RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Politics: August 30, 2026

One of the reasons the history of Lowell is so fascinating is that you can take almost any issue of national importance and see how it played out in this city. Looking at a global issue in a local context makes it easier to relate to what was or is at stake.

For example, in the decades before the American Civil War, Lowell’s entire reason for existence was the production of cloth made from cotton harvested by enslaved people in the American south. Consequently, it was in the city’s economic interest to at least remain quiet about slavery in the United States. Yet Lowell also became a leader in the abolitionist movement. To read of the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act in a textbook is one thing; to hear how people who previously lived in your neighborhood struggled with the law enhances your understanding of it.

At this Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting, we caught a glimpse of this dynamic again at work. Two emerging flashpoints in American politics – data centers and the surveillance state – were both discussed by the council.

The topic of data centers arose in a Division of Planning and Development response to motions filed by Councilor Rita Mercier (in July) and Councilors Belinda Juran and Kim Scott (in March) asking for the status of zoning changes intended to regulate data centers.

According to the DPD response, the city commenced a comprehensive review of its entire zoning ordinance 13 months ago with the assistance of a consultant, Community Scale LLC, which had experience with data centers from earlier work with the city of Everett. A steering committee composed mostly of city employees and officials was created to oversee the process and has met several times. This fall there will be community outreach events, neighborhood group meetings, and an online comment form to gather community input. (The much-publicized June 29, 2026, meeting on data centers at the Butler School was part of this.) The city and its consultants are also reviewing how other communities have regulated data centers ranging from outright bans to detailed regulations that seek to limit adverse impacts.

Finally, DPD hopes to “develop two regulatory options for consideration by the City Council” and that these are expected to be initially presented to the council this October with final action coming by the end of January 2027.

On the surface, this discussion was noncontroversial, but I sense a disconnect of expectations. There has been a longstanding need to overhaul and update the city’s zoning code. That’s a big undertaking and it was likely difficult for DPD to get council backing to do it since it would require a lengthy, disciplined strategic commitment whereas the council tends to be reactionary and operates on a week-to-week basis. However, rising neighborhood animosity towards the big Markley data center triggered a council reaction. Hence council interest in changing the zoning to stop data center expansion. Following the management principle of “don’t let a crisis go to waste” it looks like DPD used the data center furor as a wedge to get the council to look comprehensively at zoning.

However, I’m not sure the council is interested in a comprehensive look at zoning but instead seeks patchwork solutions to whatever complaints constituents bring to them this week, be it data centers, ADUs, or something else.

Then the neighbors around the Markley facility who are plagued by noisy diesel generators and other quality of life issues, want their complaints remedied immediately which is something a zoning change would be hard pressed to do since new zoning rules typically don’t apply retroactively.

But opposition to data centers transcends the neighbors living around the existing facility. Across the United States, we’re seeing widespread voter opposition to data centers. You know that’s the case because politicians from both parties who once supported data centers have pivoted to radical opposition to them.

I think this opposition is only partly grounded in concerns about the data centers themselves. The harm they cause to the quality of life of those living around them; to the electrical grid; to the water supply; and to the environment, all are factors. However, a bigger concern is artificial intelligence itself, both as a technology that will take people’s jobs but more importantly perhaps as a mechanism to further enrich and empower the billionaire class that owns and controls them to the detriment of ordinary citizens everywhere. I suspect that concern exists among the citizens of Lowell and is growing.

At the start of this newsletter, I mentioned that the council addressed two issues of national importance with one being data centers. The other, which came to the council almost by accident, involves the surveillance state in the form of invasive security cameras.

Among the usual claims for property damage and requests for handicap parking signs on the Petitions section of the August 25, 2026, council agenda was a petition by a resident to “address City council regarding AI police state camera system discussion.”

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t watch council meetings live but catch the replay on YouTube the next day. One of the reasons I do that is so I can fast forward through citizen petitions which are either routine or present issues that don’t make much sense to me.

However, contrary to my past practice, I watched this entire segment and, more significantly, agreed with everything the petitioner had to say. The petitioner delivers his remarks at 2:30:40 of the YouTube transcript of the meeting, however, he also submitted his proposed remarks to the city clerk as his petition and is therefore online as part of the agenda packed, so I’ll quote some of what was written in that document:

I am here today to discuss the Al Flock cameras that have been installed all around Lowell. . .

