RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Politics: October 11, 2026

The Lowell City Council met this past Tuesday, however, I’ll put off discussing most of that meeting until next Sunday so I can review the ballot for next month’s state election. But first, I will discuss the council’s decision to hold the special election to fill the vacant District 1 council seat on Tuesday, February 2, 2027.

The city’s director of elections, Will Rosenberry, presented councilors with a proposed schedule that was more aggressive than that ultimately adopted by councilors. Rosenberry proposed that the election be held on Tuesday, December 15, 2026, but that was rejected by councilors.

Before getting into the respective rationales for both dates, here’s what the law requires: The special election must be held not less than 64 days nor more than 120 days after the date on which the special election is called. “Calling” the election takes place when a majority of councilors sign a warrant setting the date. Assuming the warrant would be signed at the October 6, 2026, council meeting, 64 days after that would be Wednesday, December 9, 2026, – so the election would have to be after that – and 120 days after would be Wednesday, February 3, 2027 – so the election would have to be before that.

Rosenberry suggested the more aggressive schedule for at least two reasons. First, it would minimize the time during which District 1 would not be represented by its own district councilor; and second, it would facilitate voters requesting mail-in ballots in time for the election. Rosenberry explained that most who vote by mail submit a blanket ballot request that covers all elections held during that calendar year, so if the special election was held in December, most voters who already requested mail in ballots for the state election in November, would automatically get mail in ballots for the District 1 race. He chose the 15th of December because it was within the statutory date range and because the two following Tuesdays in December, the 22nd and the 29th, were too close to Christmas to realistically serve as election days.

Rosenberry went on to explain that if the election was to be held in 2027, voters desiring to cast their ballot by mail would have to submit a new ballot request for 2027, but that could not be done until January 1, 2027. If the special election were to be held in the first three weeks in January, there would not be enough time for voters to request a mail-in ballot, receive the ballot, and return the ballot.

Councilors pushed back against the early date. Their priority was to give potential candidates for the office more time to decide to run and launch their campaigns. They argued that a fast start of the election process would unfairly benefit experienced candidates who were already familiar with the system and would penalize those running for the first time who would have to figure things out as they went along. These councilors wanted the latest possible date, hence the February 2, 2027, election day.

Two more points about the special election. In last week’s newsletter, I speculated about the need for a special primary if there were more than two candidates for the office. I have since learned that since the special election statute is silent as to the number of candidates, all would run together in a single election with the top vote-getter being elected to fill the seat.

Last week I also reported that Ray Boutin and Rodney Elliott had announced their intentions to run. However, on Thursday, 8, 2026, the Lowell Sun reported that Rodney Elliott had decided not to run, then Inside Lowell reported that Zuhair Syed, a graduate of Lowell High and UMass Amherst who works as a community organizer working at the Merrimack Valley Project, has announced his intention to run for the seat.

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Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, I’ve voted by mail in every election. My ballot for this fall’s State Election arrived on Monday, so today I’ll review the candidates and questions that appear on it.

The ballot consists of four sheets of paper, each printed on both sides, so that’s eight pages of votes to cast. Here they are in the order they appear:

Senator in Congress

• Edward J. Markey of Malden – Democratic
• John Deaton of Bolton – Republican
• Shiva Ayyadurai of Belmont – Independent
• Joe Tache of Boston – Socialism and Liberation

Governor and Lieutenant Governor

• Healey and Driscoll – Democratic
• Minogue and Oliver – Republican
• James and Kittredge – Independent

Attorney General

• Andrea Joy Campbell of Dartmouth – Democratic
• Michael C. Walsh of Lynnfield – Republican

Secretary of State

• William Francis Galvin of Boston – Democratic
• Anne R. Brensley of Wayland – Republican

Treasurer

• Deborah B. Goldberg of Brookline – Democratic
• Elizabeth Dionne of Belmont – Republican

Auditor

• Diana DiZoglio of Methuen – Democratic
• Al Ozonoff of Medford – Republican

Representative in Congress

• Lori Loureiro Trahan of Westford – Democratic
• Gary J. Grossi of Acton – Republican
• Dennis R. Conlon of Hudson – Unenrolled

Councillor – Fifth District

• Eunice Delice Zeigler of Methuen – Democratic
• William Falcetano of Gloucester – Republican

Senator in General Court – First Middlesex District

• Vanna Howard of Lowell – Democratic
• Sam Meas of Lowell – Republican
• Joe Espinola of Dracut – Independent

Lowell is part of three separate state representative districts so your ballot will contain just one of the following three, depending on where you live.

