NORTHAMPTON — In a nail-biting election, Northampton Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra won a second term on Tuesday, narrowly defeating challenger Jillian Duclos in what was a nearly equally divided electorate.
Sciarra beat Duclos by 76 votes for a second four-year term with approximately 9,400 total votes total cast in this year’s municipal election. The results capture the mood of a city that remains strongly divided on several key issues, such as school funding and the Picture Main Street project.
At the restaurant Spoleto off Main Street on Tuesday night, an emotional Sciarra thanked those who supported her campaign and had gathered there on election night.
“It has been the greatest joy and the greatest privilege,” Sciarra said. “To get to continue to do this work with you has been the thing that has fired me up every day to get out and keep campaigning.”
Sciarra was joined by her husband, Bill Scher, who spoke of the challenges of running the campaign and alluded to the divisions the city has seen over the last two years.
“It’s been a really hard 18 months. It shouldn’t be this hard to serve your community,” he said. “It means so much that so many of you have stepped up, spoke out and made sure that facts would be heard and that the basic premise that we cannot govern each other without mutual respect was heard.”
Following her electoral win in 2021, Sciarra’s has faced backlash over the city’s last two municipal budgets, which brought cuts to staff and services in the Northampton Public School district, leading to the creation of the advocacy group Support Our Schools and a political action committee bearing the same name. Other contentious issues included the upcoming Picture Main Street project, that is set to remake the city’s downtown over a three-year construction period, but has left some feeling anxious about how it will affect businesses in the area.
At JJ’s tavern in Florence, where Duclos and other candidates backed by the Support Our Schools group had gathered for the evening, many watched with incredulity as ballot results updated on a large screen showed an extremely tight race for mayoral office.
“This is crazy,” said Luke Rotello, a Ward 5 candidate who manned the computer the screen was connected to, to the gathered crowd. “We haven’t seen anything like this.” (Rotello would ultimately lose his own race to candidate Aline Davis.)
Though Duclos ultimately came up short, she remained steadfast following the results, saying in an interview with the Gazette that she was proud of what she and other allied candidates had accomplished this election season.
“This is a movement born of people working from the ground up,” Duclos said. “This is a huge shift of the status quo. It’s really kind of incredible given the lack of resources we had.”
Asked if she would consider running for mayor again, Duclos responded “absolutely.”
“I’m here to bring a voice to the table,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Speaking to the Gazette outside of Spoleto, Sciarra acknowledged the divisions in the city remain.
“Clearly, there’s work to do, and I think there’s a lot of repair work to do,” Sciarra said. “We agree on a lot more than we disagree on, and I look forward to working together on these really important issues that Northampton faces.”
For many voters, the city’s divisions weighed on their minds as they cast their ballots at voting centers around the city.
“It’s been a lot more contentious this year. I’ve been getting a lot of texts and phone calls,” said Alice Hough, a Ward 3 resident who cast her vote at the Northampton Senior Center on Tuesday. “Everybody seems mad about the school funding and Main Street.”
Amy Meltzer, a Ward 4 resident, also said she was perturbed by the state of rhetoric amongst city residents.
“The chatter on our neighborhood listserv has been a little more unpleasant,” Meltzer said. “It’s not as bad as on social media, but there’s been accusations and lumping of people together. It’s the first time I’ve noticed it in a local election.”
While Sciarra had won the endorsement of Gov. Maura Healey and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, Duclos, a former executive director of the Downtown Northampton Association, earned the backing of SOS and the Northampton Association of School Employees (NASE) union. Those endorsements were enough to sway some voters, such as Mikah Semon of Ward 6.
“They [NASE] put out a slate of candidates, and I voted for those people,” said Semon. “I live here but I’m a teacher in Holyoke, so I’m a big supporter of labor and what they want.”
Jill Boski of Ward 3 also said she voted for Duclos.
“I voted for people who were going to help education,” Boski said. “I’ve seen correlations between quality of education and population in prison.”
Duclos won the majority of the vote in Wards, 3, 6, and 7 by a margin of 31, 286 and 68 votes respectively. Sciarra won the vote in Wards 1, 2, 4 and 5, with respective margins of 42, 173, 124 and 117 votes, according to results posted by the city clerk’s office. The tally across all wards was 4,637 votes for Sciarra and 4,561 votes for Duclos.
Greg Kerstetter, who cast his vote for Sciarra, agreed that grievances fueled much of the sentiment in the election.
“There’s a sense of anger. People are mad, so they’re just going to fight against the incumbent,” he said. “It’s less about the person than about things getting done.”
Others, like Oskar Saunders-Pappentick of Ward 4, said that rather focusing on the rhetoric, the city’s leaders, including Sciarra, needed to pay more attention to residents’ concerns, saying the same “group of people” had been running the city for a long time.
“I’m not saying there’s some secret cigar smoke-filled room somewhere, but we haven’t been listened to,” he said. “I’m tired of hearing that the tone of my voice is more important than what I’m saying.”
In a speech at JJ’s Tavern following the election results, Duclos alluded to the endorsements Sciarra had received from the governor and contrasted them with her own, while vowing to keep on fighting.
“I’m a little frustrated that we have people on the state level that got involved in our politics without knowing our community,” she told those gathered. “They don’t know what we’re going through, and we are going to do what we need to do to make sure our small businesses survive and our schools are funded.”
Sciarra meanwhile said she was focused on working with the newest iteration of the City Council to work on the city’s next budget.
“This will be a lot of really new people, and this will be their first budget cycle,” Sciarra said in an interview. “I look forward to digging in with them and getting them up to speed on municipal finance.”