Gina-Louise Sciarra may have claimed victory in the municipal election, but her administration has a lot of work to do as it heads into a second term.
Sciarra won the mayoral election by the thinnest of margins, getting about 80 more votes than challenger Jillian Duclos. Contrast that to Sciarra’s first mayoral election, when she captured 68% of the electorate. Sciarra will face a second term having to govern a city where half of voters preferred her opponent.
It certainly isn’t the first time the city has seen a narrow victory for a mayoral candidate in a municipal election. In 2009, Clare Higgins bested her opponent Michael Bardsley to win reelection by 344 votes out of more than 9,800 total voters. And in 1991, Mary Ford defeated Michael Ahearn by 386 votes to become the city’s first woman mayor.
But the result of this year’s municipal election reveals a strong division in the city, resulting mainly from the mayor’s budgeting policy and from anxieties over several upcoming large projects in the city, such as the proposed Picture Main Street redesign of the city’s downtown and the planned conversion of the former First Baptist Church into a Resilience Hub to address the issues relating to homelessness and climate emergencies.
In a phone interview with the Gazette three days after the Nov. 4 election, Sciarra acknowledged that her administration had to do more work to be “accessible” to residents and to answer their questions about city policy and initiatives.
“We’ve been hearing that people want more information and more engagement, and we’ve been working on different ideas,” Sciarra said. “I think we have a lot of work to do to better explain our positions and make our case about them.”
But Sciarra also said that the election had seen “negative campaigning” and “misinformation,” something that she was “disheartened” to see.
“I did a lot of door-knocking, and at a door someone would tell me something that was incorrect, and then I would say, ‘well actually, this is the reality,'” Sciarra said. “To give a detailed explanation, it’s sometimes hard for that information to penetrate, and we need to do a better job of explaining why decisions are made or what the realities of municipal finance are.”
Duclos ran against Sciarra with the endorsement of Support Our Schools, an advocacy group formed in response to the last two school budgets, which saw reductions in services and staff despite an increase in overall spending. Four other candidates endorsed by SOS were elected to the City Council: Meg Robbins, Jeremy Dubs, Chris Stratton and Rachel Maiore.
Cathy McNally, a member of the SOS coordinating committee who also runs the group’s Facebook page, pushed back against the notion from some camps in the city that the rhetoric used by the group was divisive.
“When people are opposed to the policies of the government, and they don’t have the ability to influence, people do get upset,” McNally said. “Of course people are going to be upset if their kids are not getting services.”
McNally added that there was a segment of the population that didn’t feel they had a close connection with their city’s government, something that led them to vote for Duclos and against the Sciarra.
“We want to have more accountability for budgeting practices,” she said. “We want to have more of an understanding and more of a dialogue about what is best for our city.”
The election result in the city echoes events occurring across the country, with Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City signaling a push back against the establishment of the Democratic Party. On a larger political scale, the administration of President Donald Trump has led to widespread disruption of government, with the cutting of numerous federal programs and the government shutdown.
Bill Dwight, a former city councilor who has long been involved in Northampton politics, said that the result in Northampton reflected anxieties at the national level.
“As an incumbent, the mayor accumulates essentially all the grievances, and the challenger gets to run on aspirations,” Dwight said. “This community has been shaken by the Trump administration’s election and then the consequential actions since.”
Maiore, an incumbent who will serve her fourth term on the council, also cited national concerns as a reason behind this year’s municipal election result.
“What this [election result] tells us is this community is ready for change,” Maiore said in an interview with the Gazette. “When the stakes are getting so high at the federal level and folks are really suffering, they really need to their municipal government and representatives to be willing to adapt and pivot.”
Though she often voted against the mayor’s budget in her last term and received an endorsement from SOS, Maiore said she tries to stay “autonomous” on the council, and called on the mayor and the council to come together to address the needs of the community.
“We need to talk about what’s really effective and what actually works,” Maiore said. “I would challenge all of us to dwell in that discomfort and not put ourselves in camps, because we’re not going to get anywhere.”
Robbins, a former School Committee member who received the most votes of any of the four at-large council candidates, also said she was looking forward to working with the rest of the council.
“It’s about having good conversations,” Robbins said. “There are a lot of unanswered questions, and people want to know about them.”
Despite the divisions, Dwight said he welcomed the number of new city council and school committee members, saying it represented a strong showing of civic participation in local politics.
“I’m actually kind of excited about that level of engagement and energy invested in participating, which not a lot of people do,” Dwight said. “People usually just participate by pressing like on Facebook or writing some snarky meme. That’s not participating.”
McNally also said that even though SOS-backed candidates didn’t win a majority on the council and their mayoral candidate came up just short of victory, the group was still “super excited” about the results.
“It means that in a year and half, people who are busy and have a lot of other stuff going on somehow got themselves organized to do all this stuff and create these campaigns,” McNally said. “We are going to keep going and advocating for a stronger school budget … with the changing face of the council, maybe people’s positions will be freed up.”
As for the mayor, Sciarra said that she was working to set up meetings with incoming new members of the council, arranging for them to tour departments and getting them up to speed on some of the workings of municipal government.
“There’s a lot of common ground about what we care about and what we want to achieve for the city, but we have definitely have to work to bring people back together,” she said. “We can have policy disagreements, but the personal nature is something that has been unwelcome for a lot of people.”