It’s been an eventful year for news in Newton, for a bunch of reasons.

And that news has been driven by people, with the biggest names in the city creating the biggest headlines of the year. To be clear, this is not a list of good or bad, but rather a list of people who most shaped the news this year.

Here are five people who shaped Newton’s news in 2025.

City Council President Marc Laredo speaks to Nonantum residents outside City Hall to address a controversy over the removal of Italian flag-colored lines from Adams Street. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Marc Laredo

We can start with the most obvious. Laredo not only won the election to be Newton’s next mayor, he helped shape nearly every other race, too.

Laredo named a slate of endorsements for School Committee—which was experiencing a massive turnover—and later did the same with the City Council races. His School Committee picks in competitive contests (Linda Swain, Ben Schlesinger, Jonathan Greene and Victor Lee) all won handily, setting up what could be a very agreeable committee come January.

And on the City Council side, all but one Laredo pick sailed to victory. And it’s possible that if that Facebook controversy had not arisen, John Chaimanis would have won and completed Laredo’s council coup.

Starting next month, we’ll get to see what new Mayor Laredo does with these victorious coalitions.

Anna Nolin holds a press conference to talk about new initiatives in NPS on Sept. 10, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Anna Nolin

Superintendent Nolin has had a wild ride in Newton so far. She arrived in the middle of an intense contract dispute between the Newton Teachers Association and the School Committee that resulted in a two-week teacher strike. Her second year included another NPS budget crisis and an election in which every School Committee candidate was talking about how much they want to make her vision for the schools a reality.

That’s a lot of influence. And Nolin used that power in the spring after Mayor Fuller announced she would be allocating millions of dollars less than what Nolin had requested for NPS for Fiscal Year 2026, due to lower-than-hoped-for revenues.

But Nolin knew that the lower amount would mean deep cuts at a time when NPS was still recovering from the impacts of COVID-19 and the community was still reeling from the previous year’s strike. So she, along with School Committee Chair Chris Brezski, went on an advocacy tour across the villages, rallying families to the cause. And by May, she and Fuller had worked out a compromise that kept NPS services level and helped carry the schools to what will surely be another tough budgeting season

Nolin helped keep the schools in the public’s focus for months while she dug for savings where she could find them, and the district avoided a budgetary disaster as a result.

Newton Mayor Ruthanne Fuller delivers her eighth and final budget presentation on April 22, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Ruthanne Fuller

The mayor makes the list of headline grabbers of the year for a couple of reasons. The first is the above-mentioned budget battle. When revenues were looking lower than hoped for and health insurance costs came in higher than anticipated, Fuller had the uneasy task of letting the department heads know that allocations may be lower than they expected.

This included the schools. Fuller initially allocated a few million dollars less for NPS for FY2026 than Superintendent Nolin was asking for, and that sparked a budget crisis that extended for months and had the School Committee voting to approve a budget that wasn’t funded.

Fuller worked with Nolin on ways to cut costs and move money around, and in the end, the budget gap was closed.

Fuller also made news in June when the city water-blasted the red, white and green lines off Adams Street, angering the residents of that village who saw it as an attack on their Italian heritage three weeks before the St. Mary of Carmen Italian-American Festival.

Fuller defended the removal of the lines, saying that, while the timing was unfortunate, she’d had conversations with festival organizers in the months before about having yellow lines drawn down the middle of the street and having the red, white and green lines repainted next to the yellow lines. However, Nonantum residents pushed back and showed up to protest at City Hall.

Eventually, the neighbors painted the Italian-themed lines back on the street in time for the festival. But the battle brought to life the struggle of keeping tradition and heritage thriving in Newton in the face of modern-era policy and change.

Fuller also made headlines with the new Newton Centre Plaza, a gathering spot set up over part of the Langley Parking Lot next to the Newton Centre Green. The plaza was met with pushback over parking, but once it went up in June, it became an instant popular hangout. The Traffic Council recently voted to keep the plaza up through next year. Councilor Tarik Lucas is appealing that decision.

And the end of the year brought a celebration of The Cooper Center for Active Living, hosted by Fuller to mark the end of an eight-year process that brought her promise to reality.

Fuller kept the big news churning all year, for better or worse depending on your perspective, as she finished out her time in City Hall.

Newton resident Fran Yerardi speaks at a Newton Teachers Association press conference after NTA members refuse to enter the room. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Fran Yerardi

When the election season started to take shape, Fran Yerardi—an outspoken resident who took over a teacher union press conference during the teacher strike—went to work on a messaging campaign via Kids First Newton.

Kids First Newton was a mysterious local political action committee launched in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic by parents who wanted remote learning to end sooner than it did. And Yerardi, operator of the PAC, spent much of this year sending emails, making robocalls and running Facebook ads during this year’s local election cycle, attacking School Committee candidates who have been endorsed by the Newton Teachers Association.

Yerardi also stayed on top of the Nonantum street lines controversy, sending out (via another PAC, Newton Needs Change) several updates a day as that strange episode in Nonantum’s history unfolded.

Yerardi’s political operating and in-your-face delivery of messaging had him shaping headlines all year on a number of fronts, to the point that it’s surprising he didn’t run for mayor himself.

City Council candidate John Chaimanis hosted a booth at Newton’s 50th Harvest Fair on October 19, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

John Chaimanis

Chaimanis, who ran for one of the Ward 4 at-large council seats this year, probably didn’t want to be as newsworthy as he turned out to be.

After some Facebook comments he made in 2024 came to light regarding concern over transgender athletes using school locker rooms, Chaimanis explained that he had been posting as a concerned parent with questions about safety. Others saw it as an attack on the city’s transgender community.

People showed up at campaign events and confronted city councilors who had endorsed him. Others defended him and accused Chaimanis’ detractors of using a year-old social media post for political ammunition.

Chaimanis lost his bid for a City Council seat, but the city learned a lesson on the impacts of social media on local campaigns.

Left to right: Samuel Fishman, City Councilor Andrea Kelley, Peter Klapes, Alex Klapes and (seated) Jeremy Freudberg talk to crowds about repealing the city’s winter parking ban at Waban’s Village Day 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Jeremy Freudberg and Peter Klapes

These law students made the city think about the way it handles parking when they got a question on the local ballot this year asking voters whether or not they wanted to ditch the winter overnight parking ban.

That ban was first passed in 1936, and Freudberg and Klapes felt it was time to scrap it. So, the young men gathered more than 10,000 signatures and set the city on a debate over parking policy that had the whole community invested. Two city councilors even proposed a compromise, seeing how the ban repeal was gaining popularity.

The voters ended up keeping the ban, but by a very slim margin. And the City Council is set to work on a compromise parking ban next year, so the law students accomplished change after all.