Cambridge Tightens Purse Strings, Considers Cutting Community Programs for Fiscal Year 2027

Cambridge leaders said they are preparing to make city-wide budget cuts to brace for what they believe will be a multi-year economic slowdown in a “sobering” round table meeting with the City Council and School Committee on Monday.

The city’s budget concerns come as no surprise. The year has been marked by tense budget conversations, federal funding uncertainty, and the slowest budget growth the city has seen in a decade.

But now, city officials are coming to terms with an economic downturn that is going beyond Fiscal Year 2026, affecting Cambridge’s budget for years to come.

“We can’t reiterate enough that we believe that we’re experiencing a multi-year economic slowdown,” Claire Spinner, assistant city manager for fiscal affairs and public investments, said at Monday’s meeting. “These negative trends really have serious implications for the city's financial health — including the erosion of our excess levy capacity, as well as increasing burden on the city’s taxpayers.”

Spinner specifically cited three negative trends that will harm the city’s financial health: the declining non-property tax revenues, the decreasing total amount of property taxes available in the city, and the shift of the tax burden from commercial to residential properties. These three factors mean that the city has less money in next year’s budget to fund programs — and that leaders may have to cut community benefit programs.

“If the conversation turns to cutting programs, programs or people, there are people in the community that depend on those programs,” Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern said. “Anytime you’re talking about stopping a program, it’s hard, right?”

“We have not been in a position where we've had to have that conversation in quite some time,” he added.

Taha Jennings, the city’s budget director, said the city is being “very careful” about how to approach potential cuts to programs and personnel, agreeing with McGovern that it would be an unprecedented step.

“It’s a real difference from — as the vice mayor said — for as long as I can remember, really approaching a budget process like this,” Jennings said.

Cambridge hopes to save $12 million in Fiscal Year 2027, and leaders are looking to make minimal cuts across departments. City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 has asked each of the city’s departments to identify 2.1 percent in savings from consulting contracts, overtime, and temporary salaries. The city manager has already begun the process, temporarily suspending out-of-state travel through at least the end of the fiscal year.

But even with these austerity measures, Spinner said that the city may still have to cut programs because of the decreasing total property tax values.

“It is a really significant contributor to both our financial health and stability, and also our ability to invest in important initiatives in certain years,” Spinner said. “Our healthy excess levy capacity has allowed us to invest more in affordable housing, to create the Community Safety Department, to fund our debt service for public investments, extended hours for the Cambridge Public Schools, and universal pre-K.”

But city officials agreed that the Cycling Safety Ordinance will be preserved, despite the funding cuts. The CSO, a plan to install 25 miles of separated bike lanes throughout the city by Nov. 1, 2026, became an even more prominent point in city debates after three cyclists died in Cambridge last year.

“We all understand the policy imperative to meet the deadlines that we’ve committed to in the CSO,” Huang said at Monday’s meeting. “One of the things that we will need to solve for is that we find less expensive ways to meet those goals and to build adequate, safe infrastructure that we feel very comfortable with.”

As Cambridge inches closer to the funding cliff, city officials have to calibrate to a new reality where their budget will not stretch as far as they would like.

“In Cambridge, we have been in a place where we’ve never had to think about, ‘How do we fund things?’” Mayor E. Denise Simmons said. “We just make it happen.”

“Those days, for however long this may be, are gone,” Simmons added.

— Staff writer Shawn A. Boehmer can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @ShawnBoehmer.

—Staff writer Dionise Guerra-Carrillo can be reached at [email protected].