RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Politics: May 31, 2026

Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting was devoted almost exclusively to the council’s review of the proposed FY27 city budget. The council opted to review the budget department-by-department and worked diligently for three hours until the mandatory meeting stop time of 10 pm arrived. A vote to keep going failed and the budget hearing was continued to next Tuesday, June 2, 2026, at 6 pm.

In last week’s newsletter I wrote that an early motion by Councilor Dan Rourke during the May 19 meeting to “table” a transfer of money into the fire department overtime account signaled difficulties with the fire department budget. This week, Rourke made an early motion to take that transfer “off the table” which passed unanimously as did the substantive vote on the transfer, signaling that the impasse had been overcome, if only temporarily.

While these two votes dealt with overtime spending which in turn is driven by absenteeism, the primary cause of the current friction was City Manager Tom Golden’s plan to lay off six firefighters as part of citywide layoffs of personnel to achieve a balanced budget for the coming fiscal year.

Sometime since last week’s meeting, Golden and the president of the firefighter’s union had a one-on-one meeting and reached an accommodation that avoids any firefighter layoffs in exchange for an ambiguous promise by the union to, according to Golden, “work with their members to explore opportunities to financially assist the city and to try to lower overtime costs.”

The president of the firefighter’s union then spoke. While he complemented the city manager for meeting again after the recent impasse and for finding a way to avoid fire department layoffs, he also made it clear that issues remained. He emphasized the need to maintain 203 firefighters in the city.

An article in Thursday’s Lowell Sun clarified why the union so firmly defended that number. “City Council restores 6 firefighter positions to Lowell budget” by Melanie Gilbert covered the council’s Tuesday evening ratification of the city manager’s revised fire department budget that dispensed with the six layoffs. The Sun story then added an important detail: Last week, the fire union sued the city over the proposed layoffs and obtained a preliminary injunction from a Superior Court judge that ordered the city to “fund minimum-staffing requirements for the Lowell Fire Department as agreed upon in Article XV, Section 5 and 6 of the collective bargaining agreement between the City and the Union for fiscal year 2027.”

Earlier Tuesday evening, some councilors had alluded to a court order, but it was unclear to me what they were talking about until the Sun article appeared. Not having seen the contract nor the complaint filed with the court to initiate the lawsuit, it’s hard to comment on the merits of either.

I will say that the standard for obtaining a court injunction is steep. One requirement is that the judge find the plaintiff has a likelihood of success on the merits of the dispute. Also, for a judge to order a legislative body (the city council) to fund a particular department seems like an extreme measure given the concept of separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches. For a judge to have ruled this way suggests it was a black and white issue of contract law. That in turn prompts the question, why did the city administration try to do this when the proposed firefighter layoffs, according to the motion judge at least, would be a clear violation of the union contract.

I think most councilors were more interested in getting this dispute behind them, so no one asked that question, at least not publicly. (And given council sentiments, it’s likely the layoffs would have been rescinded even without the court order.)

One question that was asked was how will the salaries of the six un-laid off firefighters be paid? Where did that additional money come from?

To make the math work, the city’s budget writers jumped on the slippery slope of boosting their projected revenue, specifically the amount of state aid the city is expected to receive.

How the state budget is finalized is a secretive backroom process controlled by a handful of legislative leaders. Here’s how I understand it to work: Early in the spring, the governor announces their budget recommendation for the fiscal year. Legislators pay no attention to that document. Instead, each branch of the legislature – the State Senate and the House of Representatives – issues their own budget proposals. Those two documents are the foundation of the final state budget. If both the House and the Senate agree on a line-item amount, then that amount is likely to carry over to the final state budget.

But what if the numbers differ? Then the disputed line item goes to a “conference committee” which I believe consists of the Senate president, the speaker of the House, the chairs of the two ways and means committee, and probably the Secretary of Administration and Finance. This committee meets in private and resolves the disputed line-items. Sometimes the House number prevails; sometimes the Senate number does; and other times there’s some compromise number. While the state fiscal year begins on July 1, 2026, the legislature rarely finalizes its budget by that date. In recent years, it has been finalized in mid-July, but it could be later.

Which brings us back to the Lowell city budget. The House budget had a lower amount for local aid than the Senate budget. Because Lowell prudently opts to be conservative in its revenue projections, the original city budget proposal used the lower House number. Now, to pay for the six firefighters whose layoffs were to be rescinded, the city simply swapped the lower House number with the higher Senate number, hoping that the higher number is the one that emerges from the conference committee. If it does not, then the city will have to make further cuts or dip into its reserve fund to make up the difference.

