The 2026-27 Lowell City Council took the oath of office at a Monday morning ceremony at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. The council’s first business was to elect a mayor. The election proceeded alphabetically: the assistant clerk called the roll, and each councilor announced their choice for the position. The first candidate to receive six votes—a majority of the eleven-member council—was elected mayor.

Erik Gitschier won on the second ballot.

Although the event was streamed live on Lowell Telecommunications, the audio did not capture the councilors’ voice votes, leaving viewers in the dark about how each councilor voted. Based on other sources, I believe this is how the voting went.

First Ballot

Dan Rourke received five votes:

• Sokhary Chau
• John Descoteaux
• Rita Mercier
• Dan Rourke
• Kim Scott

Erik Gitschier received three votes:

• Belinda Juran
• Sean McDonough
• Corey Robinson

Vesna Nuon received three votes:

• Erik Gitschier
• Sidney Liang
• Vesna Nuon

With no candidate receiving a majority of the votes, the council immediately proceeded to a second ballot.

Second Ballot

Erik Gitschier received six votes:

• Erik Gitschier
• Belinda Juran
• Sidney Liang
• Sean McDonough
• Vesna Nuon
• Corey Robinson

Dan Rourke received five votes:

• Sokhary Chau
• John Descoteaux
• Rita Mercier
• Dan Rourke
• Kim Scott

Next, the council elected its vice chair using the same process. Vesna Nuon won that election with six votes to five for John Descoteaux. All councilors who voted for Erik Gitschier for mayor voted for Nuon for vice chair, while all who voted for Dan Rourke for mayor voted for Descoteaux.

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The council had its first regular meeting of the term on Tuesday night. Unsurprisingly, the agenda was brief, and the meeting lasted just under 30 minutes. Perhaps the most consequential action taken involved the controversial $40 million loan order that was rejected by the prior council. However, on Tuesday, the order was simply referred to a public hearing on January 20, 2026.

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At the start of each meeting, councilors may ask for a “moment of silence” for someone who has recently passed away. The requesting councilor then reads the decedent’s obituary, the lights of the council chamber are dimmed, and the room goes silent for a short time before the chamber is re-illuminated and the meeting resumes. It is a nice gesture, but I don’t usually mention it in my newsletter.

This week I’ll make an exception because one of the memorials on Tuesday was for Philip Shea, who passed away on December 30, 2025, at age 84. In the 1970s and 1980s, he served on the Lowell City Council, the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the Massachusetts State Senate, and made a vigorous though unsuccessful run for U.S. Congress. In the 1990s, he served as Budget Director for the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s Office, and in recent years continued to serve the city of Lowell as a representative to the Lowell Regional Transit Authority board, the Lowell Stadium Commission, the Community Preservation Committee, and the Lowell Housing Authority board.

In 2016, Shea was inducted into the Lowell High School Alumni Hall of Fame, and in 2021, the city of Lowell named the bridge on Market Street over the Western Canal after him.

Shea was first elected to the Lowell City Council in 1969 in a transformational election that brought newcomers Paul Tsongas, Brendan Fleming, John Mahoney, Leo Farley and Shea to the council. They joined reelected incumbents Richard Howe, Armand LeMay, Samuel Pollard and Ellen Sampson.

Shea was reelected in 1971 and played a central role in the most contentious mayor’s race in the past 50 years. In that fall’s election, three newcomers were elected. They were Robert Kennedy, Gail Dunfey, and Charles Gallagher (who had been the previous city manager). They replaced incumbents Armand LeMay, Samuel Pollard, and John Mahoney, who all lost.

On that 1972-73, council, Kennedy, Dunfey and Gallagher joined reelected incumbents Ellen Sampson, Richard Howe Sr., Paul Tsongas, Leo Farley, Brendan Fleming, and Phil Shea. For Sampson, it was her sixth (nonconsecutive) term; it was Howe’s fourth; and the second term for Fleming, Farley, Shea and Tsongas.

Howe served as mayor in the previous term. James Sullivan was the city manager.

Monday, January 3, 1972, was inauguration day. After taking the oath of office, councilors attempted to elect a mayor. With just nine councilors, the winning candidate needed five votes.

On the first ballot, Shea received votes from himself, Fleming, Gallagher and Sampson (4 votes); Tsongas received votes from himself and Howe (2 votes); Kennedy voted for Sampson and Farley and Dunfey both voted for themselves. Through the next 14 ballots, councilors frequently changed their votes, but no one achieved the necessary five votes. After 15 ballots, councilors voted to recess until the next evening’s regularly scheduled council meeting.

Reconvening on Tuesday evening, January 4, 1972, councilors resumed voting for mayor. On the fourth ballot that evening, outgoing mayor Richard Howe Sr., received votes from himself, Tsongas, Dunfey and Fleming, but he was unable to get the necessary fifth vote on subsequent ballots. No other councilor received more than three votes through the evening. After the 36th ballot of the night, and the 51st since the Monday inauguration, the council again voted to recess until Thursday night.

On Thursday, January 6, 1972, councilors again reshuffled their votes through 54 more ballots without electing a mayor. That changed just before the 55th ballot of the night (and 106th since the inauguration) when Shea announced he was abandoning his own candidacy and would instead vote for Sampson who had received votes from herself, Farley, Gallagher, and Kennedy on the prior ballot. Those votes held on the 106th roll call and, with the addition of Shea, Sampson was elected mayor, her second time holding the position.

