Pittsfield's $226M Budget Mostly Personnel, Expenses, Debt ServiceBy Brittany Polito, iBerkshires Staff
06:14PM / Monday, May 26, 2025 | |
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Mayor Peter Marchetti said the $226 million fiscal year 2026 budget is mostly personnel, expenses, and debt services.
The total for city and school personnel is $110.6 million, health insurance is $33 million, the retirement contribution is $18 million, and debt service is $19.8 million. This represents $181.7 million, or 80 percent of the spending plan.
"So as we begin the conversation, we're talking about people, we're talking about benefits, and we're talking about debt service for the most part," he said to the City Council on Wednesday, the first day of hearings for the FY26 budget.
The proposed $226,246,942 budget is a nearly 4.8 percent increase from the previous year. It includes $86,450,361 for the school department, $11,202,345 for the department of public services, and $15,468,750 for the Pittsfield police.
Marchetti has also asked that $2 million in free cash be applied to offset the FY26 tax rate.
The city expects to raise about $118.8 million in property taxes, and the spending plan includes $19.2 million from water and sewer enterprise funds and $81.3 million in state aid ($68.4 million being Chapter 70 funds for schools).
At the beginning of the year, the mayor foresaw a potential 15 percent increase in the city's health insurance but fortunately, it wound up being around eight percent. During the Massachusetts Municipal Association Conference at the end of January, officials were told that the increase for MIIA/ Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is between 9 percent and 19 percent, with an average of 14.8 percent.
"We later learned that ours was a 10.9 percent increase, but after doing a really deeper dive and analyzing who is on what insurance plan, that increase is really only an 8.2 percent increase at a little over $2.5 million," Marchetti reported.
After years of deliberation, Pittsfield saw a new trash system with Casella Waste Systems in 2024 that uses 48-gallon toters for trash and recycling. The city was spending about $5.2 million on trash per year, and the new contract trims the budget by about $600,000 to $4.6 million.
"What I get to do today is stand here and say I was right," Marchetti said about the trash system approved during his first year in office.
"We pushed hard for a system for a purpose, and we have been able to see a $600,000 savings in our recycling and trash collection."
The mayor also touted the $27.5 million investment in roadwork throughout 2025 and 2026 that is funded by about $4 million in free cash, $3 million in Chapter 90 funds, $5.2 million in city capital, and $15 million in other state funds.
This includes an "aggressive timeline" of resurfacing neighborhood streets, preventative maintenance, a water main and resurfacing on King Street, West Street streetscape work, East Street streetscape work, and the resurfacing of Route 7.
"I did coffee with the mayor this morning at the senior center, and I said, ‘Well, I finally did it,'" Marchetti joked.
"I've heard all about the potholes and how we can't use our roads, and ‘Mayor, what are you gonna do about our potholes?' to ‘Mayor, when are you gonna stop all the construction in the city? Because I can't seem to get from point A to point B.'"
On Wednesday, the City Council preliminarily approved an $86 million spending plan for the Pittsfield Public Schools. On Thursday, it tackled departmental budgets for the mayor's office, RSVP, the Berkshire Athenaeum, the office of community development, the Pittsfield Municipal Airport, the department of DEI, human resources, the Council on Aging, the city clerk, veterans' services, and the Department of Cultural Development.
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