City Council Candidate, Ward 6
Website: chrisward6.com
Unscripted Community Conversation
Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity
October 24, 2025
Video Clip – Question to candidates: People are moving out of Northampton or taking their children out of the school district and many teachers are deciding to retire early. Is there a point where balancing the funding needs of children with special needs will be better supported along with classroom and district needs?
“Well, see that’s actually what I wanted to talk about, which is that we need a much better dynamic between the school committee and the city council. You have the expertise in the schools, you know what the issues are. Over on the council side, we’re going to need to follow that with care and concern.
I’ve learned so much, particularly from Mike and Anat. For example, if we spent more on early intervention, particularly with reading, that actually saves us money later. It’s not only fiscally wise – because we’re not having to give kids more individual attention later, it’s also – there’s the human cost of someone being a participant in school, rather than hating every minute of it because they’re just not reading, they’re not getting the subjects that depend on reading.
So we’re going to need a lot more conversation and collaboration between the school committee and the council. We need to get you the money and you know where it needs to go.
Some of the other factors of that, though, we talk about turnover in administration and teachers. If you give someone a job responsibility and you don’t give them the budget to fulfill that – they’re going to get fed up and leave. The next person you hire is going to last for a year before they get fed up. A lot of this comes back to the money. The school committee has expertise within the schools, but the big thing on the money, you know, there’s a lot of people in this race who are like, ‘we need to get more chapter 70 money from the state.’ I would love to have more chapter 70 money from the state. I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. Northampton needs solutions that Northampton can implement here with our local priorities.”
Video Clip – Question to candidates: Do you think that all the education, the forums, the dialogues, and everything that happens during these campaigns will – or won’t – affect the tone or the way our city government functions and how those who are elected interact with the public as a result of these elections?
“One of the things that’s happened – it was precipitated by the school funding when that disagreement blew up a year and a half ago – is that so many people in the city know so much more about how things work now. There are so many places where there were decisions that were just being made in a way that we didn’t even pretend there was a decision there. It was treated as just – the road goes this way.
The fact that we blew past four or five branches in the road, without even talking about the fact that that was a decision. A lot of that is opened up now. There’s a lot of it that’s still not being talked about that’s very, obscure. There are budget spreadsheets floating around. People are talking about things. There are numbers that are in those spreadsheets. There’s also numbers that are not in those spreadsheets. There’s missing columns.
People talk about: where does the money go? The other problem is: where does the money come from? There is money that just appears in our schools, in our departments, that doesn’t go through the general fund budget. We don’t really have a visibility into that. So, if it goes away, we don’t know what makeup we would need for that.
These are topics that people running for the city council, running for the school committee, want to be working on and we’re talking with each other about them. We’re talking with voters about this and concerned parents every day. I really hope that tradition of civic interest in how does our government work? Is the information flowing between the administrative branch and the city council and the school committee? Between the school administration and the school committee? And between all of us, or all of whoever ends up sitting in city hall?
All of you as the people of this community, we work for you. And if you don’t have that information, if all parts of our government don’t have that information, then we’re not having a government of the people. We’re just having one person says: ‘this is what we’re doing.’ There is no decision there. This is just the way we’ve always done it.”
Video Clip – Question to candidates: Would you focus on changing the charter – with the executive power in the mayor’s office – which limits your abilities to represent the people that you’re supposed to represent?
“It’s not widely understood that under the charter, an individual city councilor doesn’t really have any more power than an individual citizen. There’s been a lot of systems of courtesy and of deference, where the city council could get this information, but it’s not a power in the charter. Or where people call up their councilor because of potholes or ice covered streets – the city council doesn’t actually – one individual doesn’t have the power to do anything about that. Hopefully they can make a call and get a response to that, but it is – as we found out – that opportunity is a tradition, but it is actually not a formal mechanism of the city.
We can’t have nine people telling the DPW what to do – of course not. But we do need to establish a balance between what are the traditions of at least getting the information through, and the concerns through, and then what are the formal mechanisms where the council can require information, or require a change in policy, even if it’s just by the power of purse – we’re going to approve this or not approve that based on things.
There’s a lot that we really need to think about as a community about the balance of power between our executive and our legislative – and by the legislative, I very much view the school committee as a parallel city council for running the schools. In the area of the schools, you do basically what we would be doing for the rest of the city.”
Public Comment – City Council Meeting
October 16, 2025
“Like those contesting most seats this year, I am running because this body has failed to serve the people of Northampton as an independent representative branch of government. With brave exceptions, you have failed to put the people of Northampton ahead of controversial agendas.
