The Lowell City Council returned to its regular meeting schedule on Tuesday after a three-week gap due to Christmas and New Year’s. However, City Manager Tom Golden and City Councilors Sokhary Chau and Kim Scott were absent, so the agenda was relatively light.

The dominant issue at Tuesday’s meeting was maintenance problems at the new Lowell High athletic building. It seems like there have been many small things, but the final straw that precipitated it coming to the council was the failure of a heating system which caused glycol (a type of antifreeze used in such systems) to leak from the unit’s elevated location into the boy’s locker room below it. Because this happened during Christmas break, a time of intensive usage of the athletic facility, the negative impact was substantial.

This leak, however, was not the only problem discussed. Another was an apparent design flaw in the bleachers in the athletic facility. These were intended to remain folded up during the school day so the full gym can be utilized by physical education classes, but then be extended to allow spectator seating for sporting events. From their installation nearly two years ago, however, if the bleachers are opened, they cause gouges in the very expensive gym floor. The company that provided the bleachers has been resistant to sending anyone to rectify the problem although one of the city’s construction managers told councilors that person was due on site on Wednesday, hopefully with a fix to this issue.

The third problem discussed was a cluster of smaller items that included doors that lock when they are not supposed to which has left people trapped in rooms, closets and other spaces and have sometimes required the fire department to extract them; benches in the locker rooms that collapse the moment someone sits on them (they are screwed into  the wall rather than being supported by legs); and an elevator that routinely traps people inside.

Finally, councilors expressed skepticism over the city’s efforts to adequately staff the facility with people trained to properly utilize and maintain the high-tech systems, especially HVAC systems, that come with the building. As we’ve learned from other “new” schools in Lowell, when their systems are not properly maintained from the start, they cease to be “new” very quickly and require expensive repairs and replacements long before they would if they had been properly maintained from the start.

Although it never expressly arose on Tuesday, the bitter 2017 fight over the location of Lowell High lurks over every aspect of this project. (Recall that battle was whether to build an entirely new structure on the grounds of Cawley Stadium in Belvidere or to renovate the existing downtown building while adding two new structures). Someone Tuesday did point out that these problems have all arisen in the gymnasium, which is a brand-new standalone building constructed on the site of the demolished “dentists offices” along Arcand Drive. Presumably the desired inference to be drawn from that fact was that the downtown location was not a contributing factor to these problems. While that is likely true, the longer construction time of the downtown project as opposed to the suburban all new facility likely means that by the time the final stage of the project is completed, the earliest portion – the gym – will need extensive renovations due to the city’s inability to maintain it to the necessary standards.

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A motion on the status of the Smith Baker Center generated a brief discussion on the status of a structural engineering report that the city has obtained. That report happens to be on the agenda for this coming Tuesday night’s meeting so I’ll write about it next Sunday, but for now, from the tenor of councilor remarks Tuesday and in the past, my guess is that a majority of the council will almost immediately vote to demolish the building notwithstanding the efforts of a group of citizens to preserve the building.

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I have frequently criticized this council for the volume of motions filed. Each motion requires a formal response from the city manager which in turn requires some senior leader to devote a substantial amount of time to drafting the response, time that in my view would be better spent doing their actual job of managing city operations. To quantify this “too many motions” situation, I counted the number of motions made by each councilor over the course of 2024.

Back in July, I posted a count for the first six months of the year which I’ll repeat below before giving the second half and full year numbers. As for how the counting was done, if a motion was jointly made by two or more councilors, I credited each councilor with one motion made. Also, if a motion was clearly marked as the refiling of an unanswered motion, I did not count it. Finally, because Corey Belanger replaced John Leahy on the council in the middle of the year, I treat the two of them as a single councilor.

Here are the number of motions made by councilors in the first half of 2024 ordered by the most to the fewest motions made:

Corey Robinson – 65
Erik Gitschier – 45
Vesna Nuon – 35
Paul Ratha Yem – 22
Kim Scott – 16
John Leahy – 14
Wayne Jenness – 12
John Descoteaux – 9 (tie)
Rita Mercier – 9 (tie)
Sokhary Chau – 7 (tie)
Dan Rourke – 7 (tied)

Here are the numbers for the second half of 2024:

Corey Robinson – 38
Erik Gitschier – 34
Vesna Nuon – 21
Wayne Jenness – 20
Kim Scott – 19
Corey Belanger – 17
John Descoteaux – 10
Paul Ratha Yem – 8
Rita Mercier – 7
Dan Rourke – 4
Sokhary Chau – 3

Before you think, “That’s quite a drop; maybe councilors have learned to cut back on the volume of motions,” it’s important to realize that there were far fewer council meetings in the second half of the year than in the first half. From January through June there were 24 meetings; from July through December there were just 18 (due mostly to the twice-monthly summer meeting schedule but also to Christmas and New Year falling on Wednesdays this year).

