There was an elephant in the room at Thursday night’s special City Council meeting: the unresolved Newton Public Schools budget.

The meeting, which will continue on Monday and possibly next Wednesday, was to discuss parts of the mayor’s FY2026 budget and vote on possible resolutions to send the mayor regarding various budget items.

At the start of the meeting, Councilor Becky Grossman said she would abstain from voting on the more than $1.2 million Mayor Ruthanne Fuller allocated for her own office, which was the first item up for discussion.

“I do not feel comfortable voting for this budget in full until I am confident that the school budget issues have been fully resolved,” Grossman said. “If we needed to consider reductions somewhere, this is a place personally that I would consider it.”

Others noted that they’d be abstaining for that reason, too.

Councilor Susan Albright then reminded the room early in the evening that there was a discussion and resolution planned related to NPS, but that would be later in the process. So, there was confusion about how to handle this standard annual budget process, given the uncertainty that awaits.

The resolutions

The first resolution—submitted by Grossman along with councilors John Oliver, Martha Bixby, Bill Humphrey, Stephen Farrell, Pam Wright, Julia Malakie, Alan Lobovits, Randy Block, and Rena Getz—calls for the mayor to adjust her allocation to match Nolin’s $296.3 million level services budget.

The resolution notes that, after factoring in free cash the Finance Committee approved recently for NPS, the NPS budget gets to $293.9 million, and the resolution instructs the mayor to make up the $2.44 million difference.

That resolution was passed Thursday night, with a vote of 22 in favor, none against and one abstention (Gentile).

The second resolution—authored by councilors Bixby, Albright, Farrell, Bixby, Tarik Lucas and Maria Greenberg—calls for $2.2 million in NPS non-emergency school facility projects requested from free cash to be postponed and for the money to be put into the Education Stabilization Fund, which is used to support the NPS budget.

That resolution passed, with a vote of 14 in favor and seven abstentions (Councilors Baker, Farrell, Gentile, Downs, Humphrey, Krintzman and Lipof).

The third and final resolution—submitted by councilors Oliver, Grossman and Albright—calls for the FY2026 city general operating budget be reduced by $844,023 and that money added to the NPS allocation to close the gap in the NPS budget, assuming the mayor and superintendent agree to find another $500,000 in more efficiencies. The other departments would be cut according to their proportion of the overall budget.

“We have started by saying let’s take another opportunity, another way to look at how we could close this gap, by taking a relatively small percentage—relatively small percentage, at least in most cases—from every other department, taking those pieces and putting them together and giving them to NPS in their operating budget,” Oliver explained.

This resolution was less popular than the other two. It failed to pass, with councilors Baker, Block, Gentile, Getz, Humphrey, Krintzman, Alison Leary, Lipof, Malakie, Lobovits and Laredo voting against it. Councilor Maria Greenberg abstained.

Getting to ‘Kumbaya’

Typically, when a portion of the budget is voted on, councilors can offer resolutions and amendments for cuts to any given item. But without knowing what’s going to happen with the NPS budget, councilors who want to offer cuts to one item to recommend that money be used for the schools cannot do that with any clarity.

“It’s a little bit on uncharted territory,” Councilor Leonard Gentile, who ran the meeting, said. “I’m actually thinking of how best to handle it as I sit here.”

Gentile said he’d heard that the School Committee and the mayor would have a compromise budget to vote on at next Monday’s School Committee meeting.

“And I asked that the resolution not be submitted until we knew what was happening on Monday night, because it could be peace and ‘Kumbaya’ and we wouldn’t have to get into this,” Gentile said.

But a few minutes before Thursday’s meeting, three school-related resolutions were submitted into the docket.

Downs suggested voting on the submitted resolutions before the rest of the budget, because the proposed resolutions for the schools could affect every other department’s budget.

So, the Council moved the resolutions up for a vote to get them out of the way.

“I think an understanding of what this council is prepared to do has the power to shape what other parties outside this room do, and that’s important,” Grossman said.

“My sense is that all of us are trying to make a very significant statement about our support for this superintendent’s ability to educate our kids in the manner that she, as the expert and professional that we hired to do this, sees best,” Farrell said.

Around half of the Council abstained from voting on the budget items before them Thursday night, except with the police and Police Department budgets, which had one vote against it but no abstentions.

You can watch the entire meeting online.

The City Council has until June 6 to pass or reject the mayor’s budget.