The city of Amesbury eliminated all foreign language classes at its middle school last year. Chelsea officials are debating whether the city can afford to keep staffing a fourth fire engine they bought less than two years ago. Boston Public Schools leaders are weighing cuts of up to 400 teachers and other staff.
Even as property taxes spike in many cities and towns, local officials across Massachusetts say they’re being forced to consider painful budget decisions — and asking voters to do the same — just so they can meet the rising costs of basic services. Without state intervention, they warn, the cuts will keep coming.
Local leaders are pleading with state lawmakers to make changes to what they say is a broken funding system. Among the asks: increases in local state aid and more flexibility in how they tax residents.
But the state has its own fiscal constraints, in part due to federal funding reductions and political pressure to ease Massachusetts’ high cost of living. That’s left municipal leaders’ proposals — and their budgets — facing an uncertain future.
Northampton Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra said she has already had to cut positions in schools and trim back public works services. It’s meant the city is slower to fill potholes and plow streets after snowstorms than residents would like, and has had to add back paraprofessional positions that it previously lost after increasing their numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sciarra said the school district has also struggled to keep up with rising special education costs and requests for additional staff in recent years. It’s all created tension in the community and in City Hall, where the City Council has not passed a budget the last two years.
“I’ve never seen it like this. I have never seen the frustration, the anger,” said Charlene Nardi, Northampton’s finance director. “We’re pulling all the levers, we’re doing [everything we can] to just plug the gaps, and it’s just never enough.”
The core problem is that the costs to maintain the same level of city services outpace the city’s ability to raise revenue, she said.
“I fear we’ve already passed the breaking point,” Sciarra said. “Something is really structurally wrong.”
In Massachusetts, state law significantly restricts municipalities’ abilities to impose new taxes and how much they can raise existing ones on cars, hotels, and restaurants. Another law, known as Proposition 2½, caps increases to the total amount municipalities collect in property taxes — which funds the majority of most cities and towns’ budgets — by 2.5 percent each year, with some exceptions.
But inflation has often run higher than 2.5 percent in recent years, and federal pandemic dollars have largely all been spent. Several local officials told the Globe that their health insurance costs alone are growing 8 to 12 percent a year.
All those factors together have created the “perfect storm” of historical financial pressures, according to the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Or, in the words of Melrose Mayor Jennifer Grigoraitis: ”It just fundamentally becomes a math problem.”
Municipalities can ask voters to approve a property tax increase beyond the 2.5 percent limit through what’s known as an override. But that can be time-consuming, expensive, and politically tricky.
After Melrose residents voted against an override in 2024, Grigoraitis said the city had to eliminate dozens of school and city jobs, end Sunday hours at the public library, and reduce funding for trash pickup and sidewalk and road repair. But after a year and a half of community meetings and an organized outreach campaign, voters approved a $13.5 million override in 2025, allowing the city to restore some, but not all, of those cuts.
Jill Batchelder, who has two daughters in Melrose Public Schools and supported both override votes, said the city did a much better job last year of explaining how it planned to spend the additional tax dollars.
“That was the problem before: Folks didn’t understand where it would go,” Batchelder said.
But John Todd, a 67-year-old retired Melrose resident, said he voted for the override in 2024 but against the one in 2025, because he was frustrated that the city came back asking residents for more funds rather than more forcefully advocating for more state aid.
“They need to take into account senior citizens, so that people can stay in their homes,” Todd said. “I shouldn’t have to sell my house after 40 years to pay my property tax.”
Those concerns likely also contributed to why Amesbury residents voted against an override last fall, Mayor Kassandra Gove said.
“It was really an affordability issue — people really cannot take on anymore,” Gove said. Now she’s preparing to cut dozens of teaching positions and potentially implement parking and trash fees.
Communities such as Arlington and Malden also have overrides on the ballot this month, and will face “devastating” budget cuts if they don’t pass, officials told the Globe.
Even if Malden voters approve either one of two proposed overrides, one at $5.2 million or another at $8.2 million, “it’ll just put the pain off a little bit,” said Ron Hogan, Malden’s chief strategy officer.
In Chelsea, city manager Fidel Maltez said override votes are “not an option.” The city of roughly 40,000 people has a median family income of $75,000 — compared with $132,000 statewide — and nearly half of residents are immigrants.
”Our residents are struggling to survive, so asking them to add on to their tax bill, even for essential services, is a nonstarter," Maltez said.
The Massachusetts Municipal Association released a report in December advocating for the state to dramatically increase unrestricted local aid; give local officials the option to raise excise taxes on meals, hotels, or cars; and changing Proposition 2½ , by either raising the limit or tying it to the Consumer Price Index, and allowing voters to approve gradual, multiyear overrides.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has been one of the most prominent local officials to call on the state to repeal Prop. 2½. And while all the municipal leaders the Globe spoke to agreed the law is outdated and in need of reform, they also argued the state needs to offer a suite of tools to municipalities.
There’s no “one-size-fits-all [solution], because what’ll work for Brockton is not what’s going to work for Wellesley,” said Troy Clarkson, Brockton’s chief financial officer.
But it’s unclear if state lawmakers will pursue any of the policy solutions municipalities are pushing.
Governor Maura Healey has twice pushed a bill that would allow cities and towns to raise excise taxes, but it’s received a chilly reception on Beacon Hill. The first-term Democrat also proposed increasing unrestricted state aid to local governments, though by a far smaller amount than the $351 million MMA called for in its report.
House budget chairman Aaron Michlewitz emphasized that state lawmakers are listening to municipalities’ budget concerns, and have increased aid for schools, special education, and transit projects, including through revenue raised by the state’s tax on its wealthiest residents. But even the increases to school aid have struggled to keep pace with inflation, and the North End Democrat said it’s unlikely lawmakers can address every ask.
“We are in for a difficult budget cycle,” Michlewitz said, noting that Massachusetts voters could also vote this November on a measure to slash the state income tax rate, which state officials say could sap billions of dollars from the state’s coffers. He also said “it would take some serious convincing” to get lawmakers to agree to any changes to Prop. 2½ .
“It has been a consistent checks and balances between the state and the municipalities,” Michlewitz said.
Niki Griswold can be reached at niki.griswold@globe.com. Follow her @nikigriswold.