NORTHAMPTON — City councilors questioned police, fire and emergency management leaders about staffing and response times as they reviewed Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra’s proposed $152.5 million fiscal year 2027 budget during the second of two public hearings on Tuesday.

The city’s proposed budget for next fiscal year, which begins July 1, would raise city spending by 4.63% over the current year. An initial round of budget hearings took place last week, when leaders for the school system, the Information Technology Services Department and the Health and Human Services Department came before councilors.

On Tuesday, councilors questioned leaders from the Police, Fire, Central Services, Public Works, and Climate Action and Project Administration departments. The council was expected to take a final vote on the budget during its second reading Thursday night.

The Fire Department is expected to see a $479,352 increase in its budget, a funding bump that Fire Chief Andrew Pelis said in his presentation was largely driven by personnel costs, as the department hired eight new firefighters.

Presenting statistics on the Fire Department’s response times, Pelis explained that the increased staff has allowed the department to bolster its medical response. He noted that in 2025, roughly three-quarters of the 9,240 calls for service that the department received were for a medical responses.

“These positions were added specifically to address increasing call volume, improve staffing reliability, reduce operational strain on existing personnel and maintain a safe and effective emergency response capabilities throughout the city,” Pelis said. “Those additional personnel have already made a measurable operational impact. They have allowed us to consistently staff an additional ambulance prior to these staffing increases.”

Pelis went on to explain that the proposed budget does not represent an expansion of fire services “beyond what has already been implemented,” but rather, helps the department maintain its staff, meet operational demands safely and train firefighters to maintain certification and comply with state and national standards as they respond to “increasingly complex emergency situations.”

Following Pelis’ budget presentation, councilors primarily asked the chief about how Northampton Fire’s Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is being used and the details of the city’s mutual aid agreements with neighboring communities.

In response to Council Vice President Deborah Klemer asking about the distinction between medical and fire response calls to the Fire Department, Pelis explained that some of the department’s medical calls for service include a dual response, in which ambulances and fire trucks both arrive.

Without a private ambulance company operating in Northampton, Pelis added, the Fire Department is responsible for all of the city’s medical calls.

Ward 1 Councilor Gwenevra Nabad asked Pelis how neighboring communities’ cutting their fire department funding impacts Northampton Fire, to which the chief responded that neighboring departments’ cuts place more burden on Northampton’s role in mutual aid response.

“It certainly has the potential to impact our call volume, as far as mutual aid goes. We have mutual aid agreements with local or area departments that we agree that if they’re busy, we will come to them, and when we’re busy, they come to us,” Pelis said. “The reality is, if they’re cutting and they’re reducing their staffing, they’re not going to be able to handle as much of the call volume as they are now, and that could potentially increase our workload.”

Ward 6 Councilor Christopher Stratton asked if he had noticed an imbalance between Northampton’s response to other communities and other communities’ mutual aid response to Northampton, to which Pelis responded that there is an imbalance.

Sciarra noted that mutual aid levels shift over time, noting that while Northampton might carry more of a mutual response burden now, other departments did the same for Northampton in previous years.

“Mutual aid is also something that sort of ebbs and flows, so yes, this is something that we talk about all the time, but there was a period of time when we didn’t have our ladder truck, where we were relying on other communities that had ladder trucks,” Sciarra said. “We want to make sure there isn’t an imbalance, but I think you have to expand your view even farther, because there are certain situations where we really needed to rely on other communities as well.”

Police Chief John Cartledge’s presentation included an overview of the department’s activities over the last year, including responding to more than 30,216 calls for service, 346 “stacked” calls, in which the department lacked sufficient staff, resulting in a delayed response, 605 arrests and 918 mental health calls — 308 of which featured a co-response from mental health professionals.

Councilors’ questions about the police budget largely centered around its student officer program, which allows the department to pre-hire and train officers before they are sent to the police academy. Cartledge equated student officers to interns, explaining that by stationing student cops at the department’s front desk, for instance, the department can free up full-time officers who would otherwise need to hold the position.

“If I hire you as a student officer, you’re going to be going to the academy next year. You can be trained on the desk, and if you go to this traffic course and be trained, you can then work traffic details until you become a police officer,” Cartledge explained. “It’s really a good way for us to recruit people.”

Staff retention also became a topic of conversation among councilors as they questioned Cartledge, who reported that staff retention and officer morale are up and that Northampton officers are no longer being “poached” by nearby departments to the same extent that they were in the past.

Cartledge added that in 2020, when the Police Department lost five officer positions after City Council voted to cut its budget by 10%, 10 additional officers resigned.

“We never were able to poach [in the past], because the police didn’t get paid enough … now the contract, in my opinion, has been getting a lot better for the patrol officers, and we have been able to poach,” Cartledge said. “I feel like with the morale of the department right now, people don’t want to leave, and we have a good way of recruiting through word-of-mouth recruiting, but it’s still tough.”

The Police Department is expected to receive a $251,299 budget increase in the next fiscal year — an approximately 3.5% increase.