RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Things We No Longer See in the Culture

Things We No Longer See in the Culture

By Leo Racicot

I’m enough of an old fuddy-duddy to actually miss some of the daily fixtures of life as we knew them in the culture of the 50s, 60s and beyond.     I miss the convenience of the neighborhood mailbox, the neighborhood telephone booth. I realize what with all the new phone inventions, everybody has a phone they carry around with them. But just try finding a mailbox these days, The last time I looked, it turned into an hours-long odyssey to find one. Till recently, I used to be able to just zip down to the Main Post Office on Father Morrisette Boulevard, quick like a bunny, but the way my mobility is these days, the walk takes me over an hour with a need to stop in at City Hall for a muffin and coffee breather before continuing on my way. Oh, for one of the dozens of mailboxes that once dotted the city and suburban landscapes! There are some around but ever since Covid, they have those awful grated slots that larger items won’t clear.

I also miss the comfort and convenience of the milkman, a popular fellow of yesteryear. Each morning, early in the morning, he’d leave a bottle or two (glass bottles) outside the door. This meant fresh cold milk for coffee, for cereal. Nothing like it. When the milk ran out, customers left the empties outside their doors for pickup. I can’t say exactly why but I miss the sight of the freshly-delivered milk on our porch, something primal about that, almost luxurious.    The same convenience applied to the home delivery of the daily newspaper. A paperboy (usually this was a boy hired by The Lowell Sun who used his bike or simply walked house-to-house leaving the daily paper on the stoop, in the yard. On collection day (usually at the end of the week, he’d knock on the door for his money. A tip was maybe included in the exchange, a generous one at Christmastime. The coming of the Internet and all the news anyone could ever want simply by clicking a couple of buttons killed the whole home delivery of newspapers. But I kind of miss the sight of the boys (usually boys we knew from the neighborhood) opening the gate, coming into the yard, tossing the rolled-up paper onto the landing. There was something Norman Rockwell about it.

Not all bygone amenities are part of my nostalgia binge; some should remain in the bygone category. Our mother owned what was called a wringer machine, a Maytag, as I recall. This was a metal beast consisting of two rollers (picture two roller pins like the ones cooks use to roll and flatten dough.  After the clothes had finished washing, each piece was guided into and through the rollers. This enabled the person to wring out the sopping wet article of clothing, making it easier to dry once it was hung outdoors on a clothesline in the sun. Less work for mothers and other homemakers. Well, less work maybe. Wringers were one step above having to haul clothes down to the river to be beaten on the rocks. Anyway — very dangerous machines. One day, my sister, Diane, got too close to the wringers. Within seconds, her little hand and arm got caught between them. The hungry monsters proceeded to eat her arm up to the elbow. You never heard such a scream. Nana, who’d been doing the laundry, was too shocked to react. Our mother heard Diane’s cries, raced in and unplugged the wringer which stopped it from damaging more of poor Diane’s arm. The police, as well as firemen came, took the wringer apart, released my sister and took her to Saint Joseph’s Hospital. I don’t remember much else but do know Diane’s arm and hand remained mummified in bandages and in a sling for weeks after. When I’ve told younger folks about Maytag wringers, they can hardly believe such a piece of machinery existed.

In the paper category — remember the old very heavy telephone books? Every so often (annually, it seemed) the phone company would leave these behemoths on your doorstep. These consisted of lists of local residents and businesses. The White Pages contained residents and their phone number. The Yellow Pages, business information. They were handy but really heavy. I suppose they were all we knew so we treated them as valuable resources. They did take up a lot of room in the drawer. We kept ours on a shelf underneath the phone table in the hall. Phonebooks were replaced by the Internet and search engines where you can now look someone up in-a-flash.  Speaking about phones reminds me of the old rotary phones of my childhood. Talk about heavy! They easily weighed 8 pounds each and had a long, ungainly wire or coiled cord attached which was always getting tangled. A real nuisance but what else did we have?  My friend, Joe, and I joke sometimes, looking back at what was called “a party line”. A party line was a phone circuit number shared by multiple families (usually people who lived nearby). It was designed to save customers money. But with the party line, people on the line could be using the phone when you wanted to use it. If this was the case, you had to wait for the line to be free until you could make your call. It was fun eavesdropping on people’s conversations. Even though our mother told us not to do this, would tell us to “hang up!”, the temptation was too great. One time, Joe and I were talking when out-of-nowhere, our other friend, David McKean, actually chimed in with “Hello?? Hello?? Joe, is that you?? Leo, is that you??”We learned later that David wasn’t even on our party line, making his interruption something out of The Twilight Zone.

