The agenda for last Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting was so brief that councilors had to take a recess 20 minutes in because the rest of the agenda was finished before the 7 p.m. start time for public hearings arrived. However, brevity does not equal insignificance, for the council took a momentous vote by refusing to raise the money needed to complete the Lowell High School project.

Here’s what happened: A public hearing was scheduled on a loan order to borrow $40 million (in addition to the $382 million previously authorized to be borrowed) to pay “the costs of designing, constructing, equipping and furnishing an additional and renovation project at Lowell High School.” Most of this additional money is needed to pay for fixing the floor of the 1922 and Coburn Hall buildings, which sit between Kirk Street and the Merrimack Canal.

When contractors (and I’m using “contractors” to cover architects, agents, subcontractors and everyone involved who doesn’t work for the city) began work on the northern end of the 1922 building last summer, they discovered that the soil underneath the basement slab had washed away, leaving a void that had to be fixed before work could proceed. This discovery came as a complete surprise to the contractors, so the cost of fixing it – which involved removing the existing concrete floor, adding sufficient fill to eliminate all voids, and installing a new floor through the two buildings – was not included in the budget for the project. Not only would extra money be needed, but because of the late discovery, it is highly unlikely that the state building authority will provide any reimbursement for this portion of the project so the cost will be borne entirely by the city.

When this was first discovered, and again on Tuesday night, councilors criticized the contractors for not discovering this flooring problem during the design phase of the project. Councilors have been particularly critical of the contractor for drilling just one test hole through the floor to assess what was underneath. The contractors have pushed back saying that they followed accepted practices in their field; that the city’s concerns about disrupting student learning curtailed the number of holes that could be drilled in the floor; and that the floor had no cracks or depressions of the type that would be expected if there was nothing but empty space beneath the floor. Tuesday, the contractor categorized some council criticism as “Monday morning quarterbacking.”

When the roll call was taken, Councilors Wayne Jenness, Rita Mercier, Kim Scott, Paul Ratha Yem, Corey Belanger, Sokhary Chau, and Mayor Dan Rourke voted for the loan order, giving it seven votes. Voting against it were Councilors John Descoteaux and Erik Gitschier. Significantly, Councilors Vesna Nuon and Corey Robinson were absent.

A matter that deals with spending – like this one – that comes before the council requires a super majority of two-thirds of the eleven-member city council to pass. Two-thirds of eleven is 7.33. Since a fraction cannot be a vote, you must round up to the next whole number. That would be eight. So, for the Lowell City Council as now constituted to pass a measure that requires a two-thirds majority, eight councilors must vote for it, regardless of how many are present at the meeting. In this case, only seven councilors voted for the loan order, so it failed.

It feels apt to be writing about this on Pearl Harbor Day because the outcome seemed to come as a complete surprise. For example, when the public hearing was opened to those wishing to speak in favor of the loan, no one said anything. When councilors were debating the loan, no one questioned the city manager about what would happen if the vote failed. Even after the vote was taken, I’m not sure many of those in the council chambers realized the vote had failed. Everyone just moved on to the next public hearing without comment.

I won’t speculate about the many dire consequences that will result if this outcome is allowed to stand since the real-world effects of this vote will be apparent soon enough.

Coincidentally, on Friday, the Lowell Sun reported on the most recent meeting of the Lowell High School Building Committee which was held on November 20, 2025. (See “Progress, problems with school rebuild project” by Melanie Gilbert, December 5, 2025, print edition.) The committee learned that Phase III, which involved the northern half of the 1922 building has been completed. Over the coming Christmas break, classrooms that have been in the other half of the 1922 building and the adjacent Coburn Hall will be moved into the newly renovated portion. When students return to school in January, they will be in this new space, and renovations will begin on the rest of the 1922 and Coburn Hall buildings. Together, they constitute Phase IV, the final part of the project. Unfortunately, the subfloor problem discovered in Phase III also exists in Phase IV.

One of the uncertainties of the council’s rejection of the funding vote on Tuesday is whether this phase of the project will proceed on schedule or will be halted due to lack of money. Seemingly unaware of the impending council denial of funding, the School Building Committee cancelled its December meeting and is next scheduled to meet on January 22, 2026.

For those asking, “is it possible to scale back the rest of the project and finish it with the money already appropriated?”, the contractor addressed that on Tuesday by saying that would violate the agreement with the State Building Authority and could potentially jeopardize the state’s reimbursement for the entire project. Furthermore, contracts have already been executed with subcontractors for Phase IV, so cancelling them now would be costly to the city. For those and other reasons, scaling back on the project now does not seem like a viable solution.