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Councilors asked many questions during the three-hour meeting, but only a few attempts were made to cut anything from the budget. As far as I could tell, only one – a reduction of $15,000 – was made.

A handful of councilors tried to identify nonessential items in the hope that sufficient savings could be found to reduce the number of employees who were laid off. While it’s understandable that councilors want to keep city employees from losing their jobs, I don’t recall any framing of proposed cuts to reduce the size of government and thereby lessen the tax burden on residents.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a hypocrite who is happy to receive government services but then balks at paying for them. I appreciate all that government does for me and the community and I acknowledge those services must be paid for. But I am a realist when it comes to the cost of providing those services. The primary driver of the cost of local government has always been salaries. Employees should be paid a living wage and, to attract and retain top quality employees, the salaries paid should be competitive. However, to do that, the rate of increase of salaries and benefits will always exceed the amount of new revenue, so the only way to keep things in balance is to gradually shrink the size of the city workforce while simultaneously using technology and innovative management to increase the quantity and quality of services delivered to the public. At some point, that is unsustainable, but my sense is the city is nowhere near that point. In fact, it seems that the city remains on a trajectory to add positions, not cut them, notwithstanding the recent layoffs.

In any case, the council will resume its review of the budget on Tuesday night. I’ll report on what happens in next Sunday’s newsletter.

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This week in my Seen & Heard column, I reported on last Saturday’s “Lowell in World War II” walking tour which drew 30 people; commented on an America’s Bookclub interview of Candice Millard, a best selling American historian; I reported on the big Google I/O conference at which the company announced big changes to its search function; I reviewed the final episode of The Late Show with Steven Colbert; and noted the obituary of former Congressman Barney Frank.

‘Survey Team’ by Paul Marion

Eliot Church at South Common (Wikimedia photo)

Survey Team

With its spire ringed in scaffolding, the Eliot Church on the rim of the South Common in Lowell, Mass., looks like a church in Dresden, Germany, shown yesterday on the TV news, the spire there circled with staging from which workers guided a crane hoisting a new cross into place. Members of an Anglican church in Britain had commissioned a bronze cross in a goodwill gesture many years after the bombs. When I was young, my friend Mike Latour told me his father had been a prisoner-of-war underground with future author Kurt Vonnegut during the Dresden bombing by English and American fliers that burned large sections of the city in the winter of 1945. In Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, he tells the story in off-beat form. With our gang of kids Mike had worn his dad’s green combat belt with a soldier canteen when we played army in our woodsy suburb just north of Lowell. I had my father’s tailored Eisenhower waist-jacket that hung loose at my shoulders. In his bedroom bureau, middle drawer, were souvenirs of World War II, including an edition of the Stars and Stripes military paper headlined: HITLER DEAD.

Ahead of me on the track on the floor of the Common this morning are Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Hong, both wearing faded camouflage baseball caps, which makes me wonder if they are veterans of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), South Vietnam, who have lately gathered with local American Vietnam War vets for Memorial Day ceremonies. Chanlina, a nursing assistant at the community health center, is a quarter-lap behind me, and gaining. When I passed her earlier, I read the back of her T-shirt, Survey Team, left over from the recent census. Everyone walks in the same direction, against the clock, face into the low sun until the turn at the pool. Now and then, someone crossed the soccer-lined infield diagonally, rushing to the train station just beyond the western edge of the park.

When I arrived at 6 a.m., Mr. Ya was stretching with four neighbors from South Street, friends who likely would have been strangers had he passed them in a park in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, where he was a newspaper editor during the war. He wears a brown fedora out of a Humphrey Bogart movie, tweed sport coat, gray pants, white shirt open at the collar, and blue canvas shoes. Before he starts walking around the asphalt oval, he pulls out of his coat pocket eight small stones, which he arranges in two rows of four on a bench near one of the oil-drum trash barrels. After each turn around the track, he stops to return one stone to his coat pocket.

He doesn’t keep up with his companions and sometimes waits until they catch up to him so he can chat again. With his cane, he can match their pace for more than an eighth of a mile. When I pass his group on the inside lane, saying “Hello,” Mr. Ya and friends nod, smile, and wish me a good morning before getting back to their own words. The peppy conversation reminds me of my grandparents and parents chewing over the day’s events in French. He probably knows French from the old country. Mr. Ya is about eighty and arrived in 1977 at the beginning of the resettlement period for thousands of refugees from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The Eliot Church atop the rise kept an open door for people arriving from the camps in Thailand and the Philippines. The sign out front today announces services in Swahili for the Kenyan community and also in Portuguese for Brazilian immigrants.