Paper maps! Before the invention of the GPS, motorists had to make do with paper maps. Usually, these could be obtained at the local gas station, and were for the most part free-of-charge. They were very detailed but in order for them to cover a wide area, they were large and had to be folded multiple times into smaller squares that were stored in the glove compartment or dashboard. I still have a visual of Papa unfolding one at the wheel of his Plymouth then having to get out of the car to study it, having a challenging time folding it up again. Paper maps were awkward but indispensable, especially for long trips. When I began to drive, they were absolutely of no help to me; I have the worst sense of direction. Darned if a big, unwieldy expanse of paper, creased with age, ever came to my rescue. I tore one up in tiny bits and pieces in total frustration trying to find my way to Provincetown the year I turned 29. The glitch with GPS is that the thing can misdirect you. Rico and I were driving to Florida when it sent us down a dark road at the end of which was an equally dark dead-end lake. Best not to take the murderous Alexa at her word every time.

For years, I missed manual typewriters. I’d begun my creative writing on one. way back when I was banging out my first efforts. Then they disappeared, replaced first by electric typewriters (noisy as hell) then by word processors, computers and lightweight, soundless keyboards. For years, I clung to a romantic notion of them, a return to a simpler time when writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, Capote typed their masterpieces on Royals and Smith-Coronas. But a quick dip back into the manual typewriter pond soon had me remembering how much work they were to operate. First off, you had to be Charles Atlas to pound the stiff, clunky keys. I never studied typing in high school so – made lots of mistakes. These could only be corrected by stopping what you were doing, erasing the error with either White Out or — an invention that came along called Correction Paper. This was a small square of white paper. You placed it between the mistake and the type-writer ribbon, typed the correct letter or punctuation mark, hit the key and voila, the mistake was gone. This could turn into a nuisance, especially when you were tired, having to take careful aim that the correction paper was directly over the mark you wanted to erase. Otherwise, you’d make even more mistakes that had to be expunged. I sat in my bedroom one entire night pounding out my first essay attempt, Rachelann –a Remembrance — and kept making mistake after mistake after mistake until the sun came up. As it rose, I still hadn’t finished the work and had invented a slew of new Anglo-Saxon curse words.

There are times when Joe and I find ourselves waxing nostalgic for the magic of carbon paper. Long gone from the culture, carbon paper was an ink-treated piece of sheer paper which, when placed between two plain sheets of paper would “copy” what you were writing or typing. I doubt kids of the 21st century know what this was. Truth told, it could be messy — at times, it smeared the original document to the point of illegibility. It could be a son-of-a-gun getting the blue dye off your hands or out from under your fingernails. Still, we miss the wonder of this new (now old, forgotten) invention that made students’ and teachers’ lives easier. The digital age made carbon paper obsolete. As it did the microfilm and microfiche machines we knew as kids, a clever(for a time anyway) means of preserving entire books/magazines/newspapers on a piece of plastic film or strip. They could be trouble; especially microfilm which had a habit of getting stuck in the viewer or unspooling at the most inconvenient times. Again –something of the past that’s gone with the wind.

I used to love the pneumatic tubes that both Pollard Memorial Library and the Boston Public Library had. This was a system of cylindrical tubes designed to send patron requests from the Circulation Desk up to remote sections of the stacks (where back then patrons weren’t allowed to go). The way pneumatics worked was this — the patron filled out a slip with the bibliographic info needed for upstairs staff to retrieve the item. A jet of air would shoot the tube up into the stacks. The item would be found and brought back down to the patron). I always got a kick out of seeing the tube jettison up into the stratosphere. something like a mini-rocket being launched at Cape Canaveral. At Pollard, for many years, patrons weren’t allowed to enter the grated metal stacks. The library employed pages to fetch your materials for you, I fondly remember Peter and Ray who held such positions when I was in high school and college. Such helpful guys. Peter also drove the library’s Bookmobile which went out into the community catering to the elderly and shut-ins. I hear Pollard has brought back this wonderful service. I fear the pneumatic system has been consigned to the dinosaur pile, never to be brought back.