. . . I am not necessarily against the use of police cameras in high crime areas. The Lowell police has been using them for a few decades now. You may have seen them in parking lots outside of stores with the flashing blue lights on them. These camera systems are called CCTVs, or “Closed Circuit Television”, meaning that the video is being recorded and saved on local hard drives stored in the Lowell police station. When footage is needed, they can log into the local server and pull video when needed. It’s exactly how security cameras work in a bank or a store.

These Al Flock cameras are different; they’re always on and always watching. These cameras have the power to recognize license plates, car models, faces, driving routines, clothing, ethnicity, etc. Anything that you can determine with your eyes, it can as well.

These cameras have the ability to take in all this information about you, track your every move, stalk you, and build a virtual profile of you, and store it on Big Brothers computer. What can these profiles be used for?

Flock is a private, multi-billion-dollar company whose systems collect and store footage in data centers (hence the rise in demand by tech companies to have these centers built in your area). Tech giants do not make all their money from selling hardware or subscription services. They make their money from storing and selling data.  . .

This is just the corporate business side of things. With Al and drone weapons, as well as government tyranny on the horizon, who knows what evil these cameras can lead to. . .

The petitioner ended by asking the council to (1) end the contract with Flock and remove all its cameras; and (2) let the people of Lowell decide if they want to be surveilled by a private company.

Flock Group Inc. which does business as Flock Safety, was founded in 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia. It is a privately held company that manufactures surveillance hardware and software. The company is valued at $7.5 billion, operates in 5,000 communities in 49 states and performs 20 billion scans of vehicles in the US each month. One of its primary initial funders was the billionaire Peter Thiel, who is co-founder of Palantir Technologies, a company that provides artificial intelligence and facial recognition systems to US security agencies and the military.

Flock has been much in the news lately and not in a good way. On August 28, 2026, the Lowell Sun reported that a Stow, Massachusetts, police officer resigned just before a disciplinary hearing in which he was accused of using the Flock Safety system multiple times “for no legitimate law enforcement reason.”

The same day, Wired magazine ran a story headline, “A Georgia Cop Used Flock to Track 2 Other Cops: His Ex and Her Friend.” The offending (now former) police officer used the Flock automatic license plate reader at least 56 times to track another officer with whom he had had an affair. He also used the system 29 times to track the vehicle of a third officer who was spending time with the former romantic partner. According to Wired, “. . . many [police] officers have instant access to Flock, a powerful, informative and invasive tool for tracking people’s locations. Across the country, there have been at least 45 documented incidents of police officers misusing Flock in order to look up or track current or former romantic partners.”

At Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting, after the petitioner spoke, councilors questioned Lowell Police Chief Greg Hudon who said that the Lowell Police Department has 25 Flock cameras around the city (and that DPD has Flock cameras intended to catch people illegally dumping). Chief Hudon said that the concerns expressed by the petitioner were well-founded, but the Lowell Police have procedures in place to limit Flock access to legitimate law enforcement purposes and an audit trail that helps ensure that’s the case. The Chief then emphasized how effective a crime-fighting tool these cameras are.

I think the Chief and most of the council were addressing concerns about rogue police officers tracking ex-spouses whereas the issue is much bigger than that. Councilor Juran understood the concern of the petitioner (and others, including me) when she said the problem was the aggregation of data collected by these cameras that would be used by others. She said that the use of the system by Lowell Police Officers was “the tip of the iceberg” and that Flock is using information collected by the cameras to identify people and potentially sharing that with others.

Chief Hudon replied that the Lowell Police have opted not to share data from the cameras, however, unless the system in Lowell is physically isolated from the Flock Company, the company and its technicians would still have access to the data notwithstanding any limits set by the Lowell user. With that access, who knows who else the data is being shared with.

Councilor Juran then moved to refer the matter to the public safety subcommittee for further discussion, but Mayor Gitschier suggested it might be best to hold that discussion in executive session since it might disclose strategies for fighting crime. The city solicitor said it would be more appropriate to do it in an executive session of the entire council rather than just the subcommittee, so that’s what is going to happen.

Councilor Juran’s concerns, like those of the petitioner, are well-founded and widely documented. For example, Wired has also reported that regulators in Illinois discovered last August that Flock had violated state law by running a now-paused pilot program that handed Customs and Border Protection access to cameras in the state. The magazine also reported that a police officer in Texas searched more than 83,000 Flock cameras across the country last year while searching for a woman who had a self-administered abortion.

The modern surveillance state has been with us for years now. If you search online for a new pair of sneakers, for the next 72 hours you are bombarded with ads for sneakers from every website and platform you visit. For the most part, it’s easy to dismiss this as the price we pay for internet access.

