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Lowell Politics: August 23, 2026
The Lowell City Council last met on Tuesday, August 11, 2026. I was away that week, so I was unable to write about that meeting on the following Sunday. However, I have since watched a recording of the meeting on YouTube and will write about it here.
The council covered many topics with no single issue dominating the meeting. Consequently, here are some comments on a range of things covered that night:
Separate motions on the structure of council subcommittees, one by Councilor Belinda Juran and the other by Councilor Dan Rourke, were discussed together. A big challenge is scheduling and holding subcommittee meetings. Each subcommittee meeting requires someone from the City Clerk’s office to be present to take minutes and do all the other things the clerk’s office is responsible for. Also, subcommittee meetings typically require the presence of other city employees so their schedules and availability must be considered.
I also believe everyone values recording the meeting on video so residents who can’t attend the meeting can see what’s going on. Since two rooms at city hall – the city council chamber and the mayor’s reception room – are outfitted with cameras and recording capabilities, meetings must be held in one of them. However, subcommittees compete with the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Conservation Commission, the License Commission and other boards and commissions whose meetings are recorded.
Councilor Rourke identified the number of subcommittees as an obstacle. According to the city’s website, here are the current council subcommittees:
- Arts & Culture/Special Events
- Auditor & Clerk Oversight & Personnel
- Cannabis Control
- Economic Development
- Environment & Flood Issues
- Finance
- Frontrunner City Program
- Housing
- Municipal Facilities
- Neighborhoods
- Non-profit Organizations
- Parks & Recreation
- Public Safety
- Rules & Election Law
- Senior Citizen
- Substance Abuse
- Technology & Utilities
- Transportation
- Veterans
- Youth Services
- Zoning
That’s 21 subcommittees, each with a chair and two members.
Councilor Rourke suggested the existing 21 could be consolidated into six subcommittees and that membership could be increased to five councilors (making the quorum needed to hold a meeting just three). He further suggested that if the council were to make its summertime two-meetings-per-month permanent, the off weeks could be used for subcommittee meetings.
Councilor Juran’s motion was directed to the Rules Subcommittee while Rourke’s was a suggestion to the entire council, so it’s unclear when these will return to a regular council meeting. Still, it will be interesting to hear further discussion of the pros and cons of this concept.
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At the July 28, 2026, meeting the city council rejected City Manager Tom Golden’s request to transfer money to the city’s Health and Human Services Department so it can continue to pay its lease at 107 Merrimack Street. That night, the vote to make the transfer was seven in favor and four against so at first, everyone assumed it had passed. But someone immediately spoke up and said the transfer required a two-third majority to pass. That would have been eight votes. It only received seven, so the ruling was the transfer failed.
At this meeting, Councilor Sean McDonough, one of the four councilors to oppose the transfer back on July 28, had a motion to reconsider that vote. (A motion to reconsider can only be made by someone who was on the prevailing side of the original vote which McDonough was since he voted against the transfer.)
The discussion on the motion to reconsider unearthed multiple points of confusion. First, it seems that the original vote did not need a super majority to prevail but just a simple majority. With seven votes, it did achieve a simple majority so it should have been deemed to have passed that evening. When asked about the consequences of that, the City Solicitor advised that even though the original ruling on the need for a super majority was incorrect, no councilor challenged it that evening, so there was no recourse to now correct the ruling.
Next, both the city manager and the city solicitor suggested that the “cleanest way” to revisit this was for the city manager to bring the same vote back to the council at its next meeting. That prompted questions about the finality of council votes. If councilors vote against something, can it just be brought back repeatedly until a different result is achieved? That doesn’t seem quite right but wasn’t acknowledged as an impediment. (Perhaps the erroneous ruling on the first try distinguishes this issue.)
Then, the city manager explained that the contemplated move of the HHS department from 107 Merrimack Street to the city-owned building at 40 Market Street required negotiations with the union employees affected by the move since it would constitute a change in working conditions. I believe those negotiations have been scheduled but not held as of the August 11th meeting.
Finally, Councilor McDonough asked, if the same vote was coming back to the council anyway, was there a need to act on his motion to reconsider the original vote, or would it even be advisable to vote on the motion to reconsider. It seemed with no other way to dispose of the motion, a roll call was taken, and 10 councilors supported the motion to reconsider while none opposed it (Council Kim Scott was not at the meeting). I assume this means some of the councilors who opposed the transfer are now willing to support it, but one never knows until the next vote is taken.
