Since 1982, following the passage of Proposition 2½, the city of Northampton has been prohibited from increasing the amount of money it raises from property taxes to fund the needs of our city more than 2.5% per year, unless voters approve an override.
That’s 42 years of brutal, cumulative constraints on our city budgets, which still had to accommodate, every year, increases in inflation, employee raises, health insurance, and so forth, while somehow funding all the needs of our city.
Another burden was added in 1993, when the Massachusetts Education Reform Act adopted a formula that punished cities like Northampton that prioritized school funding. It also added charter schools to the mix, adding the tuition of families that choose them to the things Northampton must fund ahead of the needs of our students. All of this from a budget that cannot increase the amount it raises from property taxes more than 2.5%.
In 1993, the state formula funded 33% of Northampton’s school budget; in 2025 it covered only 16%. Last year, NPS’s projected net loss to charter schools was $2,379,615.
Lately when I see the mayor’s critics disparaging her budget as “the mayor’s austerity budget,” I think, “Where have you been?” Since 1982, every single mayor (Musante, Ford, Higgins, Narkewicz) has had no choice but to provide school budgets that required cuts to positions and programs. In 2013, Mayor David Narkewicz’s Fiscal Stability Plan, which ensured that budgets could increase by at least 4% per year, and which relies on periodic overrides, was a huge improvement. Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra’s budgets have followed that plan; this year’s school budget increased by 6.5%, following increases of 5.1%, 7.4% and 9.8% in the three previous years.
My own children started kindergarten in the late 80s and graduated from NHS in 2002 and 2004, long before the Fiscal Stability Plan. It was a horrifying, enraging roller coaster every spring, with losses upon losses.
And people definitely argued about many things.
But nobody thought it was the mayor’s fault that a city budget that can only raise 2.5% more per year from property taxes couldn’t fund the schools without cuts. The math was just obvious.
The novel claim being promoted by City Councilor Quaverly Rothenberg, council candidate Al Simon, and School Committee member Michael Stein, that the city of Northampton can now suddenly spend millions more on its schools, and also more money on streets and sidewalks and other needs, with no cuts to other departments, and no override, is a fantasy.
Recently at a City Council meeting a Stein/Rothenberg fantasy promoter made this astonishing claim: “We’ve been doing at SOS some canvassing, and house parties, that sort of thing, and people have been saying ‘OK we get it, there’s money, we see the tension, we see kids are suffering, so what’s the motivation for it?’ That’s the question we get, like, so, why is it being done, and I, other people may have a better idea but I personally am like, I don’t know! I don’t know if the mayor knows something we don’t know about the future, I don’t know if government wants to get out of education … maybe some kids are collateral damage, as they are like Firestone tire products, when they had bad tire products, they’re like, yeah, we’re going to lose some people, you know, some tires are going to blow up, we’re going to lose some people, it’s a cost of doing business … Please tell us! …”
Not one word of this absurd, disingenuous statement can helpfully inform anyone who is trying to understand the current NPS budget discussion. But for those trying to understand it, I have good news: Mayor Sciarra has been an honest broker of information every step of the way. She has responded to every single suggestion her critics have made, in detail, including the ever-beguiling but unfortunately false “mountains of cash” narrative (because a solution for this year that makes things worse next year is not, unfortunately, a solution). She has adopted some suggestions and rejected others. Either way, she has explained her reasons in meetings, op-eds and newsletters.
So if people are knocking on your door claiming that the reasoning behind the mayor’s budget is mysterious and unknown, some skepticism might be in order.
To be clear: this isn’t a call for “civility,” although I certainly appreciate civility. This is just a call for accurately identifying why it is that our city budget is so tight. Sciarra is rising to the occasion with the tools available to her locally, as our mayors have been forced to do for 42 years. But the root causes of the funding problems for NPS are at the state level, and it is unfair, misleading and corrosive to claim otherwise.
And just to return to my own experience — in spite of the cuts, I never for a single minute wished my children were in a private school. I never wished we lived in Newton. You can have all that. NPS was a fabulous public school community for my children to grow up in and I would make all the same choices if I had it to do over again.
Ellen Nigrosh lives in Northampton.