That fall, in the 1972 state election, Shea ran for state representative. Back then, the top two finishers in most legislative districts served as state representatives. In that year’s general election for the 31^st Middlesex District, Democrats Cornelius F. Kiernan (13,848) and Shea (13,384) defeated Independent Stanley W. Norkunas Jr. (2,681). There were no Republican candidates. In the Democratic Primary, Kiernan (5,010) and Shea (3,684) had defeated Victor M. Forsley (3,317), Raymond P. Gendron (3,137), and James R. O’Connor (2,554).

In that same election, Paul Tsongas was elected Middlesex County Commissioner. Under normal circumstances both Shea and Tsongas would have resigned from the council, and their seats would have been filled by the candidates who finished tenth and eleventh in the 1971 city election. But Shea and Tsongas were both strong supporters of City Manager Jim Sullivan who was just barely hanging on with the support of five of the nine city councilors. Both Shea and Tsongas were comfortable with tenth place finisher Armand LeMay joining the council since he would be a Sullivan supporter. But it was a different story with eleventh place finisher Samuel Pollard, who was a vocal critic of Sullivan. If both LeMay and Pollard joined the council, two Sullivan supporters – Shea and Tsongas – would be replaced by one supporter and one critic which would make five councilors ready to fire the city manager. To avoid that result, Lowell political lore says that Shea and Tsongas agreed to flip a coin with the winner resigning (allowing Sullivan-supporter LeMay to join the council) and the loser of the coin flip remaining on the council until the end of that council term (preventing Sullivan-opponent Pollard from joining the council). Tsongas won the coin flip and resigned from the council while Shea remained on the council, holding both that office and that of state representative for another year.

Redistricting eliminated multiple representative districts prior to the 1974 election. The old 31^st district which had been held by Shea and Cornelius Kiernan was renumbered as the single seat 45th district but Kiernan was appointed to be a judge at the Lowell District Court and Shea was unopposed in both the primary and the general election.

Shea was reelected without opposition in 1976 but by 1978 voters had chosen to reduce the number of state representative seats from 240 to the current 160 and Shea’s district was merged with that of incumbent Robert Kennedy. In a hotly contested Democratic Primary, Shea defeated Kennedy 3,591 votes to 3,407. Shea was unopposed in that year’s general election.

In 1979, the city councilor elected State Senator Joe Tully city manager. In the special election to fill the state senate seat, Shea was unopposed in both the primary and the general election. He was reelected to the state senate with token or no opposition in 1980 and 1982.

In 1984 when incumbent Congressman Jim Shannon ran (unsuccessfully) for U.S. Senate, Shea and his fellow State Senator Chet Atkins of Concord ran for the vacant Congressional seat with Atkins winning with 43,538 votes to Shea’s 38,737.

Shea attempted an electoral comeback in 1992 when he ran for his old state senate seat, however, in the Democratic Primary he finished second to Dan Leahy.

In that same 1992 election, William F. Galvin was elected Secretary of the Commonwealth. When Phil Shea was first elected to the Massachusetts House in 1972, Galvin worked at the State House for the Governor’s Council. The two met and became friendly. In 1975, Galvin was elected to the House in his own right, and the friendship deepened and lasted. Upon his election as Secretary of State in 1992, Galvin asked his old friend Phil Shea, who had a strong background in finance, to be his Budget Director, a position Shea held until his retirement in 2002.

On a personal note, I first met Phil Shea back in January 1970 at the Lowell City Council inauguration. He was one of the newly elected councilors who elected my father, Richard Howe Sr., mayor of Lowell that day. Shea’s name was often in the news, but I would encounter him only occasionally.

That all changed in the summer of 1997. I was in my third year as Middlesex North Register of Deeds. As a result of its fiscal insolvency, Middlesex County had just been abolished as a governmental entity, and the registry of deeds had been transferred to the Secretary of State’s office. Although my office was an elected one, I knew little about the Secretary of State’s office or its personnel. At gatherings with my similarly transferred colleagues from other registries, some spoke with trepidation about the strict fiscal policies of the Secretary’s budget director, which would be a departure from the free-wheeling finances of county government. In my naivete, I asked, “Who is the budget director?” The reply: “Some guy named Phil Shea.”

To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful partnership. The transfer from county to state government went smoothly regarding daily operations, but more importantly, it unlocked meaningful funding for new technology. As the state geared up for Y2K, Shea oversaw those expenditures with a balance of prudence and flexibility. He trusted tech-savvy colleagues to leverage these investments, effectively jump-starting the registry’s entry into the internet age. For instance, Middlesex North became the first registry in Massachusetts—and perhaps the country—to make every document from 1629 to the present freely accessible online. It was also the first to implement full-scale electronic recording, saving immense time and money for the registry and homeowners alike. Without Phil Shea’s support, neither achievement would have been possible.

While Phil Shea’s individual contributions to Greater Lowell were substantial, he spent a lifetime empowering others to assist the public in countless ways. My example with the registry of deeds is one example. Another was cited by former City Manager Kevin Murphy in his eulogy of his departed friend during Shea’s funeral mass. Kevin said that in 1979, then State Senator Shea hired Kevin to be a member of his state house staff, he joined three other staffers who all went on to have distinguished careers in public service. Those other three were Marty Meehan (now president of University of Massachusetts); Rodney Elliott (current state representative); and Kevin Coughlin (executive director of the Greater Lowell Workforce Board).

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Blog-contributor Steve Edington has a new book: The Gospel According to Jack: Tracking Kerouac in my Life. The book brings together Steve’s “Kerouac life” (he’s a past president of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac) and his life as a retired minister in the Unitarian Universalist Protestant tradition.

Steve will give a book talk this coming Wednesday, January 14, 2026, from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm at Lowell’s Pollard Memorial Library in the ground floor community room. No registration is required.