A better way to measure any changes in motion volume is to look at the average number of motions filed by each councilor in the first half of the year compared to the second half. Here are those numbers with the councilors listed alphabetically with their first and second half averages following:

Sokhary Chau – 0.3 to 0.2 (motions per meeting)
John Descoteaux – 0.4 to 0.6
Erik Gitschier – 1.9 to 1.9
Wayne Jenness – 0.6 to 1.1
Leahy/Belanger – 0.6 to 0.9
Rita Mercier – 0.4 to 0.4
Vesna Nuon – 1.5 to 1.2
Corey Robinson – 2.7 to 2.1
Dan Rourke – 0.3 to 0.2
Kim Scott – 0.7 to 1.1
Paul Ratha Yem – 0.9 to 0.4

Finally, here are the total number of motions filed by each councilor for all of 2024 sorted by the most to the fewest:

Corey Robinson – 103 motions in 2024
Erik Gitschier – 79 motions
Vesna Nuon – 56 motions
Kim Scott – 35 motions
Wayne Jenness – 32 motions
Leahy/Belanger – 31 motions
Paul Ratha Yem – 30 motions
John Descoteaux – 19 motions
Rita Mercier – 16 motions
Dan Rourke – 11 motions
Sokhary Chau – 10 motions

With 2025 being a city election year, don’t expect these motion totals to go down. There’s a correlation between people who watch city council meetings and people who vote, so there’s a re-election incentive for councilors to draw more attention to themselves by making more motions.

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As if this volume of regularly filed motions were not enough, councilors sometimes bring up things that are not on the agenda by “suspending” the rules. According to a recent Lowell Sun article (“2025 debuts the Year of the Snake,” January 5, 2025, p.3), this practice was responsible for some of the Open Meeting Law violations committed by the council in 2024. Here’s some of what was written in the Sun article: “The council was scolded and schooled by the Attorney General’s Office for the use of ‘suspending the rules’ under the mistaken understanding that it waived proper public notice . . .”

The most common use of “suspending the rules” by the council is to take an item that does appear on the agenda out of order, usually because someone is present to speak on the motion and councilors don’t want to force that person to sit through the entire meeting before they can make their statement. There does not seem to be anything wrong with doing that.

The problematic practice is when something that does not appear on the agenda gets brought up by a councilor. There is an exception in the Open Meeting law – and I’m paraphrasing here – for urgent business that cannot wait until the next meeting, but this council seems way too quick to invoke that exception. However, because violating the Open Meeting Law in this manner does not seem to result in any meaningful sanction, it’s unlikely the council will change its ways.

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In past newsletters, I’ve frequently mentioned the pending Supreme Judicial Court decision on the legality of the state’s MBTA Communities zoning law. The long-awaited holding in that case was announced on Wednesday. Attorney General v. Town of Milton (SJC-13580) was a civil action brought in the Superior Court last year in which Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell sought to compel the town of Milton to comply with the MBTA Communities Act, a bill passed by the legislature that requires municipalities serviced by the MBTA to allow more affordable housing to be constructed.

The town of Milton has refused to comply with the law. Many other communities have followed Milton’s lead so there was a lot riding on this decision. The SJC reached what might best be called a split decision. The court held that the legislature did have the authority to set housing policies that had to be implemented by municipalities; that the Attorney General had broad authority to seek enforcement of such laws; but that the administrative process used to implement the regulations that govern the detailed working of this law was flawed, so the regulations are unenforceable at this time.

The mainstream media reporting I’ve seen on this emphasizes that the law was upheld and minimizes the administrative flaw, implying that the problem can be rapidly rectified. I’m not so sure it will be that easy or fast. Redoing the adoption process will likely require re-advertising the proposed regulations, holding new public hearings, and then voting to adopt them.

My concern is that opposition to this law has become so entrenched that the process will be fought at every step. At the same time, I suspect that many elected officials interpret the results of last November’s election as a sign that the electorate has become more conservative and less accepting of things like affordable housing. (I think that’s the wrong takeaway from the election but mine is not the prevailing analysis.) Consequently, there is no guarantee that the version of the regulations adopted after this redo will be the same as those first promulgated.

For Lowell, this decision might have a slightly negative consequence. The city was quick to adopt the required zoning changes and only recently announced that the benefits of the quick enactment in the form of substantial housing grants would soon flow to the city. However, if this decision causes the entire program to be placed on hold pending a lengthy administrative redo of the regulation implementation process, it could delay those funds getting to the city.

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This week on richardhowe.com, Rich Grady wrote about his visit to the U.S. Capitol to pay his respects to former President Jimmy Carter; I wrote a review of the movie Conclave; and Louise Peloquin provided coverage of the celebration of the New Year in Lowell one hundred years ago as covered by L’Etoile, Lowell’s French language newspaper.