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Councilors were officially notified at this meeting that the Cambodia Town neighborhood of Lowell has been designated a Transformative Development Initiative (TDI) district by MassDevelopment. This is a program intended to help targeted commercial districts in Gateway Cities in Massachusetts.
The designation provides several types of support over its three-year existence. First, it funds a “TDI Fellow” which is a fulltime employee with economic development training who is assigned to the community to help coordinate between local government, small business owners, property owners, and nonprofits. Second, the TDI designation makes technical and planning assistance from the state available. Third, TDI provides funding and grants for storefront improvement, placemaking projects, and some financing.
The TDI program is highly competitive which makes it extra impressive that the city landed this one for Cambodia Town since Lowell was the beneficiary of a TDI designation for the Acre back in 2022. I won’t get into the details of all the benefits that brought except to confirm that it did bring many benefits to the Acre neighborhood, benefits that will hopefully be duplicated in Cambodia Town (which for those unfamiliar with the place, includes the Middlesex and Branch Street stretches near Clemente Park and Pailin Plaza and, I believe, Cupples Square.)
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The council also received a report looking back on the employee layoffs that occurred in June. In all, 23 city employees lost their jobs which the administration calculates saved $1.9 million in the current fiscal year.
The report goes into considerable detail about the process that was followed, the timeline, and the factors considered in making the decisions. It also explains how most of the city budget comes from fixed costs that cannot be cut. This puts greater pressure on non-discretionary items such as salaries.
As for lessons learned, the report identified three. (Since I don’t fully understand exactly what two of them mean, I’ll include all three verbatim from the report):
- More frequent mid-year budget updates to departments to reduce the scale of year-end adjustments.
- Enhanced communication with unions and department leaders regarding fiscal conditions and potential workforce impacts.
- Additional cross-departmental workforce planning to minimize reductions in force.
Although I didn’t see it in the report, City Manager Golden explained that the abrupt notification of the effected employees was driven by the timing of the presentation of the budget to councilors. Someone realized at the last minute that since the proposed budget would omit the names of the employees who were being laid off, once the budget document became public, the absence of those employee names from the document would indicate that they were to lose their jobs. Since employees finding that out from the media or from seeing something online would be terrible, the administration speedily notified the employees in person on an accelerated timeline, hence the hurried nature of the notifications.
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Another interesting report dealt with the procedure for making a claim for damage caused by a pothole or a plow. The report provides considerable detail on how to make a claim and what type of supporting documentation would help resolve the claim quickly.
Importantly, it states that if the damage occurred on a state-owned road, the claim must be presented to the state and not to the city. (Although the state is only liable for personal injuries, not property damage, so it would have to have been a very big pothole.)
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A couple of other council meeting items to briefly note:
In a discussion on the state of upkeep of the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center, City Manager Golden mentioned that a challenge to finding a new use (and owner) of the property is that it’s “underwater.” In real estate, that usually means the property owner owes more money to its lender than the property is now worth. In this case, I think it meant the property is worth less now than when the University of Massachusetts Building Authority bought it. To confirm that, I looked at the numbers. In 2009, UMBA paid $14.8 million to the prior owner, LHG LLC. According to the city assessor’s website, the ICC is now assessed for $10.1 million (which is $4.7 million less than the state paid for the property 17 years ago). Golden added that the value deficit is a substantial obstacle to the redevelopment of the property.
Another issue was identified during a discussion of the recent Puerto Rican Festival which turned out to be less than the organizers had hoped due, in part, to communication problems with the city. I couldn’t follow all the details, but it seemed like the organizers had used the city’s online reservation website to reserve the dates, thought they had everything confirmed, and proceeded accordingly. However, there was an unpaid bill for police services at a prior festival, so the city did not deem the event reservation to be finalized because of that unpaid bill. But because of turnover among the organizers, the current group was unaware of the unpaid bill and was relying on the confirmed reservation from the website, hence the confusion. It seems like the city’s reservation system should flag past due bills to avoid a replay of this in the future.
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This week in my Seen & Heard column, I reviewed a big new exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts called “American Stories: Revolution to Rockwell”; I commented on a blog post on “Why the Backlash Against Data Centers is So Potent”; noted a NYT article on unacknowledged brain injuries sustained by crewmembers of Coast Guard life boats; reviewed a book on The Enlightenment (which I read because I feel our current national trajectory is dragging us back to the Middle Ages in many ways); and analyzed the consequences of adopting Daylight Savings Time during the entire year.
