NEWS ANALYSIS

Newton’s election 2025 will go down as a history maker. Not only are several city councilors not running for reelection, this is also the first time there’s been a near-total exodus of the School Committee at the same time there’s an open mayoral seat.

The 2025 local election cycle has been a strange one, from a notably small mayoral candidate field to a political action committee targeting union-backed School Committee candidates.

But Newton’s current electoral drama didn’t come out of a vacuum. The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting inflation crisis created insurmountable fiscal obstacles, and the MBTA Communities Act escalated a debate over housing development that ripped the city in half while teachers prepared to go on strike. And all of that has created a perfect storm that has a city on edge and a mayoral candidate at an advantage.

How did we get here?

COVID-19, empty schools and the housing crisis

In 2020, communities worldwide were frozen in place by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Newton’s schools were closed for 18 months.

Families suffered. Parents wrung their hands. And a new political group Kids First Newton was created to take on what many were calling government overreach and ineptitude,

While School Committee Chair Chris Brezski doesn’t think the school district’s current problems started with COVID-19 lockdowns, he does think the pandemic laid bare the inefficiencies in the district and credits the chaos with his decision to run for School Committee in 2021.

“There’s zero percent chance I would have done any of this, except for the fact that there was this huge exposed failing, and that that’s sort of forced my hand,” Brezski said. “I spent the better part of the year trying to get kids back in school and doing these petitions and organizing these doctors and doing all this stuff that the School Committee should have been doing, or the mayor should have been doing, or Health and Human Services should have been doing, or anyone should have been doing that wasn’t doing it.”

What followed the lockdown was record-breaking inflation that devastated municipal budgets nationwide, and Newton was not immune, even as the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) provided the city more than $60 million for various purposes.

“And everybody was all raw nerves back then,” Ward 8 At-Large City Councilor Rick Lipof, who’s served in city government for 24 years, recalled.

In 2023, with the city’s finances still in a bit of chaos as inflation sent costs into the stratosphere, Mayor Ruthanne Fuller requested three Proposition 2 ½ overrides to pay for school building projects and supplement the city’s operating budgets. The school construction overrides passed, but the voters rejected one for more than $9 million to fill budget gaps.

That meant less money than hoped for to fund the city and school budgets the next year and beyond, at a time when the mayor and School Committee were negotiating a new contract with the Newton Teachers Association.

Meanwhile, the city and the region were facing a housing supply shortage that was only getting worse.

At a Charles River Chamber event last year, Massachusetts Housing Secretary Edward Augustus said the current housing shortage stems from the Great Recession of 2008 to 2012, when banks were reluctant to give credit and developers were hardly building anything. By the time construction picked up again, people had become used to not seeing construction, so more opposition to development arose everywhere especially in eastern Massachusetts.

The state has not caught up with that gap in supply or with the rise in demand, keeping older empty-nesters from downsizing to condos and keeping young people from putting down roots.

In 2021, Gov. Charlie Baker signed the MBTA Communities Act into law, requiring cities and towns with  MBTA stops to rezone the neighborhoods around those MBTA stops for more housing units by-right (without a special permit).

Municipalities had until Dec. 31, 2023, to rezone for compliance. Meanwhile, the Zoning and Planning Committee was crafting a plan—the Village Center Overlay District—to bring more people and businesses to Newton’s village centers and provide new life to businesses already in them while adding to the city’s housing stock.

The state gave each community a number of new housing units they had to rezone for (compliance numbers only, not representing actual construction plans). And with that, the VCOD became the focus of a citywide fight. On one side, people who opposed higher-density housing development insisted the city only rezone for the number of units mandated by the MBTA Communities Act. On the other side, supporters of rezoning the village centers for higher-density housing wanted a robust rezoning that went beyond state law compliance.

“We were ahead of everybody else,” Lipof, who supported rezoning the village centers, said. “The  VCOD was our community trying to renew our zoning code, that hadn’t been touched since 1953, for major overhauls. And out of that, unfortunately, came the first real polarization of this community, and it was done unnecessarily.”

