It is these experiences, Nabad said, that inform her politics. Her biggest priority issues are affordability, access to services, and climate resilience. 

Nabad said she has experience analyzing housing authority budgets and is in the process of learning more about city budgets. Regarding claims that there is enough unallocated revenue in recent city budgets to avoid cuts to the school system, Nabad said, “If that’s the case, let’s fund the schools.”

Nabad described herself as “pretty liberal” and said that what sets her apart from the other candidates in the race is her experience “in the issues that matter to people in Ward 1.” She said she’s often out in the community, meeting people at the Northampton Survival Center, Grow Food Northampton, and community meetings. Of her opponents, she said she’s “never seen them” out there.