Joe suggested I include here a word about subway tokens. In the 60s and 70s, commuters accessed the subway stations by feeding a token into a turnstile. These tokens had to be purchased prior to entering the subway area. They were cheap enough and were easier, I think, than the Charlie card system used in Boston today. I can’t tell you the number of trains I’ve missed while grappling with the Charlie Card purchase machines. Oy vey. The T had what it called “Dime Time”, weekdays from, say, 10 to 2. All trains — ten cents — no matter how far you were going!

Speaking of cheap fares — when we were growing up, the downtown Lowell movie houses, The R.K.O. Keith and The Strand, offered a double feature for cheap. For a mere fifty cents, you could see two movies. Also included in the show was a newsreel that presented current affairs, sports, mini-documentaries, a cartoon (or a few cartoons), At the snack bar, popcorn, hot dogs, soda could be had for nickels and dimes. Best of all, movies would run continuously throughout the day and night. The ushers wouldn’t throw you out when your movie was over. I once stayed and watched Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee from 10 in the morning till 7 at night. Nowadays, a trip to the movies empties your bank account, or seems like it does. Alas, with the new deluxe home entertainment systems, streaming services and multiple cable channels, people aren’t going out much for a movie. Modern technology is causing movie theaters to become extinct.

One last mention before I end this commentary. When did elevator operators depart the culture? These were department store and professional building employees, usually men, who’d usher customers into the elevator carriage. The doors were equipped with grated gates. The gates, made of steel, brass or iron, were used to protect riders from harm, from getting their clothes caught in the elevator doors, for protection while the car was in motion. I liked watching the operator open and close the accordion-like gate. He was usually dressed in a fancy elevator operator outfit similar to the kind movie theater ushers wore. This gave a certain fancy formality to riding in elevators. By the 1970s or so, elevator operators disappeared from the culture. Automated button-operated elevators were invented allowing customers to operate their own ascent/descent. The oddest job I ever had was when I was hired by The Bon Marche Department Store downtown as an elevator operator when I was 15 years old. The job required me to wear a sports jacket, slacks, dress shirt and necktie. I never quite understood the reason for my hire. By that time, automated push-button elevators had replaced the caged kind. To be honest, I felt like an idiot standing there, gussied up as if for Easter Sunday, pushing 5 buttons over and over as customers called out their floor. The store had only four floors and a basement and though I had a job and was making money, there was really no need for me to press buttons customers could press themselves, some of them actually insisting they do that themselves, poking lighthearted fun at the obvious superfluousness of my presence in the elevator. One man actually laughed,  saying,  “But what are you for, young man??”  I had to agree…

Special thanks to Joe Markiewicz for his helpful suggestions.

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Elevator operators

Cage elevator

Automated elevator

Carbon paper

Manual typewriter

Eavesdropping on a party line

Yellow Pages phone book

Telephone booth

Maytag Wringers

Milkman delivering milk

Paper map

Paperboy in the 1960s

Pneumatic tube system

Seen & Heard: Vol. 22

Magazine: “The Venture-Capital Populist: How David Sacks and the new tech right went full MAGA and captured Washington” by George Packer in The Atlantic, June 2026 – Because of extreme cold, the 2025 presidential inauguration was held inside the U.S. Capital. The smaller venue limited how many could attend in person. I found it notable that photos of the ceremony showed the front row occupied not by members of the Cabinet but by leaders of the nation’s tech companies: Facebook, Amazon, Google, and X. I saved that photo as an emblem of the marriage of high tech and a government regime with fascist aspirations. Two decades ago, tech founders seemed grounded in the left side of the political spectrum. What changed? This article, by George Packer, who is best known for his deep explorations of U.S. foreign policy, national politics, and the socio-economic divisions shaping modern America, profiles David Sacks, a native of South Africa who made his initial fortune alongside Elon Musk with PayPal, who was appointed White House AI and Crypto Czar in the second Trump administration. This quote gives a sense of this article. It refers to Sacks’ position that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was entirely Ukraine’s fault. According to Packer, “It’s worth asking how someone so committed to facts and logic could end up spouting such nonsense. If Sacks made investment decisions on this basis, he would go bankrupt. An obvious explanation is that a successful businessman might not know much about history and politics. But an intellectual deficiency can be compounded by a moral one.” That moral deficiency is the willingness of Sacks and the other Tech Bros to embrace what Packer calls the most corrupt administration in American history to grow their already enormous wealth. Whatever room they enter, these guys not only believe they are the smartest one in it, but that everyone else should be unquestionably grateful to them for their brilliance. When ordinary people began turning hostile towards tech for all the harm social media has wrought, and all the anticipated and magnified harm that AI will bring (as used by these people), the tech bros fled to a corrupt, anti-populist regime that permitted tech to maximize its own wealth at the expense of everyone else, as long as the regime got its cut of the profits. 