However, two things have combined to dial up the “I’m very concern about this” meter. First is the maturation and widespread deployment of artificial intelligence. Previously, there might be a lot of data about me floating around, but it would take someone a lot of time, effort and money to piece it together in a way that could be injurious to me. But AI changes everything. The super computers filling the data centers everyone is protesting can search, sort and combine billions of bytes of information in seconds and erase any expectation we have for privacy in our lives.

That those AI companies are owned by the same billionaires who crowded the front row in the U.S. Capitol rotunda on January 20, 2025, for President Trump’s inauguration only elevates those concerns. I’m fully convinced that the DOGE miscreants who burrowed into the Social Security Administration and Health & Human Services data bases walked away with digital copies of everyone’s financial and medical histories and also that that data is now being used in nefarious ways by the tech sector but also by a government that has shown its willingness to use every means available to punish its opponents and those whose race or gender don’t fit the regime’s narrowly defined norms. I’m sure Chief Hudon spoke in good faith when he said Lowell restricts outside access to the data collected by city surveillance cameras but believing that requires one to think the best of the AI companies and the billionaires who own them which is a leap of credibility that defies everything we’ve seen over the past 20 months. Since our elected representatives at the national level have been neutered (or worse) by the campaign cash flowing from these same billionaires, there is no hope for top-down protection from Congress. Consequently, it’s up to individuals in communities to speak out against this as part of a bottom-up effort to combat the growing authoritarianism we face. I’m not anti AI, but AI is just a tool that can be used for good or evil and right now, the balance is tipping the wrong way, so when it comes to data centers and surveillance cameras, I think the right path at the community level is to slam on the brakes.

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Tuesday’s council meeting lasted 3 hours and 30 minutes, so other issues were covered and discussed, but I’ll halt my council coverage right now.

There will be no council meeting this Tuesday, which is also the day of the state primary election. In next Sunday’s newsletter, I’ll report on the results of the voting.

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This week in Seen & Heard, I reviewed a great book that provided a British view of the American Revolution; reminisced about the glory days of local sports TV recounted in an article about Bob Lobel and Mike Lynch; reviewed the classic novel, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; and noted the obituary of Bill Rasmussen, a co-founder of ESPN.

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I’ll be leading several Lowell history tours in the coming weeks for anyone who is interested:

Saturday, September 12, 2026, at 10am – Walking tour of the Tyler Park Historic District. The tour is free with no registration required. Just meet at the park. This tour is part of the Friends of Tyler Park “Autumn Market.” (For GPS purposes, Tyler Park’s address is 748 Westford Street.)

Saturday, September 26 & Sunday, September 27, 2026, both at 10am – Walking tour of Lowell Cemetery. The tour takes 90 minutes and begins at the Lawrence Street entrance to the cemetery. It is free and requires no registration. The same tour is offered on both days.

Saturday, October 17, 2026 – “Secrets of Lowell Cemetery” tour which is part of the of the Poe in Lowell Festival. Edgar Allan Poe came to Lowell at least three times to lecture but also to spend time with a female friend who is buried in Lowell Cemetery. Learn their story and the stories of others involved in their orbit. This tour is free and begins at the Knapp Avenue entrance of the cemetery (77 Knapp Avenue).

‘Summertime Blues’ by Poet Bill O’Connell

Bill O’Connell is a past contributor to this blog. He is the author of the poetry collections When We Were All Still Alive and Sakonnet Point. His forthcoming book Tarifa Moon (Lost Valley Press) includes poems drawn from recent European travel along with family and neighborhood stories. He lives in central Massachusetts and is a graduate of U Mass Lowell.

Summertime Blues

by Bill O’Connell

There ain’t no cure

for the summertime blues

–Eddie Cochran

The eczema on my forearm migrates

from one arm to the other.

Stiff neck-chords shift

left to right nightly.

My body is fucking with me —

playing mind-games: guess

what will fail

next: one ear

half-deaf, sciatica

when I least expect it.

Then there’s the 24/7

news: trying to outwit

Trump with my

liberal mind — by the end of the day

I’m exhausted, put on

the Red Sox and hope on hope

a ball leaves the yard

with the crack of a bat

and soars above the light towers

and the crowd’s roar

into the dark-city nothing

between the Park

and the Mass Pike.

Some Economic Policy Ideas

Lowell resident Joe Smith, a longtime observer of city and national finances, shared the following with me. I’m posting it here with an invitation to readers to share their feedback on the comment section of the blog.