People took to opposing sides of the line drawn in the sand, as groups were battling for what they perceived to be the soul of the city. And talk of where in the city high-density housing makes sense and where it doesn’t took a backseat to mudslinging and tribalism.

“The conversation of reasonableness never got there, because it is so much easier to engage and get people on your side when you dish them fear,” Lipof said.

Newton Teachers Association President Mike Zilles speaks to a crowd of supporters after the NTA voted to go on strike. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Winter of discontent

The Village Center Overlay District plan was crafted, debated, redone, debated again, reduced to half the village centers, debated again, and eventually approved  by the City Council in December 2023.

By the time that approval came, several city councilors who had supported the VCOD proposal had lost their seats in that November’s election, after a campaign focused almost entirely on the VCOD and housing development.

The division that came with the VCOD was nothing compared to what was on the horizon with the Newton Public Schools later that winter.

In December 2023 and January 2024, new School Committee Chair Chris Brezski met with parents and other members of the community to talk about the NPS contract negotiation, which had escalated into a public battle with the school committee and mayor on one side and the Newton Teachers Association on the other.

But by the time Brezski took over as chair, negotiations had crumbled and a teacher union strike was certain.

“When I was elected chair, one of my first orders of business was to call Mike [Zilles, NTA president] and figure out how we manage this thing,” Brezski recalled. “But it was, too far gone. There was no saving anything.”Efforts to calm the tension failed, and that month the NTA went on strike for two weeks. By the time the mayor, school committee and NTA reached a contract agreement on Feb. 2, immense damage had been done to the community’s trust in its institutions.

What was it like watching a train that’s already left the station barrel toward derailment and then managing the wreck? Exhausting and frustrating.

“I think I said during the strike, every day, up until the moment that phone call went out and said that school’s canceled for tomorrow, we were working on kids back at school that next day,” Brezski said. “And as soon as the phone call went out, you were working on the day after that, and then that’s just all you could do.”

The aftershocks

Earlier this year, another budget battle broke out, this time between Fuller and Superintendent Anna Nolin after Fuller allocated millions of dollars less for FY2026 than the amount Nolin insisted the schools needed just to stay at current levels of service.

The school committee took an unusual step and approved Nolin’s budget request rather than Fuller’s proposed allocation, and everyone headed to the bargaining table while parents once again wrung their hands and demanded a change in how the schools are funded.

And now, six out of eight school committee members have announced they’re not running for reelection. The mayor, who serves as the ninth member of the school committee, is also not running again. So the Newton School Committee is looking at a nearly 80 percent changeover in January, at a time when the president of the United States is planning to cut funding for Newton’s schools and the state isn’t likely to have enough money to offset the impact.

The stakes are high.

Brezski said his decision not to run for reelection had nothing to do with the budget turmoil or uncertainty of today.

“When I started this, I kind of had a conception that I probably wouldn’t do it for eight years,” Brezski said. School Committee work is much more involved now than in the past, and he has a full-time job and a family. “There was always a thought in my head of whatever I can’t get done in four years we’re not going to get done in eight.”

Newton City Councilor Marc Laredo prepares to vote on the Village Center Overlay District proposal on Dec. 4, 2023 after a slew of amendments scaled the plan down. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Laredo’s City Hall

The battles of the past couple of years show one glaring reality: Newtonians have lost trust in local institutions.

Many who opposed rezoning the village centers for higher density lost trust in their City Council for crafting and passing the VCOD. Many who supported the VCOD lost trust in the opponents of the VCOD who had predicted massive development spree that never materialized.

People who sided with the NTA during the 16-month contract negotiation and two-week strike lost trust in their mayor and school committee, while others who opposed the strike lost trust in the teachers’ union and the education system in general.

All of this may have helped propel Marc Laredo to his current position as Newton’s likely next mayor.

In December 2023, the City Council prepared for a new term, the candidates who defeated the city councilors who had supported the VCOD joined together and voted for Marc Laredo to be City Council president.