You have failed to understand the impact of your votes on your constituents.
You have allowed the mayor to understaff our schools and essential services. And you have done so while leaving recurring revenues on the table, resulting in large surpluses year after year. Surpluses which you treat with mock surprise, one-time money which can only be used on a project, when it was actually recurring revenue we could have used for people.
In the previous term, you paid Eric Suher $3 million for an unusable church. You endorsed and continue charging headlong into a dangerous, impractical, user hostile, and unwanted do-over of Main Street. On November 4th, the people of Northampton will go to the polls. But this year, they will decide their votes not just on the candidates as individuals. This year, our election is a referendum. A referendum on the priorities of our City, on what sort of community we choose to be.
Will we be a City which prioritizes its people, a City which prioritizes its seniors and its children? Or will we elect a government which ignores the consequences for people and lines up instead to serve the agendas of profit-driven developers and originally well-meaning but factually ignorant, extremists?
Will we be a City which ties itself into knots, pursuing a doomed quest to remake ourselves in pale limitation of Cambridge or New York? Or will we be a City which elects a government that works for its people and enables Hamp to be the best version of itself?”
Northampton Open Media – Candidate Statement
October 8, 2025
“My name is Chris Stratton and I am running to represent Ward 6 in city council. I have chosen to enter this race because I have been disappointed that our council often operates as little more than an approval body for the mayoral agenda. Our current council has failed to serve the people of Northampton as a truly independent and counterbalancing branch of government, one which must do its own research and form its own conclusions.
Although I will be new to government service, my career has been a lifelong exercise in curiosity. I enjoy learning about complex topics and finding solutions to deeply rooted problems, especially those which have fallen into the gaps between people and departments or between assumptions and facts.
Northampton’s current government has developed a habit of focusing on signature agenda projects to the neglect of our schools and our basic city services. Most of what the people of Northampton need from our government consists of the boring everyday things. needs like roads, fully funded schools, plow truck drivers, and controlling the taxes and fees we pay for them. If a mayor wants to spend 5% of their time doing something fun and visionary, there can be a role for that. but only so long as the basics are not neglected, and only when the changes they would bring are carefully considered rather than those which upend lives with casual disregard or freely spend our hard-earned money on ideas unlikely to yield the claimed results. 5 years ago, I moved to Northampton to reconnect with family during a challenging and uncertain time in history. a time when family bonds and the opportunity to be present in the lives of my niece and nephew felt especially important and I have loved what I found here.
Far from seeking to change Northampton, my desire is to enable Hamp to be the best version of what it already is. I grew up and attended public schools in a small town a half days bike ride south of here. I moved to Cambridge to attend MIT and spent a decade in that area. Then I tried life in New York City. I know firsthand how fundamentally and permanently those communities differ from ours. While I enjoyed aspects of life there at the time, I value what we have here now, and I do not seek to change it.
For the practically minded people of Ward 6, the problems with the proposed downtown project are many and obvious. Far from the misleading claims of marketing tidbits, which continue to present no solution for snow, the truth of our concerns is evident in the engineering reports of the project itself. Most downtown bicycle crashes and both of our tragic deaths there have resulted from surprise between bicyclists and drivers. Yet, the designers ignored the leading risks they documented and instead obeyed a political charge to create a painfully disruptive design, one which adds rather than removes causes of surprise.
Far from ripping up downtown, safety requires we do simple and sensible things to clarify it for all users. These would be standard and non-disruptive things already used elsewhere in our community. Paint the lane lines. Raise the crosswalks to emphasize them. Add curb extensions so that the crosswalks span only the travel lanes and not also the angle parking, and then fulfill our long neglected obligations to those with wheelchairs and walkers by rebuilding damaged and unworkable stretches of sidewalk. Many bicyclists will prefer to take advantage of the flat grade and comparative quiet of the adjacent rail trail. But when I ride my bike directly to and from locations on Main Street, the actual challenges are the narrow and curving hills of Berts Pitt Road.
Keeping the present width and multiple traffic lanes of Main Street not only serves the majority who drive, it allows those of us who bike to ride visibly and predictably, centering ourselves within a car- sized buffer of safety space. As our city navigates the challenges to come, I seek to represent you as a counselor who will take time to understand each issue and its impact on your life before I cast a vote on it. I will prioritize funding our schools and city services over grand projects. And I will cross-check budget and financial models to make sure that the revenues of our local economy are best applied to the services we need so that we can fulfill our obligations to our people without raising taxes. “