Some Economic Policy Ideas

By Joe Smith (with some help from AI)

I was experimenting with feeding some economic policy ideas to AI and ended up with a partial report.

Too many “economic growth” concepts are zero sum, where some win, others lose, with the winners usually the rich and connected.  Good example would be Trump’s bitcoin involvement, or his pay-to-play announcements.

One other issue I put to AI was the raise of full retirement age for Social Security pushed by Republicans.  Since life expectancy in the US is quite dependent on wealth (low 70s for the poor end, mid/upper 80s for the wealthy end), raising the full retirement age is a significantly higher percentage loss on lifetime collections at the poor end.  Conversely, removing the payroll tax cap hits the high end.

I think it comes down to developing economic policies with the following goals.

* reduce federal deficits

* reduce inflation

* reduce income disparity

* only reward true economic growth investments

I don’t feel the Democratic Party has done enough to formulate a coherent economic plan, and that will lessen their win opportunities this November, to our detriment.

The AI response to these prompts

Progressive Alternatives: Shifting the Burden to Revenue

By choosing your proposed revenue-raising options—eliminating the payroll tax cap and equalizing capital gains taxes—the government can completely eliminate the deficit without cutting benefits or lifting the retirement age.

The table below illustrates how these policies interact with inflation, the deficit, and life-expectancy equity:

A Supplemental Proposal

I then asked to add a policy whereby upon death, the step-up cost basis would be limited to a deceased’s remaining estate tax exemption, and any excess would be taxed in the year of death, whether sold or not.  AI estimated about a $200 billion 10-year deficit reduction (moderate), but a significant reduction in income inequality.

So, the collective recommendation is:

1) eliminate payroll tax cap

2) equalize capital gains and labor tax rates

3) limit step-up basis at death to remaining estate tax exemption, and force payment of taxes that year.

Most proposals for taxing are to provide other ways to spend it, and that does nothing to curb inflation.

Photo Fix

Photo Fix

By Leo Racicot

I’ve always liked taking photos. The idea that you can click a button and capture a person, a place forever (or at least for as long as the photo lasts, appealed to me from childhood. When, as a nine-year-old, I acquired a Brownie camera for a birthday gift, I took instant delight in its small, simple “point-and-shoot” capability. Of course, the pictures I took with it were seldom any good. The only shot I like was taken not by me but of me, by my friend, Anthony Kalil. as we were walking up Cross Street towards his home. When, a couple of years later, one of our scoutmasters, Bill Riley, demonstrated how a camera can be fashioned by sticking a pinhole in a shoebox, I was hooked. Could there be a more amazing invention than a camera?

What became a lifelong passion for taking pictures might well have been inherited; while poking through old family scrapbooks and albums, I came across many photos our father had taken when he was serving overseas in India and Burma with the horse cavalry. Throughout his brief life, Papa loved horses (and not only horses but other four-legged equines like donkeys, burros, even zebras). I’ve written before how he kept horses in horse stables located just behind the houses here at the family homestead. Not that all his photos were of equines; he also liked taking photos of the family and of countryside vistas in his adopted Dracut. Since I didn’t know this before I began clicking shutters, my love for photographs can’t be a case if imprinting, more genetics-based, wouldn’t you say?

In about 1988, ’89, an intense friendship fell into irreparable ruin. My emotions became a tiny boat out in the middle of a dark ocean. I was devastated, depressed. Sylvia Contover, a library co-worker, seeing my distress, reminded me that, as full-time ULowell employees, we were entitled to take courses free of charge. She, in her 80s, was working toward her Masters and suggested I might do the same. My state of mind was in no shape to take on Masters’ level courses (that would come a couple of years later) but at that time, with the help of another co-worker, Marie Ann Drouin, I signed up for a Photography 101 class. Marie Ann decided it would be “fun and easy!”. Oh….brother…was she ever wrong.

