NORTHAMPTON — For the 39th year, the city of Northampton will host its annual First Night celebration on New Year’s Eve, a 12-hour festival that culminates in raising a ball from the roof of Hotel Northampton to ring in the new year.

Twenty-eight different locations downtown will host events related to First Night. Events begin at noon at the Academy of Music, with a live performance by SHOW Circus Studio of Easthampton. Smith College will also host several events, such as the “Bugaboo Revue” puppet show and the A2Z Yo-Yo Team.

Other events around town include jugglers, magicians, dancers, puppets, a cappella voices, plus classical and contemporary music from solo to quintet, acoustic to electric. A firework display will be held at 6:15 p.m. to begin the evening events, which ends in the ball raising at Hotel Northampton, with top music hits emceed by Steve Sanderson of the WRSI radio station.

The purchase of a button gives people access to all of the First Night events, with separate buttons for children and adults, as well as a reduced price for seniors and a day-only pass. The city is still looking for event volunteers, who will receive a complimentary button allowing them free access to the event.

Public comment at council meetings

The Northampton City Council at its Tuesday meeting decided to table a measure that would have changed the rules regarding the city’s public comment, after some councilors expressed hesitancy over the changes.

The changes were initially discussed at a special council meeting, after the council’s Nov. 2 meeting was bombarded with racist and antisemitic remarks over Zoom by anonymous accounts. Proposed changes to the public comment rules include requiring Zoom participants to sign up beforehand in order to comment, and to allow councilors to address any comments made after the public comments session.

Despite some initial aspects of the changes being dropped, such as requiring participants to comment only on agenda items, some councilors still expressed skepticism regarding the precise language of the changes.

“We’re not seeing a repeated pattern of this behavior,” said Ward 5 councilor Alex Jarrett, who voted against the rule changes as a member of the Committee on Legislative Matters. “So I’m still pretty wary of limiting and thereby increasing the barriers to public participation.”

The council delayed a vote on the measure to give more attention and reworking, leaving the possibility of having a vote on after the New Year, when a new council is seated.

Prevent nuclear war

Councilors on Tuesday also unveiled a proposed resolution that would call on the United States federal government to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war.

The proposed resolution had been pushed by activists within the Northampton community for several months, and similar resolutions have been passed in other major cities, such as in Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. Concerns of nuclear attack have increased in recent years, with wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip raising alarm of potential widening conflicts.

The resolution calls for, among other things the “renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first” and “ending the sole, unchecked authority of any president to launch a nuclear attack.”

In August, several prominent medical journals issued an editorial calling on health professionals to alert the public and political leaders about the catastrophic effects a nuclear attack could have on the human species. Among the authors of the editorials was Dr. Ira Helfand, a Northampton resident who has served as a past president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and as a member of the international steering group for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

In a message delivered to the council on Tuesday, Helfand noted that a war between Russia and the United States, or even a more regional conflict between countries like India and Pakistan could result in more than a billion lives lost.

“Our federal government needs to acknowledge that nuclear weapons do not make us safe, but in fact the greatest threat to our safety and survival,” Helfand wrote. “And it needs to invite the other eight nuclear armed states to come together to negotiate a verifiable, time-bound plan to eliminate their arsenals.”

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.