NORTHAMPTON — The four candidates for mayor discussed their qualifications and shared their priorities for the city’s future in a WHMP radio forum on Monday, the first meeting of the mayoral hopefuls before a Sept. 28 preliminary election.
City Council President Gina-Louise Sciarra, social worker Shanna Fishel and transportation analyst Marc Warner appeared remotely on “The Bill Newman Show.” Retired resident Roy Martin, making his 10th run for City Hall’s corner office, joined Newman in the studio.
Voters will eliminate two of the four candidates in the preliminary, and the top two vote-getters will advance to the Nov. 2 general election. David Narkewicz, first elected mayor in 2011, announced in January that he would not run for a fourth term.
Rosechana Gordon dropped out of the race on Monday afternoon, citing “personal and health reasons,” and did not participate in the 10 a.m. radio forum.
Host Bill Newman is an attorney and director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s western Massachusetts office.
“As far as I’m concerned, this is an enormously complex managerial job, and the city of Northampton is a complicated enterprise to run,” Newman said. He asked each candidate to explain what makes them qualified to manage a $121 million budget, covering 26 city departments with 1,000 employees, including public works, public health, the police and many more.
“I’m bringing field experience into the budget,” Fishel said, explaining that they have worked as a special education teacher and sex educator in local schools. “I know the harmful impact of a municipal budget on those most disenfranchised. … Our budget is not reflecting the morals and the values (of) a progressive city, as Northampton presents itself.”
Fishel wants to highlight “history and justice-oriented programs” in schools and “safeguard equal access” for students with disabilities, and join what they described as a movement for guaranteed universal basic income. Fishel said that, if a mayor’s job is just to manage the budget, the city should instead have an unelected town manager. An elected official, they said, also manages “people and priorities.”
Warner argued that the city has a strong-mayor form of government, and that the “buck stops” at the corner office. He is the founder of Warner Transportation Consulting Inc., which has worked with large agencies in California, Texas and countries around the world to improve public transit. The firm also assists transportation agencies in human resources management.
“I do have the right background for this,” Warner said. “For the last 29 years, I’ve been running my own company, where I have done operational audits, management audits, planning studies, policy studies … and I do all of this with a great deal of persuasive writing and public speaking.”
He said that he has participated in collective bargaining sessions, and helped “very poorly organized” agencies turn themselves around. “I don’t see the other candidates as having that background,” he said.
Sciarra, a City Council member for the past eight years and its president since 2019, said she is “the only candidate with elected municipal experience, and it is extensive.” She said that her role as council president makes her a department head, and that she has strong working relationships with the other department heads and many city employees.
“Having served in these roles, I can tell you, it is an awesome responsibility to have your community place their trust in you to represent them,” Sciarra said, “and I take that responsibility incredibly seriously.”
Sciarra is the communications manager for Pathlight, the parent organization for several programs including Whole Children, Milestones, Autism Connections and Family Empowerment.
Martin, 78 and retired, previously worked on an oil rig and ran a pet supply business. He pledged that, if elected, he would “never, ever, ask for another Prop 2½ override.” He said that there is “a lot of waste from what I see” in city spending, while neighboring cities like Easthampton and Holyoke “live within their budget.”
Asked to list their top three priorities if elected, Fishel said they want to “fully fund” the nascent Department of Community Care, a peer-led emergency response alternative that received $424,000 in the fiscal 2022 budget; create more carbon-neutral affordable housing; and increase funding to public schools.
Warner said the ongoing redesign of Main Street is one of his top priorities, along with making sure “we don’t lose any more Coca-Cola plants,” referring to the company’s plan to shutter the Industrial Drive bottling plant in 2023.
Sciarra said her priorities include the Main Street redesign, but also getting the Department of Community Care off the ground and establishing a municipal broadband internet network.
Martin, who has served as president of the Walter Salvo Tenants Association, said he “got sober with Bill Nagle’s Honor Court,” and advocated a return of the program that helped drug users recover and put them to work cleaning the city; he added that he would not “defund the police department, not one dime” in order to fund the Department of Community Care.
The deadline to register to vote in the preliminary election is Sept. 8, and the last day to register for the Nov. 2 general election is Oct. 13.
Brian Steele can be reached at bsteele@gazettenet.com.