Representative in General Court – Sixteenth Middlesex

• Lorena G. Betts of Chelmsford – Democratic
• Karla J. Miller of Lowell – Republican

Representative in General Court – Seventeenth Middlesex

• John Drinkwater of Lowell – Democratic

Representative in General Court – Eighteenth Middlesex

• Tara Hong of Lowell – Democratic

District Attorney – Northern District

• Marian T. Ryan of Belmont – Democratic

Register of Probate – Middlesex County

• Tara DeCristofaro of Medford – Democratic
• Tara Martorella of Everett – Republican

Next comes the office of Greater Lowell Technical High School Committee. That district consists of Lowell (4 members); Dracut (2 members); Tyngsborough (1 member); and Dunstable (1 member). Previously, each community voted for its own representatives, usually during the city or town election. However, because of the disparity of population and the principle of one person/one vote, that changed several years ago. Now, everyone in the district votes for every candidate, although candidates are grouped by their respective communities. This ensures that a resident of each community will be elected to the board, although that person would receive votes from everyone in the district. With that in mind, here’s how all Lowell ballots appear. Remember, even though you might live in Lowell, you may vote for candidates for the Dracut, Dunstable and Tyngsborough seats:

Regional School Committee – Dracut – vote for one

• Matthew J. Sheehan

Regional School Committee – Dunstable – vote for one

• No candidate

Regional School Committee – Lowell – vote for two

• Ralph Richard Hogan
• Brady Owen McCarron
• Anthony Robert Milisci

Regional School Committee – Tyngsborough – vote for one

• Carol Chisolm

BALLOT QUESTIONS – There are eight referendum questions on the ballot. Each may be answered Yes or No. One the ballot, none of the questions have a simple title that tells you in a short-hand way, what the question is about. Instead, there is a brief statement of what the question proposes to do followed by the consequences of a Yes vote or a No vote. Rather than repeat all of that, I’ll provide my one brief title with a short explanation or commentary if needed.

Question 1 – Public Records – A YES vote would apply the Public Records Law to the governor and legislature which under the current law are exempt. A NO vote would keep the system as is.

Question 2 – Public Defenders Unionization – YES would permit employees of the Committee for Public Council Services, the entity that represents indigent defendants in criminal proceedings, to form a union and collectively bargain, something current law prohibits. A NO vote would keep the system as is.

Question 3 – Combined Primary Elections – YES would eliminate separate party primaries and would have all candidates run together regardless of party in the primary election with the top two finishers advancing to the general election. A NO vote would keep the system as is.

Question 4 – Election Day Voter Registration – YES would allow a person to register to vote at the polling place on election day provided they present identification (including address) and sign a statement under oath that the information provided is accurate (with criminal penalties for false statements). A NO vote would keep the system as is, where registration must be done prior to the election. A NO vote would keep the current system.

Question 5 – Cap on State Revenue – YES would limit state revenue to the amount raised the prior year increased by the percentage wages increased in the prior three years with any excess being returned to taxpayers. NO would keep the current system.

Question 6 – Establish and Finance a “Nature for All Fund” – YES would divert 50% of existing sales and use taxes on sporting goods, RVs, and golf courses to a Nature for All Fund that would be used for natural conservation. NO would not create this fund.

Question 7 – Single family home minimum lot size – YES would allow a single-family home to be constructed on a lot at least 5,000 square feet in size that has 50 feet of road frontage and access to public sewer and water services. No would make no change to existing law.

Question 8 – Repeal legalization of marijuana – YES would repeal the law that made it legal to sell recreation marijuana. NO would leave that law intact.

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Thanks to everyone who attended last weekend’s Lowell Cemetery tours. Saturday’s tour drew 180 people and Sunday’s drew 120.

I’ll lead another Lowell Cemetery tour on Saturday, October 17, 2026, at 10 a.m. as part of the Poe in Lowell Festival. The tour is free and begins inside the Knapp Avenue entrance to the cemetery (77 Knapp Ave).

Once More to the Mountain

Once More to the Mountain

By Jim Provencher

Now it’s all mixed up.
I don’t know what’s true,
history or memory
or both, but then
it seemed clear.

It was as I recall
or imagine—
what now is the difference
and who but few care
that I walked that day from my car
with scant provisions
to the faint footpath trailhead
and soon traversed snowmelt-swollen creeks
and watercourses flowing over my boot tops.

My backward glance
took in a past
so befuddled and constrained
as to make me wonder what I was up to
and thought of turning back.

