The City Council met on Thursday to go over the mayor’s FY2026 budget and vote to approve or reject allocations to various departments as well as offer resolutions to send to the mayor regarding the budget.

While many councilors abstained from voting on most items because of the ongoing NPS budget crisis, no one abstained from the Police Department budget. But one councilor gave a flat-out “no” to that department’s budget request.

Councilor Bill Humphrey noted that the resolutions to cut funding from city departments to help fill a multi-million-dollar NPS budget gap didn’t include the police and fire department budgets and that, as he’s said in years past, he doesn’t think the police and fire departments need to be as big as they are in Newton.

“If we’re talking about spreading around the cuts that some people would like to see in order to fund NPS, these two departments were left out of that budget resolution, and that’s a political decision, in my opinion, more than it is a fiscal decision or a fairness decision,” Humphrey said.

Humphrey’s comments were met with strong pushback from other councilors, including Council President Marc Laredo.

“I’m actually concerned that we are having difficulty filling positions in the Police Department. We are understaffed. I think that’s a concern,” Laredo said.

He noted that even though the city has settled a patrolmen’s contract, there are other police contracts that have expired and he wants to get those settled quickly.

“I also think that given everything that’s going on in our world these days, public safety officials and officers have a particularly difficult task ahead of them,” he said.

There are nine police positions unfilled at the moment. But unfilled police jobs don’t always save the city money. Since there has to be a certain number of officers on duty at given times relative to the city’s population, any vacant roles are often filled with overtime pay.

Councilor Becky Grossman took issue with Humphrey saying the choice to leave public safety off the chopping block in the NPS resolutions (which Grossman helped write) as being political.

“For me, it’s a values statement,” Grossman said. “I think that, as a local government and a municipal government, there are certain things that we bear the responsibility for, for our community: Education and health and safety. Those are the top for me.”

Health and Human Services was also left off the suggested areas to cut for an NPS resolution.

Councilor Andreae Downs, who abstained from most other budget item votes because she wants more money for the schools, said that a new police chief deserves the same support a new superintendent gets from the Council.

You can watch the entire meeting online.