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).
New French Language Audiobook of Kerouac Writings
de Jack Kerouac
French was Jack Kerouac’s mother tongue. More specifically, the variety of French spoken by the Franco-American communities of New England. Kerouac spoke this French Canuck, or joual québécois, exclusively until the age of six and continued to use it throughout his life at home with his mother, who was born Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque in St-Pacôme, in Québec, Canada. As a heritage defined by departure, migration, and the open road, Kerouac’s French-Canadian roots are inseparable from his linguistic genius and literary achievements.
ISBN 13: 978-2-7646-1398-6
ISBN 10: 2-7646-1398-9
[FRENCH VERSION}
Sur le chemin et autres écrits en français
de Jack Kerouac
Le français, celui que parlait la communauté franco-américaine de Lowell, au Massachusetts, était la langue maternelle de Jack Kerouac. Cette langue, celle de ce grand peuple de « partance », de migration, de la route, qu’étaient les Canadiens français, il l’a parlée exclusivement jusqu’à l’âge de six ans et l’a employée toute sa vie, chez lui, avec sa mère, née Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque à St-Pacôme.
Ce qu’on ignorait jusqu’à l’ouverture de son fonds d’archives, c’est que Kerouac avait aussi écrit plusieurs textes dans sa langue maternelle tout au long de sa carrière d’écrivain. En 2016, les Éditions du Boréal les faisaient paraître dans le recueil intitulé La vie est d’hommage [Life Is a Tribute]. Lecteurs et lectrices ont alors pu découvrir avec ravissement la forme unique du français de Kerouac, qui a donné – dix ans avant l’éclosion du joual au Québec, au début des années 1960 – une incarnation écrite à la langue populaire des francophones d’Amérique du Nord. Il était donc tout naturel que la musique, le rythme et les modulations de ce français soient offerts à l’écoute.
Afin d’honorer la diversité retentissante du répertoire poétique francophone que Kerouac a créé, nous sommes allés chercher nos quinze narrateurs et narratrices dans la grande francophonie des Amériques – du Québec à la Louisiane, de l’Acadie à Haïti, de l’Ontario au Nitassinan. Nous vous invitons à vous laisser bercer par ces voix, ces timbres créolisés de territoire, qui font retentir le passé et l’avenir du français en Amérique.
Avec des lectures de : Évelyne de la Chenelière, Herménégilde Chiasson, Jean-Christophe Cloutier (responsable du livre audio), Jean-Marc Dalpé, David Goudreault, Jacques L’Heureux, Robert Lalonde, Soleil Launière, Guillaume Martel LaSalle, Marie Michaud, Susan Pinette, Sébastien Ricard, Zachary Richard, Rodney Saint-Éloi et Chloé Sainte-Marie.
Prise de son, montage et mixage : Studio Bulldog
ISBN 13: 978-2-7646-1398-6
ISBN 10: 2-7646-1398-9
Fast Food, Spindle City
Fast Food, Spindle City
By Leo Racicot
In 1965, when radio and newspaper ads announced that a new type of eating place was coming to town, area excitement was high. The restaurant was called McDonald’s and promised to offer fast, cheap service, new kinds of food flavors different from the diner and restaurant fare people were accustomed to. McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Lowell on Rogers Street near the Tewksbury line in the summer of ’65. Always up for a new adventure, Aunt Marie headed her Rambler toward it first chance she got, with al of us in tow. I can still remember our mother pointing out, “There it is!” when she spied the matching pair of Golden Arches over to the right, The first sight of what would become a familiar part not only of America’s but also of the world’s landscapes. Once inside, we admired the look of the place; spanking clean, colorful, bright. Equally colorful and bright was the restaurant’s mascot, Ronald McDonald, the clown standing outside the front door handing out balloons. The place was packed. After sampling the new and unusual hamburgers, fries and a soda, we admitted it was a special place, a special taste we’d never tasted before. The service was, indeed, fast and amazingly affordable. We were to go back, as a family many times in the years ahead and I still stop in to a McDonald’s whenever I want a nosh. In summertime, I especially like treating myself to one of their Soft Serve vanilla ice cream cones for its airy texture and flavorful, almost paper-thin cones.
