Daily Hampshire Gazette, Guest Column
by Al Simon
7/30/2025
Reprinted with permission from the author.
In her July 25 guest column [“The brutal reality of public school funding”], Ellen Nigrosh misrepresents my views on what Northampton can do financially to support public education and other essential services, so I’ll set the record straight.
My opinions are informed by my experience as an 18-year veteran of the Windsor, Connecticut Town Council, deputy mayor for many years, and spending 12 years as the finance committee chair. I was deeply immersed in the creation of annual budgets and other financial matters. Windsor has the same sized population as Northampton and an annual budget of similar size. This makes my expertise relevant to Northampton.
I am very aware of the constraints on municipal governments. While the particulars vary by state, the overall situation is of unrelenting financial pressure on local governments. When Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra proposed her fiscal year 2025 budget in May 2024 reducing public school services and eliminating 24 staff positions, I initially assumed that Northampton was in bad shape financially. Why else would you cut your public school workforce and reduce educational services for our children?
But what I later found shocked me. More than 10 consecutive years of budget surpluses between $4-6 million, and an added mountain of cash in the bank. The last accounting had Northampton’s reserves at about $35 million. While Northampton is below the state average in teacher salaries and per pupil education spending, there is one area where we are well above average — our cash reserves. We currently rank 8th in the state for total cash on hand among 351 cities and towns in the state. For cities with over $100 million budgets, Northampton ranks 2nd in the state for cash reserves as a percentage of the budget. No poor city here. So the question again is, if you are bringing in millions more than you spend every year, why are you cutting school services?
Ms. Nigrosh accepts Mayor Sciarra’s view that there is not sufficient money coming in on a yearly basis to maintain level services. The mayor’s budget has reduced public school services for two years in a row. After analyzing Northampton’s financial history using publicly available official documents, I believe the mayor could have applied an additional $2 million to the FY25 school budget. We would have still ended the year with a budget surplus. We have the means to help our schools and children more than we are at present. Ms. Nigrosh implies that the city can only rely on 2.5% property tax increases per year and that is why our schools can’t be fully funded. This isn’t true. Northampton’s property tax only generates about 60% of the total city revenue. The other 40% comes from non-property tax sources including interest income and consumer spending taxes. In the past two fiscal years the total general fund revenue growth has been 5% each year. In short, Northampton’s total revenue pie is much bigger than Ms. Nigrosh believes.
The mayor and her allies tell us there is no other choice but to permanently reduce public school services because there isn’t enough money. Since only our schools have faced reductions, no other city services have been cut, it is fair to conclude that everything else seems to be a higher priority than our schools. If we prioritize our public school children as we should, will we be able to generate all the funding they need at once? Not at once; but we can make a good start followed by incremental efforts to improve funding across multiple years to meet our children’s needs. Will this require a modification of future spending plans? Likely yes. Essential services should always come first.
Why don’t we have public discussions of the city’s priorities? The mayor has been asked to hold public forums or town hall meetings on this topic many times and has refused. The president of our neighborhood association wrote to the mayor in February asking for a community-wide discussion of the school funding question. The mayor never replied to his request. City residents affiliated with Support Our Schools have asked for a public dialogue forum as well. No answer. Our mayor avoids face to face public dialogue with people in her own city.
The idea that there are no alternatives to the mayor’s current path of reduced public education services is just factually wrong. Suggestions of alternative solutions are caricatured in the extreme and presented against the mayor’s position as “it’s my way or disaster.” I moved here from a same-sized city where things were done differently, and a tiny bit of research shows me that other Massachusetts cities are managing their finances differently as well. Northampton can learn from other practices if it wants to solve this problem. It requires acknowledging that the old fiscal stability plan isn’t working any more.
Consider this: We were told to vote for the last override to avoid service cuts. Yet, only a few years later, school services were cut. The truth is, the mayor’s current plan requires both permanent cuts to school services plus more tax overrides. Who wants to pay more taxes and yet have essential services cut?
What we need are new ideas, creative solutions, and more communicative and flexible leaders who engage the public directly to find solutions that meet the needs of our community, and especially our children. Northampton’s children should not be the first to pay the price of leaders’ rigid loyalty to a plan that doesn’t work anymore.
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