Laredo had endorsed them, and he was helping them with their campaigns, despite Laredo insisting he’s not against development and having voted for multiple large developments himself.

That set quite a stage for his mayoral run, which many had already speculated about for a while. When Mayor Ruthanne Fuller announced in late 2024 that she would not seek a third term as mayor, City Council President Marc Laredo had already been raising money for a 2025 mayoral run for months.

But Laredo was the only candidate—Al Cecchinelli would join the race later—in a city of nearly 90,000 people, which is rare.

The last time there was an open mayoral seat, with no incumbent, was in 2017. Setti Warren was running for governor, and there were a bunch of candidates: Fuller, Eli Katzoff, Richard Saunders, Geoffrey Woodward, Scott Lennon, Cecchinelli and Amy Sangiolo (who lost that race but was elected state representative last year).

Fuller won that race and ran for reelection in 2021, against challengers Cecchinelli and Sangiolo.

Now, Laredo has endorsed his own slate of candidates for City Council, candidates who have expressed hesitation toward housing development, despite Laredo insisting that he expects more housing and development. His candidates face people who advocate for more housing.

Laredo is also endorsing several candidates for school committee, and three of his endorsees are running against candidates endorsed by the Newton Teachers Association. It’s unprecedented for a mayoral candidate to name school committee endorsements.

Year of the slate

Laredo may be playing political chess or simply adapting to circumstances, or a combination of both. But one thing is clear: Newton stands at multiple forks in multiple roads.

On the City Council side, you have housing advocates like Garry Miller and Cyrus Dahmubed, who have campaigned on growing Newton’s housing supply, running against housing development skeptics like John Chaimanis, who questioned whether more housing is needed in Newton, and Lisa Gordon, who supports building affordable housing for seniors and low-income families but wants the city to slow down high-density development.

With the School Committee, we have three candidates who supported the teachers’ union during the 2024 strike and are endorsed by the union in this election—Jenna Miara, Mali Brodt and Jim Murphy—against a slate of non-union-endorsed candidates like Ben Schlesinger, Linda Swain, Jonathan Greene and Victor Lee. The NTA-backed candidates are pledging to prioritize fully funding Newton’s schools according to what staff and administration need, while the other candidates are calling for data-driven budgeting decisions, whatever those decisions may turn out to be.

And these opposing sides have help. Housing advocacy groups like Engine 6 have endorsed the more pro-housing City Council candidates. Kids First Newton has been running attack ads against the NTA-endorsed candidates. And sitting elected officials have released endorsement lists—which almost all contain the Laredo slate candidates or the non-Laredo-endorsed candidates—showing which side of the housing and school budget debates they’re on.

“These [School Committee] races are people who think fundamentally, very different things about the role the schools play in our kids lives, about what we’re supposed to be doing as an institution,” Brezski said. “Stark, fundamental differences in a way we probably haven’t seen ever, right?”

Lipof said he decided not to run again after 12 terms because he’s looking at other ways he can use his voice to better the city, and he’s not going anywhere. We’ll have to wait to see what that means. For now, he wants to see a vibe shift in the city’s government that allows civil discourse and discourages divisive behavior, regardless of who wins which City Council race this election.

“A change has got to happen, and it’s a switch that I don’t know can be flipped, but it has to,” Lipof said. “And we need to be, first and foremost, working for the best of what Newton is, and the only way we can do that is to do it together. I know that sounds kind of cheesy, a little Kumbaya, but the healing that needs to happen can only happen through leadership, and the City Council needs to show that leadership.”

It’s generally understood that the 2024 presidential election was a “vibe” election, focused more on feelings and instinct than policy and data, and Newton’s 2025 local election seems to be about vibes as well. In the end, it’s going to come down to trust. Who can get people’s trust in government back? Do voters trust the thousands of members of the teacher’s union or Marc Laredo more? Are more voters leaning more NIMBY or YIMBY when it comes to housing development?

We’ll get our answer on Nov. 4.