With the instant success of this new-fangled kind of dining came other fast food joints to Lowell. Howdy sprang up at the corner of Dutton and Thorndike Streets across the street from where the Dutton Dunkin’ Donuts now stands. My friend, Anthony Kalil and I, would ride our bikes up for a snack while “on the road”. I can still taste the distinctive flavor of a Howdy burger and shake. Its 10 cent hamburgers and 7 cent fries were out-of-this-world. When I was living in Las Vegas, the burgers the restaurant chain, Carl’s Jr. served reminded me of the taste of Howdy burgers. Unfortunately, Howdy’s didn’t stick around for long; it closed its doors in, I think, around 1970. It took a while to get used to the fact that it had disappeared.
Burger King became a alternative to McDonald’s; it was popular in a different way; its food had a char-broiled flavor as compared with McDonald’s salty, more savory flavors.
Wendy’s chain of restaurants boasted what founder, Dave Thomas, boasted were real hamburgers made with real beef, the implication being that other chains used meat substitutes in their food. He used an image of his daughter as his logo and in advertisements giving an impression of a healthier, sunnier more wholesome American vibe. Wendy’s, though inexpensive, was the slightly more expensive of the chains, the fancy fast food place. Adding to its popularity was an open salad bar from which customers could pick and choose from a dozen or more items and could return to replenish their plates as many times as they liked. Wendy’s topped this feature by replacing it with the Superbar. The Superbar consisted of three, distinct stations: The Garden Spot, featuring lettuce, diced tomatoes, cucumbers, bacon bits, boiled eggs, cheeses, and multiple dressing options. The bacon bits were my favorite. The Mexican Fiesta: A do-it-yourself taco and nacho bar equipped with taco shells, seasoned ground beef, nacho chips, shredded cheddar, salsa, and jalapenos. And last but not least, Pasta Pasta, an Italian station that included spaghetti, fettuccine Alfredo, marinara sauce, and even pizza. Wendy’s also offered up what’s become a familiar staple, a baked potato. Whenever he eats at Wendy’s, Joe likes to order the baked potato along with a small bowl of its classic chili. a hearty combination. What we liked about Wendy’s is that, unlike other fast food eateries, it had plastic Tiffany lamps hanging from the ceiling. One Christmas, I bought Joe a mock one at Miles next door to Chock Full of Nuts on Summer Street in downtown Boston. I think somewhere, he still has it. At Wendy’s, you never had to clean up after yourself or throw your items away; the “help” did that for you, like in real restaurants. I still stop in at the Wendy’s on Arlington Street after leaving nearby Parker Library to grab a snack while waiting for my bus home.
A final observation. after monopolizing the food culture for decades, fast service, cheap prices have given way to much slower service, higher costs. The other day I waited half-an-hour for a breakfast wrap and a small coffee. The guy in front of me who’d been waiting even longer for his order turned around saying, “Remember when fast food was fast?? Since Covid, wait staff concentrate more on the Drive-Thru line, less on the In-Store customer. I try steering clear of those self- service kiosks. I’m just no good with them. One time, I tried ordering a small coffee at a McDonald’s kiosk and out came a full hotcakes breakfast for me with a large McFlurry. Oy! Woe to the customer who just wants to order a hash brown. Get ready to be turned upside-down by a talking machine that wants your name/rank and serial number. Oh, and whether you want to donate your change to charity! The fast food experience isn’t what it used to be.
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Burger King
Howdy’s
Ronald McDonald
Wendy’s logo
Wendy’s Pseudo Tiffany Lamp
Wendy’s SuperBar
Seen & Heard: Vol. 33
A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday.
Museum Exhibit: “American Stories: Revolution to Rockwell” at Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts until October 26, 2026. Anytime we visit the Berkshires, the Rockwell Museum is a regular destination, mostly because of the interesting temporary exhibits presented there. This one is unique in that it encompasses the entire museum. The show utilizes paintings, prints, drawings and other pieces to illustrate how works of art showed the progression of life in the United States from the Revolution up to the present. Notably, the Rockwell Museum does not accept any federal funding so there were no restraints on the content presented as there have been with other museums that have had content censored by the US government.
