Marianne LaBarge City Councilor | Ward 6 | Northampton, MA

WARD 6

         CITY COUNCILOR

MARIANNE LABARGE
Text Box: July 1, 2025 Fiscal Year 2026 Northampton City Budget On May 16th, Mayor Sciarra released her proposed Fiscal Year 2026 budget, effective July 1, 2025. The complete budget can be found at the following link: https://www.northamptonma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/30931/Mayors-FY2026-Budget-PDF?bidId= City Council held two budget hearings. At the June 5th meeting, City Council unanimously agreed to delay the vote to June 18th, to allow more time to consider all the information we'd received. Mayor Sciarra brought two amendments to us in the interim. The first increased the contributory retirement line by $12,549, to meet our obligations to retirees, and the second increased the Northampton Public Schools budget by $116,711. This amount is the difference between State support for our schools in their original budget, and the one passed by the Senate.  This funding, along with changes to the already allocated NPS Information Technology budget, will make $217,711 available for staffing, which has been identified for additional teachers at Northampton High School and for the garden program at the four elementary schools. At the June 18th City Council meeting, for the second year in a row we failed to pass the amended budget. The vote was 5 in favor and 3 opposed, and six votes are required to pass a financial order. Councilors Dubs, Maiore and Rothenberg voted against the budget, citing insufficient school funding, with Councilor Dubs also citing insufficient Dept. of Public Works funding. When a Council doesn't pass an annual budget, it goes into effect on July 1st, along with any amendments the Mayor proposed that we accepted. The effect of not passing this budget is a 12-day delay in adopting it. We do expect our free cash from FY25 to be larger this year than in the coming years, since we have adjusted our revenue expectations so much higher beginning in FY26, which will produce less of a surplus. That’s why it won’t be sustainable to allocate more on a permanent basis, barring other changes to income and expenses. Investing in our schools will yield many dividends besides financial ones. There is an argument that it will bring in more money to invest now (fewer students to charter schools, and school choice). This needs to be studied with a realistic outlook - if we invest $100,000, can we get the number of students back that will make up for that? There are no hidden pots of money - every dollar is either for use this year for important purposes, or set aside for future years, also for important purposes. We must carefully plan or we'll end up like it was before the fiscal stability plan, with no predictability in funding. The graph below shows the history of increases for NPS. Prior to 2014 and the implementation of the fiscal stability plan, funding was quite volatile. Northampton Public Schools increases over prior years