In the front hall of my family’s house across the street from the park, there’s a long panorama photograph. On April 19, 1919, George H. Russell, owner of the local Commercial Photo Shop, captured in his trendy format hundreds of people on the South Common, all along the north slope of Meetinghouse Hill, topped by the red-brick Eliot Church. It was Patriots’ Day, a state holiday since 1894. The church and houses on Summer Street made it into the picture. In reverse on a dark tree limb, Russell inscribed: Lowell’s Welcome to her 26D Boys.

Back from the trenches of Europe after defeating the Germans with allied help, the soldiers assembled. In the frame are nurses and nuns in white uniforms and habits, Knights of Columbus in regalia, French flags, kids in doughboy outfits, black-suited city leaders in bowler hats, women in Sunday coats, and officers wearing General Pershing cowboy-type campaign hats.

We run and rerun private History Channel tapes in our brains. I’m stepping through the afterimage of one George Russell composition this morning, just a moment in a parade of negatives. CNN’s Early Report from Afghanistan this morning told us about a soldier who shot a twelve-year-old boy who had run to be with his father after the soldier spotted the boy and ordered him to stand still. The soldier saw the boy as a threat. It took two hours for a helicopter to arrive and transport the kid to a field hospital, where an army doctor told reporters that he is recovering. The father said his wife returned to the rocky hillside where her firstborn son was wounded to beat the ground and wail.

Paul Marion (c) 2004, 2026

The Pick-Me-Up

The Pick-Me-Up

By Leo Racicot

I’m sitting here wondering if the charming American custom of the afternoon pick-me-up still exists. I asked around and got a lot of blank stares. It’s safe to say the afternoon pick-me-up is cousin to the British tea time tradition, that hour of the day when the body and the mind begin to slump and a restorative timeout is sought. The afternoon pick-me-up isn’t quite the same. The pick-me-up as I knew it is less formal than the ceremonial UK teatime. American pick-me-ups have a looser dynamic, an almost spur-of-the-moment need to sit down amid the day’s activities and stop for a breather. Teatime in England appears to be a necessity; the British can’t live without their tea. In UK-produced movies, television series and books, no matter what dreadful occurrence has beset the principals, the kettle is always put on the burner in the belief that a good, strong pot of tea will see the tragedy through.

The pick-me-up is less formal than the ceremonial UK.  At our grandmother’s and aunt’s place, after a day’s long slog, there was always, around 3 p.m., a practice of sitting down at table with a cup of coffee and a plate of sweets. This is the pick-me-up formula – hot coffee to be enjoyed (and enjoyed slowly, leisurely) along with a sweet, a cookie, a piece of candy, a small dish of ice cream. The respite is less about food and drink as it is about taking a period of quiet time for oneself and one’s company to simply “be”. Amicable chat might be a part of the break but usually, everyone gets quiet, sits in the quiet, admiring the sun coming through the window, the silence in the hallway. A contemplative pause washes over the room and its occupants who might, in fact, be thinking about absolutely nothing as they nosh. Think of the pick-me-up as a middle of the day culinary nap.

When I was living in Las Vegas, Helen and Cookie observed this habit. I came to look forward to it as the midday heat of the desert descended and the curtains were drawn. Coffee was made; it need not be percolated; sometimes all Helen had in the house was instant Maxwell. She’d place a box of assorted cookies before us and off we three would disappear in reverie. I thought of it as moments of “Enough is enough”, enough of chores, enough of errands, enough of everything, to give oneself permission to just sit.

At the Shea’s home, for the nine years I was working there, Ms. Shea held to this routine. Daily, no matter what else was going on, at 3 pm on the dot, she’d make her way from her second-floor rooms to the downstairs kitchen where she’d bid me make herself, Richard and me a hot cup of coffee and bring out of the cupboard a confection or two. Often these pauses would consist of the three of us. If Richard was out, say, at an appointment, it would be his mother and me. Because she didn’t always join in on the breaks, Richard and I would be by ourselves. I treasured these alone times with him, especially when he’d free himself of his tantrums, his nerves, his fretting. The pause had the power to calm him; the pick-me-up, a pocket of peace in a mostly chaotic place.