New sweat oozes and trickles
with the work of walking
for no gain but elevation.
On the peaks a few
individuals remain.
I sensed a long winter
of valley darkness passing.

A grown man seeking still
something beyond my ken,
something that wanted looseness
and extrication, rumours
of wild rumination
unreeling like spring ferns
in a pixilated film.

Shouldering a fresh task,
I kept on steadily slowing down,
peaking-out only after the usual
serial mirage of false summits.
It was alpen-glow twilit time
dimming into dusk when I made it.

A few silhouetted peaks,
darkly etched, sharply limned
when reluctantly I abandoned
my summit perch and descended
into nightfall, tracing
a milky moonlit snowpath,
following its cold fluorescence
into a well of steep darkness.

Halfway at treeline
I knew the derelict cabin
where I could stay the night,
kindle a cookfire, read by candlelight,
and pass a peaceful evening.

It didn’t work out quite that way.
An abrupt knock on my cabin door
and a man with a dog, asking
Mind if we join you?

Mind you it was already dark,
and I’d made the cabin mine,
domesticated it with the scatter of my things.
Yet since he was a fellow,
much like myself, on a mission to open up
the season of mountain wandering,
I let him in.

Solitude was a place
I’d aimed for so I did mind at first,
but he was quiet and good company,
a local who’d lost a finger to the mill,
a wood-cutter whose wife kept sheep,
one who travelled light and left no mark.

In my usual way
I doppelgangered him
into the part of me
that stayed
no matter what or where I roamed
in restless urge
and marvelled at how casually
he could name the nameless
five branches of water
tumbling off the mountain
and how he had remained
rooted and married and childrened
in the Sandy River valley.

Sleeping later in the loft,
I woke with a start
and found my eyes
clocked open, locked
into his electric stare.
Caught in the current’s grip,
we held our wordless gaze
in timeless trance, then rolled away,
burrowing back into sleep.

Waking to the sound of falling water,
for it was spring and all
the snowmelt hurrying down
in one gush.  No one there
but myself and yesterday’s muddy
pawprint greeting of my double’s dog
flowering like a bloom in snow
on my white T-shirted chest.

Prayers, Pies and Prizes

Prayers, Pies and Prizes

By Leo Racicot

I’d be lying if I said our mother looked forward, as did so many of the parents of our Saint Patrick’s School classmates, when the school year rolled around to school community-related activities such as raffles, school fairs, bake sales, paper drives. As a widow, and as someone who was innately shy, she felt not entirely comfortable among the other parents, most especially the mothers of students who had early before I entered the flock in second grade (I spent my first grade year at The Morrill School across the street) formed impenetrable cliques. I don’t think my mother was paranoid about not fitting in; even as a child, I observed a certain, if not snobbery or disdain, a palpable reserve towards her from other mothers. There was, indeed, a stigma attached to a young widow, a widow’s children. I never talked with Diane about how she felt but I, myself, experienced the curiosity, if not the downright scorn, of classmates as being one of the only two kids in the whole school whose father had died. (The other was Karen Waite whose father or mother (I forget which) had died, leaving her half-orphaned. Whispers about the two of us were heard, no matter how hushed, whispers and insults. I remember being so incensed by remarks aimed at me by a group of students one day at recess in the school yard that I found myself countering with, My mother’s been married seven times so I have seven fathers! No one seemed to challenge this and one kid, Danny Mullen, looked at me in an awe usually reserved for astronauts.    So, there was this to be lived with — being fatherless for us, Diane and me — being husband-less for our mother.

School group gatherings were awkward for her, I could plainly tell second only to root canals on her list of “things to be avoided”. As I started out saying, she cringed whenever an invitation from the nuns was sent home with us requesting her participation in this or that fundraising event: a solicitation for a cake for a bake sale, say, or an appeal to volunteer her time for a paper or penny drive. Appeals to craft homemade aprons and potholders for school hall raffles made her an absolute wreck. She’d protest, What are you kids getting me into now??  One “ask” we all three of us wanted to run from was the two or three times a year the nuns asked families to sell chances, raffle tickets for a fair, or Holy Childhood Seals drives, whatever the parish deemed necessary to fatten its coffers. Good sport that she was, my mother sometimes bit the bullet (you couldn’t bite the bullet every time the nuns asked or you wouldn’t have any teeth left in your head) but she was game to once-in-a-while try to lend a helping hand to her two very put-upon children. I’d inherited my mother’s shyness, either that, or it had imprinted itself upon me, so I wasn’t too eager to go knocking on neighbors’ doors for what seemed to me like panhandling. Classmates from nearby streets were knocking on the same doors. It wasn’t uncommon for me, when I’d find the courage to approach neighbors, to be told they’d “already given”.

