The January 13, 2026, Lowell City Council meeting began with a brief presentation by the Lowell City of Learning committee on UNESCO’s recent decision to add Lowell to its Global Network of Learning Cities. This is the first time a U.S. city has received this honor.

This network is designed to help cities promote lifelong learning as a tool to address urban challenges like social inclusion and economic sustainability. The “learning city” concept seeks to redefine what it means to learn by transforming everyday spaces like streets, libraries, and workplaces into areas of education. This achievement has the potential to realize Patrick Mogan’s “educative city” vision, where residents engage in learning opportunities from birth through death. Additionally, the recognition will highlight Lowell’s “Frontrunner City” status and is a significant milestone for the city’s 2026 bicentennial.

Led by retired UMass Lowell professor John Wooding and numerous volunteers, the effort to gain this designation began in 2018. One complication is that during Trump I, the United States withdrew from UNESCO, which is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and although the Biden administration rejoined the organization, the US has again withdrawn during Trump II. Nevertheless, it seems that UNESCO and the city of Lowell do not see the non-membership status of the United States as an obstacle to Lowell’s participation in the program.

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Council Kim Scott had a motion requesting that the council impose a “temporary moratorium on the permitting and approval of new or expanded data center facilities in the City of Lowell until zoning and planning regulations are updated to protect residents, including required buffer zones, noise standards, screening and protections against water and electric rate impacts.”

The only datacenter I know of in or contemplated in Lowell is the Markley Group in Scott’s South Lowell district. The Markley Group came to Lowell in 2015 when it purchased the former Prince Spaghetti manufacturing plant located off Moore Street. The company transformed the site into a high-security data center and cloud computing hub, which officially opened in early 2016. As a data center provider, the facility allows other businesses to house their servers and critical IT infrastructure in a secure, “always-on” environment. The site itself has a legacy of industrial use spanning many decades prior to Markley’s acquisition.

The company’s recent history in Lowell has been marked by efforts to expand its infrastructure to meet the rising global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) data processing. These expansion attempts have sought to increase the backup power capabilities which means more backup generators and more diesel fuel stored on site to power those generators. These efforts have encountered significant pushback from residents living adjacent to the facility and from those concerned about the environmental impact of burning diesel fuel for electricity.

In the face of council discontent with the most recent Markley expansion request in October 2025, Markley withdrew its petition, perhaps planning to resubmit it after the November city council election. This motion by Scott can be seen as an attempt to pre-empt such a request. The council referred the motion to the city’s Law Department to draft the requested regulatory amendments.

This motion transcends the immediate concerns of neighbors and taps into growing discontent with datacenters both in the US and across the world. When Markley first came to Lowell, “cloud computing” was at the forefront of the tech industry. Everything was moving to the web, but for a company to host and operate its own website required a substantial and sometimes unaffordable investment in computer infrastructure. To solve that problem, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google created warehouses filled with webservers then leased space on those servers to customers requiring a web presence. In return for rental payments received, the host company would provide security, redundancy and “always on” backup capabilities (like diesel generators that would power the servers when the electricity went out). This is the service that Markley provided when it first came to Lowell.

Now, the tech industry has changed substantially with AI (artificial intelligence) dominating everything. But unlike cloud computing that just stored and retrieved data from servers, AI facilities are constantly creating new data which requires much more powerful computers. More powerful computers require more electricity to operate and create more heat which requires more fans for cooling. The fans create more noise. The electricity demand stresses the power grid and raises energy costs for everyone. Because they must be “always on” these facilities need greater backup which means more generators and more fuel stored onsite.

I don’t know what kind of computing is done inside the Markley Group facility, but whether it provides AI processing or not, it may get blamed for it, not unreasonably, by the public and by city officials.

As City Councilor Sean McDonough observed during the debate on this motion, communities across the country “are playing regulatory catchup” with AI companies. However, the ability of cities like Lowell to regulate data centers is being challenged by the Trump Administration which claims that permitting the rapid growth of AI is a national security requirement and that is would be unreasonable for AI companies to deal with 50 sets of state restrictions and perhaps thousands of local regulations (such as those now contemplated by Lowell).

Opponents of this view argue that our federalist system has always empowered states and municipalities with the power to regulate the health, safety, and welfare of their residents and that the Trump Administration has repeatedly protected the interest of tech billionaires while disregarding the negative consequences faced by ordinary people.

Lowell has now entered that discussion.

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A representative of the Lowell Folk Festival appeared before the council to raise awareness of the fiscal challenges facing the event due to cuts to its federal funding. The 2026 Festival, which will be the 39th, will cost $1 million, so there is a great need for substantially increased community financial support.

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The city council ended the meeting by going into Executive Session to discuss the ownership status of the Lowell Senior Center on Broadway. The land the Senior Center sits upon was purchased by the city in 1869 (not a typo) and was used as the DPW headquarters for more than a century. In 2001, as part of the Acre Urban Revitalization and Development Project, the city sold the property to developers who renovated an existing building and constructed an addition. The city leased the property back from the developers to be used for the Senior Center. The lease was for 20 years and, at the end of its term, ownership was supposed to revert to the city. The lease should have ended in 2024, but the developers continue to own the property.

Notwithstanding the plain language of the original lease agreement, there is some ambiguity. Although I no longer practice law, over my 40 years as a lawyer in Massachusetts, I’ve learned that legal issues are rarely black and white but almost always fall into some gray area. For example, the original lease agreement might expressly state that any amendments must be in writing and agreed to by the parties. However, if the parties have acted otherwise and verbally agreed to modifications, if one party then acted in reliance on that verbal agreement, the other party, out of equitable considerations, may be bound by that verbal modification. I have no idea if that’s the case here, but it is a possibility, especially when you consider that during the lifetime of this lease there have been five different city managers (Cox, Lynch, Murphy, Donoghue, and Golden) speaking for the city with all being bound by the actions of their predecessors.

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On March 4, 2026, at 6 pm, Charlie Gargiulo will give a book talk about his memoir, Legends of Little Canada, at Boston’s West End Museum. There is a nominal fee ($12.51) with tickets available from Eventbrite. However, the event will also be virtual, so if you’d like to participate without going into Boston, you can do that too. Here’s what the Museum wrote about that: “If you would like to attend virtually, please purchase a ticket and email jaydie@thewestendmuseum.org. Those living outside of Route 128 may contact Jaydie for a discount code.”

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If you’d like a break from Lowell politics, I’ve launched a new weekly feature on richardhowe.com. Each Wednesday, I publish “Seen & Heard” in which I review the most interesting things I’ve seen and heard on streaming services, linear TV, newsletters, newspapers, books and podcasts. Please check out my first two installments and then look for new versions each Wednesday.