There was a tree in the backyard, a wise, old oak. It was so sturdy it had a steadying influence, a calming effect. Richard’s and my eyes were especially drawn to it in the Fall of the year when it became ablaze with Autumn light, Its quiet reds, its silent yellows slumbering in the afternoon sun hypnotized us both as we nibbled noiselessly on our cookies, soundlessly sipped our coffee. There was no not liking him at these times together, not that I ever didn’t like him. I liked him from the moment I met him, liked him from the beginning of our nine years together. And he, thank the gods, liked me; I used my ability to speak in foreign accents to soothe him, quiet his furrowed brow when tantrums lurked behind it on the verge of explosion. He tuned in most keenly to my Irish accent, my singing of the old Irish folk songs he and I had both known as children, at different times in our lives. He always closed his eyes whenever I’d sing to him, his favorite being Farewell to Tarwathie which I’d learned listening to Judy Collins’ version on her Whales and Nightingales album. As a background to the song, the mournful moans of real Humpback whales added to the natural beauty of the song. I once, as a joke, mimicked for Richard the whale sounds and had him laughing and laughing. I laughed too.

It wasn’t popular in the house to say you liked Ms. Shea. She could be difficult. Her philosophy was that you had pitched your tent in her home and you would abide by her rules. For a tiny person, she had a giant temper — what Joe Perkins referred to as her “cow voice”. I watched many a strapping 6 foot and taller varsity football player quake and shake in absolute terror as this little knick-knack of a woman shook her crooked finger at them,  giving them the “What for”.  But I liked her. Not exempt from anyone else in that house from being chastised, I was nevertheless drawn to her sense of humor, her fascinating anecdotes about her life; her personal history among the movers and shakers of her time. She was impressed that I was able to discuss Spinoza and Schopenhauer with her at the table, knew who she was talking about when she told me she’d studied under Bertrand  Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. She especially liked that I called her Ms. Shea, not Mrs. Shea, like all the other guys did, liked the feminist sound of it, and once confessed to me that I reminded her of her own brother, a doctor, Uncle Doctor Sidney Druse whom she said I resembled both in my facial features and in my demeanor. We had some of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had. I came to love looking into her eyes, eyes cloudy with time and the years. Those eyes had looked into the eyes of men like Alger Hiss, Franklin Roosevelt, Abe Fortas. Ms. Shea was a bit of living history. At Christmastime, Thanksgiving time, she’d leave a bundle of her copies of The New York Times Review of Books and The London Spectator outside the door of my room. Always, a thrill. Gifts at the holidays were always the same — a bottle of sherry and a box of those Ferrero Rocher chocolates, the chocolates wrapped in gold foil.

The funniest of the pick-me-up parties (though only funny in retrospect) was the time she got merry and festive (not very often) and decided for Hallowe’en, she’d have a little something extra as a surprise for Richard. She ordered a luscious, elaborately decorated cake for him from Cardullo’s Gourmet Shoppe in Harvard Square (wildly expensive), ice cream from Hurrell’s. Well, came the time for the kitchen shindig, I completely forgot it was Day Light Savings Time, and the time change. Ms. Shea told us she’d be down at 3, adding, “I might come to the party, I might not.”   So, when at the appointed time, she hadn’t arrived from upstairs, I assumed she wasn’t coming (she often didn’t join Richard at these soirees she herself had arranged). So — Richie and I dug in. No sooner had we swallowed our sumptuous cake, the last of the ice cream treat, than whom should appear in the kitchen doorway but Ms. Shea, dressed in a Halloween gown, peckered all over with little witches and pumpkins (the sort of wonderful dress she never ever wore). Her face was dolled up to the max — eye shadow, lipstick, the full magilla. Again, something she never did. She had a limelight smile on her face which, when she saw we were just finishing up, vanished. She looked crestfallen. Panicking, I explained the time change had thrown me, that I’d gotten confused and because she hadn’t shown up when she said she might, figured she wasn’t coming and that we had better start without her. I apologized profusely. Richard, wiping the last cake crumbs from his mouth with his Halloween napkin, slyly chuckled, “Late for her own party…”  Rather than murdering me and Richard both, Ms. Shea howled, louder than the loudest holiday goblin as she made her way back upstairs in the sad/comic afternoon. Saved!

Looking back from a distance of nearly 20 years, as hard a personality as Ms. Shea was, as hard as it often was, working with Richard, I can see now they picked me up with more than cups of coffee and treats. As my former co-worker in that house, James Stephen Lee, said to me a few years ago, “My, but weren’t we lucky to know them.”

