Last year’s election saw significant turnover on the City Council following the retirement of four of its members, with new council members taking office in Wards 3, 4, 6 and 7.

Now, as the council moves into 2025 and deals with problems unforeseen at the time of the election, such as the school budget deficit, the councilmen are getting used to rolling with the punches they’ve been dealt.

“There was no honeymoon period – we just jumped into the deep end and started treading water,” said Ward 6 Councilman William Muto, one of the freshmen. “But I believe we have a great team here on the City Council.”

Muto, alongside Bryan Nappa in Ward 3, Salvatore DeLuise in Ward 4 and Jack Kirby in Ward 7, is one of the council’s newcomers. He said that so far, the four have worked well together and have brought new viewpoints to council issues.

In the first two months of the year, the council held two special meetings, both related to Warwick Public Schools’ deficit, which was discovered in December. Other major issues, such as approving contracts, have made the council’s regular meetings quite busy as well.

“We’ve had a lot of big crises thrown at us early on,” Nappa said. “What’s been important is taking it one step at a time, one day at a time, and just tackling the problem as you can and not trying to catastrophize the whole issue at once. You just chip away what’s manageable and you lean on your other councilmen and try to get through that together.”

Nappa, a lawyer, said his experience in that field has been crucial to him as he adjusts to city government.

“From my experiences growing up – going through school, working full-time while I was in law school – you learn there’s a lot of balls in the air at the same time a lot of the time in my world,” Nappa said. “So I’ve kind of taken these tools that I’ve learned throughout my life before I got on the council and translated it over.”

Muto said he and Nappa have come to trust each other on the council. In order to better address the school budget issue, the two have taken up different tasks to go in-depth on and report their findings to each other.

“[Nappa] and I have sort of split duties,” Muto said. “I’ve been focusing on the school’s operations and fixes, and he’s been doing a lot of the legwork on the building commissions. Because we’ve realized that we can’t do everything as deeply as we would like to, we’ve sort of picked our own little specialties, and we do our homework and exchange notes and things of that nature. We trust each other.”

To learn the role, Nappa said, the council members have built up a camaraderie, saying that the skill sets of each council member have meshed well and created a good dynamic.

Muto and Nappa agreed that the five returning council members – Anthony Sinapi, William Foley, Jeremy Rix, Ed Ladouceur and Vincent Gebhart – have been a major help to them.

“The senior members of the council have been really great with all of the younger members as far as kind of bringing us under their wings and making sure that we understand process and catch up on the learning curve as fast as possible,” Nappa said. “They’ve made themselves readily available to mentor us or bounce ideas off of – to help us get to a point where we know what to do.”

As the councilmen continue to get used to life in local government, some of their top priorities, such as improvements at the Mickey Stevens complex for Nappa and City Park for Muto, have had to take a back seat. As the year goes on and they gain more experience, though, they’re hoping to focus more on their priorities.

“Dealing with the past and present has made it a little tougher to focus on the future,” Muto said.

Muto and Nappa said that despite the challenges, they’re glad that they decided to run for City Council and feel as though they’re getting better and better at their new job.

“It’s been a lot busier than I would have expected it to be, but overall, I’ve been having a good time,” Muto said. “The first two months, it felt a little chaotic, but for me, I’m starting to get into a rhythm.”