Newspaper: “Pope’s Encyclical Calls for Putting Humanity at the Heart of Technological Change” by Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias, New York Times, May 27. 2026. Pope Leo XIV, a native of Chicago and the first American Pope, has criticized governments over immigration crackdowns and war. Now he has spoken out on artificial intelligence and technology in general by issuing his first encyclical, called Magnifica Humanitas. I downloaded it but haven’t read it yet – it’s quite long – but have followed the mainstream news coverage of it. He warns that technology should not be allowed to take away the dignity of ordinary human beings, and says humane labor practices and just wages remain essential. While this pronouncement is focused on the impact of AI, it is also a critique of the modern economy where more and more of the world’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small group of people. Government, which once leveled the playing field between corporate owners and individual workers, has become a tool of the wealthy and the expense of the many. 

Newspaper: “Jill Lepore adds a Pulitzer to her laurels, but she’s nowhere near ready to rest” by Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe, May 23, 2026. When Jill Lepore’s first book – The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity was published in 1998, I was in the midst of a late in life masters in history program at Salem State and was in a course on colonial America. I scooped up this book and wrote a paper on King Philip’s War (which had a profound impact on the subsequent history of Lowell). However, when her next book came out, I bought it, read it, and thought it was just OK (I can’t even recall the title). Since then, Lepore has been omnipresent in American history and culture, as a prolific author, a staff writer for The New Yorker and as a full professor at Harvard. Earlier this month, she also won the Pulitzer Prize for history with her latest book, We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. A week ago when I was at lala books on Market Street with a gift certificate I had received I spotted We The People on the New Nonfiction table, took that as an omen, and bought the book. Every Pulitzer Prize winning history or biography that I’ve read has been a good book and I expect this to be that. And in the age of Trump and the corrupt Supreme Court, knowing the history of the Constitution is valuable information to have. This article quotes Lepore: “I’m really fascinated by the relationship between the past and the present . . . The way we tell stories is how we anchor ourselves in time. That’s what I’m interested in.” She also said that one of the reasons we’re in our current predicament is that it is so difficult to amend the US Constitution. In contrast, the Massachusetts Constitution which predated the US version, has been amended more than 100 times which is not a lot for state constitutions. But the US Constitution was last amended in 1971. Lepore says to be functional, a constitution must be “durable and changeable.” Because the US procedure for amend is so difficult and rare, it is decisions of the Supreme Court that amend the Constitution by its decisions. Since not everyone agrees with those decisions, there is a sense that unelected judges are encroaching on the people’s government. I have a big stack of books to be read before this one, but whenever I do get to it, I’ll be sure to review it here.

Newspaper: “Cambodia’s Leader Suddenly Pardons Top Opposition Politician” by Sue Narin and Sui-Lee Wee, New York Times, May 27, 2026 – Because Lowell has the second largest population of Cambodian-Americans in the United States, and because the politics of Cambodia today have repercussions for the politics in Lowell, anytime I see a news story about Cambodia, I pay attention. This one reports that Hun Sen, the longtime leader of Cambodia, “pardoned” Kem Sokha, one of the leaders of the opposition party who has been under house arrest for years. Sokha is a founder of the Cambodia National Rescue Party which was the main opposition to Hun Sen and his followers. Although Sokha’s supporters must be pleased with his release, they are also realistic that this is not a move towards reform but an attempt to lessen Western scrutiny of the country and its regressive political practices. I believe the Cambodian-Americans in Lowell fall on both sides of this divide and that the intensity of that divide seeps into local politics here. 

