Easthampton Residents Deserve Accurate Information about the Budget Override

On June 9th, Easthampton residents will vote on a 20% tax increase to raise property taxes by $6.9M — about $1,200 per household. If the vote fails, the city faces steep cuts to schools, police, and the fire department.

I wanted to make an informed choice about the election, so I read the city’s budget proposal. Or, at least, I tried to.

The city has published two budget documents: one is the version that will go into effect if the override vote succeeds, and the other is the fallback plan if the vote fails. Each document is over a hundred pages long and contains roughly 800 table rows of data.

The problem is that the two budget documents are 98% identical. To understand the critical 2% where the budgets differ, readers have to compare them page by page, line by line to spot the differences.

So, I spent several hours analyzing the differences between the two plans, but the numbers didn’t add up. And not in a figurative, “Something doesn’t add up here,” sense, but in a literal, mathematical sense: the line items did not sum to the totals in the document. There were over $200k of discrepancies.

On May 8th, I sent an email to Easthampton Mayor Salem Derby to report the errors in the budget. After four days, I hadn’t received a response, so I raised the issue with the City Council. Hours later, Evan LeBeau, Mayor Derby’s assistant, replied to say that he had updated the budget the same day I emailed the mayor’s office but neglected to tell me.

The new budget documents fixed some of the issues I reported, ignored others, and introduced several new errors. Mr. LeBeau added several pages of tables with unlabeled rows, so the dollar figures on those page had no obvious meaning.

I reported the new errors to the mayor’s office on May 12th, and I still have not received a response. In the following weeks, I sent the mayor three more emails as I discovered additional errors in the budget, but I haven’t received any response beyond that single reply from his assistant.

On May 18th, Mayor Derby announced a Q&A session at City Hall the following Thursday. The press release promised that this session would “offer residents an opportunity to ask questions about the city’s proposed budget.”

I left work early to attend Mayor Derby’s Q&A session because, even beyond the errors, I had questions about the budget. For example, why does the override budget call for an $802k increase in a line item described only as “School related”? Why has Easthampton’s education department announced a 2027 budget that’s $1M higher than what the city’s budget allocated to schools? And why does the city’s proposed budget assume that the city’s other revenue sources will fall by $1.1M if the budget override succeeds?

I never got to ask my questions at the Q&A session; none of the attendees did. Mayor Derby spent most of the meeting presenting his view of the budget crisis. He answered some questions his assistant had pre-screened from online submissions, but he cut the meeting short without even addressing all of the online questions. He invited attendees to ask more questions via email.

Mayor Derby’s invitation rang hollow to me, as I’ve sent him five emails about errors in the budget plan, and he hasn’t responded to any of them. When he was running for office, Mayor Derby told voters, “I get the mayor emails. And when I get an email, I read it, and I respond to it. And I think that’s really important,” adding, “I should be accountable to the people that I’m serving.”

I voted for Mayor Derby, and I’m disappointed by his lack of accountability and engagement with the public around this important vote. I’m especially alarmed at the casual indifference Mayor Derby has exhibited toward serious errors in the budget.

I’m not telling Easthampton residents to vote no on the override; I’m asking residents to hold our officials to a high standard. Supporting our community means more than just giving money to the mayor when he asks. Good citizenship means demanding transparency in municipal spending and decision-making.

I encourage Easthampton voters to ask Mayor Derby to publish a clear, accurate comparison of the two budget plans that explains every major difference between them. This election will have lasting consequences regardless of the outcome, and our community deserves the information we need to make an informed choice.