In spite of all this donation trepidation, lame sales pitches, I did like the end results of the fundraisers. All anxiety melted away once we entered the school halls, the church basements, greeted by the festive cakes, the brilliantly decorated tables, the colorfully-draped ceilings, food and drink goodies so abundant, a child’s eyes, hands and appetites didn’t know where to begin. Usually the centerpiece of these events was The Money Doll. “Money dolls” were an arts and crafts fundraising staple where a doll (often dressed like a bride or a First Communicant girl) had paper currency — usually ones, fives, and tens — folded, fanned, pinned, origami-style all over its dress or attached as a cascading skirt. These were quite the popular money-maker themselves; everyone bought a ticket hoping to win the jackpot. There could be only one winner though but everyone left with something before going home, if only a full stomach, a satisfied sweet tooth. The frenzied scramble to become overnight salespeople was left far behind. Until the next time…

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PTA mothers in 1960s

Our mother in the 1960s

A money doll

Holy Childhood Seals

Bake Sale table

Seen & Heard: Vol. 40

A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. 

Book List: The 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century in the New York Times Book Review, September 27, 2026. One of the high points of my weekend is reading the Book Review although I come away from it wanting to  acquire more books than I’ll have time to read. My wife and I both like to read although I choose mostly nonfiction while she goes for fiction. On one hand that’s good because we don’t compete over who reads a book first, but on the other hand, we buy more books than we would if we both read the same ones. Anyway, this week’s Book Review had their list of the 50 best thrillers of this century. I see that my spouse checked off 17. I read less than that. In fact, reading thrillers has been so rare for me that I can list the ones I have read here: “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson; “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy; and “The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

TV List: The Top 100 TV Shows of the Century. This was another New York Times list. To the extent I watch TV anymore, it’s either YouTube or Netflix. I dropped cable TV during the summer and though I have an indoor TV antenna, I only use it to tune in weather forecasts because for some reason I like seeing and hearing a professional explain the weather rather than just read about it. Because of my de minimis TV watching, I didn’t expect I would check off many shows on this list but I surprised myself by tagging 17 of the 100. My self-imposed criteria for saying I watched a show was to have seen at least three episodes in full. Often I saw more, but three gets you beyond the “I’ll just check this out” stage. Here are “my” shows with the years they ran indicated: The Wire (2002-08); Mad Men (2007-15); Veep (2012-19); 30 Rock (2006-13); Friday Night Lights (2006-11); The Americans (2013-18); The Crown (2016-23); Deadwood (2004-06); Band of Brothers (2003); House of Cards (2013-18); Downton Abbey (2010-13); Slow Horses (2022 to present); The Shield (2002-08); Ted Lasso (2020 to present); The Good Wife (2009-16); The Queen’s Gambit (2020); Justified (2010-15). 

Op-Ed: “Big Tech Fooled America Once. The Second Time’s Not Going So Well.” by Oren Cass, New York Times, September 13, 2026. The author is the chief economist at American Compass, “a conservative economic think tank.” He argues that as tech arose as a major piece of everyday life, most Americans believed in the altruism of tech pioneers and gave them the benefit of the doubt. But now that we’ve seen how it has turned out, with social media especially, hardly anyone believes what any of these guys say and hardly anyone believes these guys wouldn’t impoverish every one of us (or worse) if it enriched them even a little bit. One of the reasons our country is in such a precarious position is because billionaires can wield disproportionate influence in the political process because of their money. But on this issue, it seems that people on all sides of the political spectrum have common cause for standing up to the tech billionaires and since we still live in a democracy, that counts for something. 

Obituary:  “Peter Max, artist whose work breathed spirit in the 60s, dies at 88” by William Grimes in New York Times, September 18, 2026. Whenever I visit a place, I go to the local art museum, so I feel like I’m familiar with most notable artists. So whenever I see a full page obituary in the Times of an artist I’ve never heard of, I read it closely. Such was the case with this one. Several photos of his art illustrate the story. It’s colorful, exaggerated, almost psychedelic. If you ever watched the old Monty Python TV show, in between the skits they would do a cartoon-like short film that had wild images and sounds. Max’s work would fit in. He’s now on my mental radar and I’ll closely monitor how long it takes me to find one of his works on display somewhere.