Newspaper: “A eulogy for Schlitz, the cheap beer that made me a beer lover” by Kevin Slane, Boston Globe, May 24, 2026. Like many, my introduction to beer occurred when I went away to college (which was during the short window during which the drinking age was 18). My preferred brand was Miller, or sometimes Michelob but that was more expensive. Because I went to school in Rhode Island, there was plenty of Narragansett to be had. Schlitz was in the refrigerator case of the local liquor store but no one ever seemed to buy it. “The beer that made Milwaukee famous didn’t have much of a following in the late 1970s. This story’s author went to school in Wisconsin in 2008 which is where he first tried Schlitz. He says he enjoyed it. The brand, now owned by Pabst, is being discontinued, hence the “eulogy” in the title. Interestingly, the author says in a cost cutting measure in the late 1970s, whoever owned Schlitz at the time revised the formula to use cheaper ingredients and the beer lost much of its popularity, although it switched back to the traditional better-tasting recipe by 2000. 

Newspaper: “Joe Sedelmaier, Auteur Behind ‘Where’s the Beef?’ Ad, Dies at 92” New York Times, May 21, 2026, by Richard Sandomir. I’d never heard of Joe Sedelmaier but this story caught my eye because the ‘Where’s the Beef” commercials were big in popular culture in the early 1980s. It was so big that in the 1984 Democratic Presidential Primary, former Vice President Wallter Mondale used it to skewer Gary Hart whose campaign was surging on the strength of his promise of “new ideas” that were never defined or described.

“La Caverne du Pont Neuf” by JR, Plato and Daft Punk

Pont Neuf, overall view

La Caverne du Pont Neuf  by JR, Plato and Daft Punk

By Louise Peloquin

More than 40 years after Christo and Jeanne-Claude literally wrapped up le Pont Neuf, JR is in the process of transforming it into what he calls “the world’s biggest immersive artwork.” (1)

From Saturday June 6th to Sunday June 28th, the Caverne du Pont Neuf will open to the public, day and night, free of charge. Passers-by will be able to cross the bridge, meander beneath it along the river banks, admire it while cruising on a bateau-mouche. It will even be visible from the Eiffel Tower.

This work is a colossal technical challenge which gathered 800 engineers, workers and production teams to provide European-made equipment for the construction of a “monumental ephemeral sculpture” 323.70 feet long, 65.62 feet wide and from 39.37 to 59.06 feet high.

The Caverne is made of inflatable material printed to resemble stone. JR wants to highlight Paris’s architectural origins and to “give Paris history a friendly wink.”

La Caverne du Pont Neuf will transform each of the bridge’s arches into a cave entrance in reference to Plato’s famous allegory. The artist wants to use this myth to make people reflect upon society and upon themselves.

If the exterior aspect of the work astounds passers-by, the interior will equally impress.

“I have imagined entering the Caverne as an experience where fullness and emptiness live in equilibrium. It will be a symbolic crossing, a step towards the unknown, a journey within oneself, a unique sensorial experience where augmented reality allows interaction and gives the visitor the impression of traveling and seeing beyond the Caverne. The technology creates an immersive, emotional and participative experience turning everyone into a co-author of the artwork” explains JR. (2)

A specific soundtrack will be an integral part of the Caverne adventure and, for that, JR turned to former Daft Punk member Thomas Bangalter who will “sculpt sound matter from electroacoustic elements whose reach will materialize the monolithic and mystical aspect of the Caverne.”

    With his Caverne du Pont Neuf, JR not only aims at transforming an old Paris monument but he also wants visitors to renew their perspective on the world around them.

After closing on June 28th, the Caverne will be dismounted. Several options are being studied for disposal of the 20669.29 yards of Caverne fabric. It could be used for future exhibitions, for new inflated structures or simply recycled. In any case, JD intends to give his artwork a second life.

La Caverne opens to the public on June 6th. These shots offer a sneak peek at a most unusual, and free, June 2026 “must-see” for Paris tourists and residents alike. (3)

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1. Completed in 1607, le Pont Neuf over the Seine is Paris’s oldest bridge. It is the first structure in the city to be entirely built with Lutetian limestone, the famous material used for many Parisian buildings and monuments.

Born in Paris in 1983, JR is a creator, photographer and director who began his career with graffiti and defines himself as an “urban artist.”

2) Augmented reality – technology which overlays digital content onto the real world enhancing the user’s perception of it.

3) Photos – Louise Peloquin

JR, the “Caverne” artist

Pont Neuf, partially covered

Pont Neuf, closeup

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.