Regardless of the ultimate resolution of this most recent High School funding issue, it seems that the FY2027 city budget, which will commence on July 1, 2026, will be a painful one. City Manager Tom Golden indicated that in his remarks on Tuesday. He said that the first 1.6% of the overall budget will go towards the indebtedness for the high school project. While this latest $40 million adds to that, the budget shock has other causes. Golden said that from the beginning of this project, the city chose to “backload the debt” making it all come due in FY27 rather than incrementally in the intervening years. He also said that beyond the high school, the city has been “doing a lot with roads and firehouses.”

A recurring theme of this newsletter over the past three years is that this council and its predecessor have been spending a lot of money. Perhaps the reason city roads were not in tip top shape is that keeping them in pristine condition is expensive, but fixing roads has been a priority for this council and that comes at a fiscal price. With rare exceptions, this council has added new positions to the city workforce without much regard for the future budget impact of more employees. Finally, past councils have been the beneficiaries of millions of dollars in federal funding through programs like ARPA and ESSER which landed the city an entirely new fleet of fire trucks; nearly a million dollars each in renovations to eight city parks (one per council district); countless improvements to school buildings; and much else that was funded entirely without city funds. Beyond the future of the Lowell High project, this council vote is a sign of the fiscal chaos that will engulf the city in the coming year.

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As mentioned above, today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. It is not a federal or state holiday, but if you look at many wall calendars, December 7 will be so marked. That is largely through the efforts of the late Henri Champagne who died in 2006 at age 86. Born in Lowell but a Dracut resident for most of his life, Champagne was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, aboard the destroyer USS Phelps. He served on the ship throughout the war and then was active in Greater Lowell veterans affairs for the rest of his life, especially his calendar advocacy.

Henri Champaigne was not the only Lowell resident at Pearl Harbor on December 7. Two men from Lowell were killed there by enemy fire. Clifton Edwards, a 1936 graduate of Lowell High who lived on Merrill Street, was a 24-year-old seaman on the USS Curtiss, which was one of the few ships to get underway that morning. The ship’s movement and the intense anti-aircraft fire coming from it attracted the attention of the Japanese and the Curtis was hit by several aerial bombs, killing 19 of its crew, including Clifton Edwards. The second Lowell man to die that day was 23-year-old Arthur Boyle of 28 Ralph Street. A 1940 graduate of Lowell High, Private Boyle was an aviation mechanic stationed at Hickam Field, the main US Army air base in Hawaii. Boyle was killed while trying to get an American fighter plane airborne to counterattack the Japanese.

Pearl Harbor received enhanced attention in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In both instances, assaults from the air came completely by surprise although there was ample evidence in advance to have uncovered enemy plans. In both attacks, thousands of Americans lost their lives. And in both cases, the United States launched long and costly wars in response to the attacks.

Today, World War II has assumed greater geopolitical significance. As President Donald Trump aligns the United States closer with Russia and China (our antagonists for the past 80 years) and further away from Germany and Japan (two of our most reliable post World War II allies), both Russia and China are pushing World War II nostalgia to provide Trump with an intellectual underpinning for this mammoth geopolitical shift.

Specifically, this year China has repeatedly cited its role in World War II as the key American ally in the defeat of fascism in the Pacific. Left unsaid but certainly implied is that Japan was the fascist country that had to be defeated. It is no coincidence that Japan which has made clear its intent to intervene militarily if China moves against Tiawan, is being framed as the bad guy by the Chinese.

Similarly, in justifying its invasion of Ukraine, Russia invokes the need to de-Nazify that country, which relates back to World War II when several thousand Ukrainians joined the German military. What is left unsaid is that an equal number of Ukrainians fought the Nazis as partisans or as members of the Soviet army. By highlighting the US and Soviet alliance in World War II and by portraying Ukrainians (and Germans) as heirs to Nazism, today’s Russia seeks to influence American policy in a pro-Russian, anti-Western Alliance way.

As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” By which he meant that past experiences, both personal and historic, are not gone but actively live on, affecting current realities and choices.

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Yesterday I made the rounds of downtown retail establishments which included the Hive Public Market at 101 Paige Street, Pop Cultured at 58 Prescott Street, the Brush Gallery and the National Park Visitor Center Gift Shop at 246 Market Street, and lala books at 189 Market Street. Christmas shopping in downtown Lowell is alive and well at these and other places, so please consider visiting them in the coming weeks.

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Finally, if you haven’t already read it, please check out The Rag Man, a nostalgic Lowell story by Rocky Provencher, the newest contributor to richardhowe.com.