Blog Post: “Why the Backlash Against Data Centers Is So Potent” Talking Points Memo website, July 31, 2026. Talking Points Memo, better known now as TPM, has been around for a long time. Its editor and primary writer, Josh Marshall, shares opinions on national politics that usually make lots of sense to me (meaning he’s pretty progressive). In this post, he analyzed local pushback against data centers. The AI companies are owned by the richest men in the world – and they always seem to be men – who, because of their unimaginable wealth, always get their way. And if someone says no, they just go ahead and do it anyway, assured that their wealth and the political power that they purchase will ensure no negative repercussions. Marshall’s point is that method of operation hits a potential roadblock on the local level where planning and zoning boards and citizen participation, make local government less dependent and less subservient to the immense power of the data center purveyors. We might be seeing that in action in Lowell right now.
Article: “Rescuers show signs of harm to the brain but aren’t helped.” By Dave Philipps in New York Times, August 1, 2026. This is a sad story that begins with a retired veteran of 21 years in the Coast Guard taking his own life after increasingly violent and erratic behavior while still in the service that grew worse as time went on. Throughout his Coast Guard career, he was a crewmember on rescue boats, 47-foot long craft designed to plow through heavy surf to conduct rescues and other missions. After the man died, his high school age daughter contacted the Coast Guard to inquire if anything about his job may have caused his condition. She was told no. Not accepting that, she developed a questionnaire for a school project and shared it with several dozen Coast Guard personnel who had the same job as her dad. The results were astounding because most of the respondents had similar symptoms. She won an award for her science project but also caused the Coast Guard to open its eyes to growing research around the world that crew members on these kinds of boats sustain severe head injuries from the constant pounding their bodies take in the heavy surf. This is another example of how we don’t know as much as we think we do about how the human body works and it demonstrates the importance of conducting science and medical research and being open to new ideas and spotting causal connections we haven’t yet thought about.
Book Review: The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction by John Robertson. I like to read but works on philosophy are not high on my list. However, I’ve been troubled by how many in higher office treat science and knowledge with disdain. They act if their goal is to drag us back into the Middle Ages. I struggle to understand why this is so which caused me to pick up this book. If the Enlightenment led us out of the backwardness of the Middle Ages, it might be a template for how we should navigate today’s world. Oxford University Press has a series of small paperbacks called “A Very Short Introduction.” There are perhaps 200 titles. I read this book with enthusiasm but still struggled to understand the topic. Here’s what I came up with: The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement characterized by certain ideas but also a commitment to engaging with a wider public of readers. Enlightenment thinkers had a complex attitude towards religion. They weren’t anti-religion but they were committed to toleration, mostly because of the devastating religious wars that had been fought across Europe. They sought a new, modern understanding of the place of human beings in the world and to better the human condition for all people. Enlightenment thinkers sought to understand society, the economy, religion and politics. They made the “public sphere” – places like coffee houses – more important, and contributed to a vibrant print culture that greatly increased the number of books written, printed and read.
Article: “Let the Sun Shine. It’s a Matter of When.” New York Times, August 4, 2026. The push to adopt year-round daylight savings time seems to be gaining momentum. There are also contrary movements to have year-round standard time, or to keep things the way they are now. This article explores the consequences of each of the three options. Long ago, time was set by the position of the sun. When the sun was directly overhead, that marked noon. That worked pretty well when no one ever traveled beyond the village of their birth but in the modern world, having time unsynchronized from place to place would be chaotic. However, since humans evolved long before today’s complex world, we don’t respond well to these artificial shifts in time so experts agree that none of these systems are perfect. It seems each is supported by a specific interest group: public health officials would keep the current system despite its flaws; business people who seek customers want year-round daylight savings to extend the amount of light at the end of the day; and educators and children’s health advocates would rather have more light in the morning. To help you make up your own mind, here’s an illustration of how the proposed changes would affect us here in Massachusetts:
Under our current system, mid-winter on January 15 brings sunrise at 7:13 AM and sunset at 4:36 PM, while mid-summer on July 15 sees sunrise at 5:19 AM and sunset at 8:22 PM.
If Massachusetts adopted Year-Round Daylight Saving Time, winter evenings would gain an extra hour of light—pushing the January 15 sunset to 5:36 PM—but mornings would remain dark far longer, delaying winter sunrise until 8:13 AM. (Summer times would remain unchanged at a 5:19 AM sunrise and 8:22 PM sunset).
Conversely, under Year-Round Standard Time, summer evenings would lose an hour of twilight—pulling the July 15 sunset back to 7:22 PM—and summer sunrises would occur at an unusually early 4:19 AM, well before most people awaken. (Winter times would remain unchanged at a 7:13 AM sunrise and 4:36 PM sunset).