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Afternoon pick-me-up

Leo (the author) and Mrs. Shea

Reading to Richard

from left: Leo (the author) and Richard

The study at Francis Street at a peaceful time

Seen & Heard: Vol. 21

Event: Lowell in World War II Walking Tour: On Saturday, Bob Forrant and I led 30 people around downtown Lowell, sharing stories about the city during World War II. The main theme was how war production temporarily rescued the remaining Lowell mills and boosted employment and wages for Lowell residents who had suffered through almost two decades of hard times. We also talked about organized labor, the military draft, how the city honored those who gave their lives in the military, and how the war was financed through “war bond” drives that united the community. 

Television: America’s Bookclub on C-Span. David Rubenstein interviews the historian Candice Millard who has written several best selling books, the best known of which may be Destiny of the Republic which is about the assassination of President James Garfield. She grew up in Ohio in a blue collar family. Both of her parents loved to read. She went to a small college in the midwest then worked at National Geographic where she worked for six years when she wrote her first book, River of Doubt, which is about Theodore Roosevelt’s post politics journey up an unknown in South America.

YouTube: Google I/O 2026 – Google I/O is Google’s annual developer conference which was held this year on May 19-20, 2026, in Mountain View, California. I watched the keynote address by the company’s CEO and several of its top executives. The purpose of the presentation I watched was to announce new things in artificial intelligence and Google products and systems. For a variety of reasons, I never found my way into the Apple universe and landed on Google as a comprehensive alternative. I use it for email, calendar, writing, entertainment (I watch YouTube more than anything else on TV) and my Pixel phone, watch and tablet. Perhaps the biggest announcement was a further shift by Google away from its traditional “search” function that would return a bunch of hyperlinks to websites in reply to your query with greater reliance on AI summaries. “AI mode” has been available in Google search for a while so it’s not completely new, but that functionality has been much expanded and made more dynamic in that you can ask follow up questions and almost engage in a dialog with the device. Other big announcements involved “coding” (using AI to write computer code) and “agentic AI” (having an agent automatically do things for you like order coffee or schedule an Uber based on some prompt embedded in your calendar, for instance). Finally, Google introduced an “intelligent eyewear” product, also known as smart glasses, which will compete with META which has the lead in this technology. 

Streaming: Late Night with Steven Colbert – I don’t watch much TV, certainly not any late night TV, and as much as I find the various hosts amusing, there is so much other content on YouTube that I find interesting that I don’t catch their clips there. However, I did watch a replay of the full final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I found the program entertaining and enjoyed watching, especially the musical finale which featured Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello and Jon Batiste. McCartney was the one guest who sat next to Colbert’s desk and talked in the traditional TV talk show way. The former Beatle was coherent and entertaining but he looked and sounded old (he’s 83), but when he sang, I thought the years melted away. There were several “comedy cameos” where different celebrities seated in the audience interrupted then expressed displeasure that they were not the final guest. Jon Stewart had an appearance as did the scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson. And Colbert’s four late night colleagues, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Myers and John Oliver, appeared as a group. The Colbert version of the Late Show has been around for 11 years which is a good run on TV, so if it had just been cancelled in normal times it would not have been such a cultural marker. But the wide perception is the show was cancelled by Paramount to earn favor from President Trump who had expressed annoyance at Colbert’s mockery of him. That context elevated the significance of this episode beyond the normal termination of a TV show. 

Obituary: Barney Frank – Former Congressman Barney Frank died on May 19, 2016, at age 86. Born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, Frank came to Massachusetts to attend Harvard and was in graduate school there when he was hired by Mayor Kevin White. In 1972, he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature and in 1980, when incumbent Congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest, had to relinquish his elected office due to a new policy from Pope John Paul II, Frank won that seat which he held until 2012 when he chose not to seek reelection. In 1987, he came out as gay, the first sitting member of Congress to do so publicly. In 2012, before his term ended, he married Jim Ready, making Frank the first member of Congress to have a spouse of the same sex. His most significant legislative achievement was the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act which tightened the rules on lenders in response to the meltdown of the housing market that led to the global financial crisis in 2007. Conservatives later argued that a main driver of the financial crash was risky loans that liberal politicians forced lenders to make to undeserving poor people. The reality is that lenders delighted in making those loans because the riskier the borrower, the higher the rate of interest the lender could charge, and none of the loans were held by the entities that made them – they cashed in their profits right as the loan was made – but were passed on to gullible investors who were left holding the bag when the bottom fell out.