Ahead of a preliminary election, four mayoral candidates in Northampton, Mass., talked problems and solutions at a forum – making their pitches to a packed community center before the field’s slimmed to two.
Hosted by the League of Women Voters and broadcast by Northampton Open Media, the event featured incumbent Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra, Dan Breindel, David Dombrowski and Jillian Duclos.
Questions ranged from how candidates would bolster the city’s business community to their reaction to recent protests at L3 Harris, a defense contractor operating in the city. But, weaving its way into several questions and answers, was the matter of school funding.
“We really need to go to parents and teachers and administrators and students and really understand what the needs are and make sure that the way that we are funding schools is what schools actually need,” said Ducloss, answering a question on school funding.
The past two budget seasons have featured showdowns over funding for Northampton Public Schools. Advocates have called for level funding and the restoration of previously cut jobs, while the mayor has maintained the city needs to balance district demands with lagging state funding, an issue faced by districts across the region.
“Schools are always scrounging - we just don't have enough funding for public schools anywhere in this country. It's not the priority of the federal government. In many states, it's far less a priority of the state government,” said Sciarra, who added that NPS funding has increased by as much as 32 percent since FY22. “Thankfully, our state, I think, does prioritize [funding], but I've already outlined all the ways that it's letting us down, as well.”
Dombrowski stressed the city’s responsibility to fund schools adequately, whereas Dan Breindel seized on the $2 million gap between what the school committee sought this year - $46.6 million - and Sciarra’s nearly $44 million NPS budget - a spending plan that featured programming cuts and open roles going unfilled, while avoiding sizable layoffs like last year' budget.
Breindel also called out the city acquiring the former First Baptist Church on Main Street in 2023, with plans to convert it into a “community resilience hub” that could serve as an emergency shelter and home to various city services.
“$3.2 million for a building that, at best, is valued at $1 [million] - there are memos from the planning director talking about walking through the building and how it's ready to move into - this is a building that you can't even get up because it doesn't have stairs and the doors are all boarded up,” the local artist and activist said. “We haven't been working on it, even during the Biden administration, which means that we are not serving our houseless population, which is about 200-250 people in this town that deserve us to take care of them, not to pander to.”
Speaking before Breindel, Sciarra noted the project’s largely been paid for via federal funding, as well as donations and cannabis community impact fees – the latter of which Breindel contends ought to have been used elsewhere, like school spending.
Dombrowski, a former Northampton police officer, questioned whether the building was needed given the programming that’s already in place in the city. Duclos touched on how local non-profits provide similar services, and whether city partnerships with them would be more viable.
Sciarra also stated more grant funding is needed to "get the building ready" - a situation, she said, not helped by the Trump administration cutting federal grant spending. She said such a facility remains “desperately needed” in the city.
The mayor said the same of affordable housing – touting 282 units the city has helped support the creation of. Dombrowski also emphasized affordability – touching on how he hopes to address rising real estate taxes, water and sewer bills and foster small business growth. Part of his solution – mixed-use developments.
“… building apartments and homes and commercial space and office space, as well as retail space … within those three communities - downtown, Florence and maybe, eventually Leeds," he said, when asked how he would encourage small business growth.
All candidates spoke on the state of Northampton’s downtown – Breindel called out the over-a-dozen empty storefronts he’s spotted, and said more investment is needed. Sciarra said the city’s vacant storefront program meant to incentivize businesses filling empty spots was seeing success.
Duclos, the former executive director of the Downtown Northampton Association, spoke of having a dedicated economic development director address the matter, as well as taxing property owners who seem to host empty spaces for long periods of time.
“Another thing that I have talked about is a vacant storefront tax, which has been implemented in other areas in which taxes if vacant storefronts are empty for a certain period of time, then the people who own those properties will be taxed, but that tax money goes into a fund to support resources for small businesses,” she explained. “But it is all cyclical, because once that landlord rents out that storefront, then the new business that moves in there has access to those resources and the money that they paid into that tax.”
Two of the candidates will ultimately end up on November’s ballot, after a preliminary election on Sept. 16 narrows down the field.
The entire mayoral portion of the forum can be found here.
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This piece originally aired on Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2025.