The section I ended up in was being taught by renowned photographer, Arno Minkkinen. Minkkinen ran a tight ship. Suspecting that a lot of his students had chosen his course as an elective, perhaps an easy A, or like me, as a means of moonlighting through a bad spell, he set forth one of the most rigorous curriculums I had ever encountered. Every week, he chose, as our assignment, a theme. Students were to fill an entire roll of film with examples of this theme. He also gave lessons in the not-so-simple process of developing what we shot. There was a darkroom and we were responsible, on our own time, to develop our work, to be turned in for inspection at the next class meeting. Now remember, I was struggling with depression. Our first assignment was an interesting one; we were to approach total strangers on the street and ask if we could take their picture. I took to this task instantly. I’ve always been a timid guy, more so back then than now. But something happens to me when I set out to take photos. Something about being able to hide behind the camera banishes all shyness and I turn into Ron Galella (the bold photographer who haunted and harassed poor Jackie Kennedy for years). I had no problem walking up to people on the street, asking them if they’d mind posing for me. Of course, a lot of people didn’t want to but a lot did. I do remember one sightless fellow. I went up to him politely and said, “Would you mind if I take a quick picture of you?”   He said, “no” which I took to mean no, he didn’t mind. So, I aimed and took the picture. The second he heard the shutter click, he became enraged. What he’d meant when he said ‘no’ was, “No, you can’t take a picture.” Though he was blind, he started charging after me. Naturally, I ran and saw, looking back, that he’d stumbled and fallen. The incident has stayed with me all these years as a lesson that no photo is worth the cost of a subject getting hurt, whether physically or emotionally. Every time I look at the photo of this man, I think, “Shame on you, Leo.”  A simple enough misunderstanding but I regret it to this day.

But getting back to Minkkinen and his class. I’m afraid his demanding weekly assignments got the better of me; I couldn’t keep up. Adding to the chaos was the fact that I had a hard time learning darkroom techniques. The overpowering smell of both the stop bath and fixer chemicals used in developing had my eyes watering, my nose stinging. Making the situation worse — one day, I saw the friend who’d stopped speaking to me in the darkroom; even in the impenetrable blackness, I could see and feel him glaring menacingly at me. Some digging on my part revealed he’d signed up for a different section of the course. I decided never to go back to that darkroom. As a result, I fell way behind on my assignments, which led to Minkkinen calling me in for a Teacher/Student conference. I explained what was going on with me, though nothing about the estranged friend. Minkkinen said he understood but emphasized that unless I could catch up on the work, he’d have to give me an Incomplete for the class. When grade time rolled around, what did I find on my report card but a great, big, fat, red F. Throughout my academic years, I’d maintained near-perfect grades. Seeing that F was horrifying to me, as was the lying Minkkinen. It was at that point, I swore to myself that I’d become the best photographer I could be.

I began taking pictures of everyone and everything like a madman. It was rare to run into me when I didn’t have a camera in my hand or around my neck. The circumstances of my life have left me prone to depression. Whenever I find myself low or in despair, my habit is to grab not a Prozac but a camera and head out to see what I can see. In the ‘80s, I bought a used Yashica at Hunt’s Photo in Harvard Square (which I came to call “my trusty old Yashica”). I loved that camera and it held my efforts in good stead up until the time it got left behind on one of my many moves in Las Vegas. With it, I managed to shoot photos of Judy Collins and Julia Child, also many of flowers and gardens, one of my favorite subjects (I don’t know what attracts me to flowers or gardens; I don’t have a green thumb. I like plants and flowers but all I have to do when I bring a new one home is look at it and it falls over dead) I also love taking photos of murals; I like them because they are so transitory, and I want to preserve them before the wrecking ball obliterates them. I think it was Richard Avedon, possibly Susan Sontag who said, “Photographs reveal more about the photographer than they do the subject of the photo.”

I don’t claim to be an expert but I’ve learned to train my eye to the exact spot in the frame I feel is most pleasing. I figure if the image pleases me, it will please the viewer. Only a half-dozen of the photos I’ve taken do I think of as being halfway decent; I like a picture I took of a lady on The Red Line looking at her phone. I looked up and suddenly, the colors of her hair, her outfit matched the colors of the speeding red outside the window. Got it!  Another favorite is one of Whistler’s Park on Worthen Street on a rainy autumn evening. Another, of the interior of a hibiscus. These shots strike me as being pure dumb luck. At a point, as I’m aiming, Buddha enters the lens and something akin to cosmic intervention causes my finger to press the button leaving me amazed by the image it captures. I’ve even a couple of times sold my prints to private buyers and magazines. So, take that, Arno Minkkinen!

_________________

Arno Minkkinen

Blind Man

Hibiscus interior

Judy Collins looking sassy at Harvard Coop

Julia Child at Harvard Bookstore in 1997

Lady on the Red Line

Leo – photo by Anthony Kalil

Leo – photo by Dad (seen in his shadow)

Mural in Putnam Square, Cambridge

Mural on Tremont Street, Boston

Photo by Papa of his Army buddies in India during WWII

Whistler Park

Leo with his beloved Miyoshi and trusty old Yashica at Wingaersheek

Yashica camera