Tuesday’s Lowell City Council was a long one, mostly because the council had cancelled its prior meeting which fell on St. Patrick’s Day. The public portion of this meeting took 3 hours, 45 minutes. For councilors, it was even longer since they went into executive session after that.

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The big issue this Tuesday was the Lowell Senior Center. A month ago, the council rejected a new lease for the senior center that had been negotiated by City Manager Tom Golden. The councilors who opposed the lease – Corey Robinson, Belinda Juran, Sidney Liang, Sean McDonough and Mayor Erik Gitschier – mostly took the position that 20-plus years ago when the city conveyed the property to the current owner and then leased it back for use as the senior center, it was with the understanding that at the end of that 20 year lease, the owner would make a gift of the property back to the city.

The City Solicitor explained that the deed from the city to the developer/current owner had no reversionary language so whatever promise had been made would be legally unenforceable. City Manager Golden added that much had changed in the intervening years and that the proposed lease was the best way to move forward for a variety of reasons.

Voting for the lease were Councilors Dan Rourke, Kim Scott, Sokhary Chau, John Descoteaux and Vesna Nuon. Councilor Rita Mercier recused herself from the vote on the grounds that since she was the president of the Friends of Lowell Council on Aging Center Inc., she had a conflict of interest and could not participate in the matter. However, as she left the council chamber at the start of the debate, she said, “If I could vote for [the lease], I would.”

The tie vote equaled a rejection of the lease, so it was unclear where the matter stood when that council meeting ended.

Then, at their March 3, 2026, meeting, the council unanimously adopted a joint motion by Councilors Corey Robinson and Rita Mercier that asked the city manager for a report explaining how the council could obtain independent legal counsel for its own use. Although the express wording of the motion made no mention of the senior center, that was clearly the catalyst. While there was some debate among councilors that evening about whether this was a good idea, or even legal, the motion was just for a report on how to do it, not actually to do it, so it passed unanimously.

As I mentioned in my March 8, 2026, newsletter (link below), hiring the council’s own legal counsel is an issue that arises from time to time. However, rather than independent legal counsel, what councilors are really looking for is a lawyer who will give them a legal opinion different from the one rendered by the city solicitor since this only comes up when a cohort of councilors is unhappy with a ruling from the city’s legal department.

Which brings us to this Tuesday’s meeting and twin motions about the senior center. The first, by Councilor Kim Scott, asked the city manager to “prepare a 15-year RFP for the needed space for the Lowell Senior Center.” The second, a joint motion by Councilor Corey Robinson and Mayor Erik Gitschier, asked the city manager to “have the proper department draft and execute a request for proposal (RFP) seeking to provide alternate accommodations for our Lowell Senior Center.”

The term of the original senior center lease ended several years ago, yet the city has continued to occupy the place without paying rent. Consequently, the property owner would be entitled to evict the senior center from the property and sue for unpaid rent for the city’s use and occupancy of the premises. Since the city needs a senior center, beginning the search for an alternate site is prudent, even if the current impasse is resolved.

The debate on these motions, however, made it clear that the senior center lease impasse is far from being resolved. At some point, Councilor John Descoteaux observed that since Councilor Mercier has now obtained an opinion from the State Ethics Commission that she does not have a conflict and could legally vote on the lease, the council should revisit that vote since Mercier, as mentioned above, indicated she would support the lease. Her vote in favor would break the tie and authorize the city manager to execute the new lease.

Not so fast, according to Councilor Mercier, because contrary to her comment at the February 24, 2026, meeting that she supported the lease, she is now completely opposed to it. After explaining her recent interaction with the Ethics Commission which gave her the green light to participate, Mercier launched a verbal attack on the owner of the senior center property, describing him as “ruthless, greedy, conniving, deceitful and merciless.”

Perhaps it’s best to let Councilor Mercier’s words speak for themselves. Here are three portions of the YouTube transcript of her remarks. In several places, I’ve added explanations which appear in brackets and are italicized. I’ve also highlighted the above quoted adjectives in bold.

The first portion is from 53:25 of the recording:

There are no technicalities [referring to her dealings with the State Ethics Commission] such as I understand were present in the filing of the paperwork for our senior center many years ago on the part of the city by our implied incompetent solicitors of the past. Well, I know our solicitors well from the past, especially Dave Fenton and Tom Sweeney and Christine O’ Connor. They were from the past. They were outstanding in their expertise, just as we have the same expertise today.

So, what went wrong? A technicality. Don’t argue over a technicality to gain more for yourself. Which leads to the motion [for the new lease]. Is this motion the culmination, the plot that someone was waiting for so we would look for another senior center location and all the condo units would be owned by one person? [The senior center parcel has been condominiumized with the actual senior center leased by the city just being one of several condominium units that comprise the property.] How appropriate! You’d then have all your eggs in one basket in one area. No city ownership mixed in with other units. How appropriate, how ruthless, how greedy, how conniving. And I don’t really care what I’m saying. I’m speaking from my heart.

The real motion should be, let’s hire an independent, non-connected person with nothing to gain who specializes in title law, a title specialist, a real estate litigator who specializes in quiet title action, and focuses on the history of the deed, the history of the deed, and clearing a cloud of error. a certified title examiner. That is who we need and something that was implied years ago but never kept.

Or maybe the next motion should be, let’s investigate other options on relocating our school department to another place and eliminate our connection with deceitful, scheming, merciless people. [The Lowell School Department rents space for its central offices in the Bon Marche building on Merrimack Street, which is owned by the same person, through a different trust, as the senior center parcel.]

Then at 56:26 of the recording, Mercier said this:

Why is it that someone with an ample amount of income wants to take something that we own in the beginning away from us, away from our seniors through a technicality and I say how sad and it’s sad for me to go to the senior center for my monthly meeting for the friends and they come up to me and say please councilor support that contract support the new lease because if you don’t they’re going to lock the doors and we’ll the outside looking in with no place to go. How sad is that? That is sad in this day and age that we treat our seniors like that. I can’t believe it.

So maybe it’s time to look around at all the things that we rent and put our people somewhere else. Maybe we can get the Bon Marche and put our school department across the street at the, uh, at the, um, place on I can’t even think of the name. I’m so upset. Right across on Market Street [I think she was referring to the old police station/market building across the street from Brewed Awakening that the city re-acquired last year.] Maybe that’s where we should put them. And save that money. I don’t like to be screwed. I’m going to say it. I don’t like it.

Then at 59:50, Mercier said this about a possible redo of the tie vote on the proposed lease:

I’m sorry to go on, but I’m not supporting the lease. So, you can take another roll call. You can try to take the people that already voted no and try to change their mind. But I don’t like it. We owned it. What do you not understand there? A technicality. What about the word implied? Implied we owned it, because we did and I’m not settling for anything less.

Let’s be clear. The city does not own the senior center, either actually or impliedly. When the concept of a senior center on Broadway first arose in 2001, there was a clear understanding that at the end of an anticipated 20-year lease, the owner would “gift and donate the leased premises to the city of Lowell.” (I believe that express language was in the purchase and sales agreement between the parties.) However, when the deed from the city to the new owner was executed and delivered, it made no mention of the property being gifted back to the city at the end of the lease.

As I explained in an earlier newsletter, the “doctrine of merger” in Massachusetts real estate law holds that if a promise contained in the purchase and sales agreement is not repeated in the deed, the express language of the deed prevails, and the earlier promise is not legally enforceable.

I speculated that the omission of the reversionary language was not accidental since, had it been included in the deed, the new owner would not have obtained the $15 million mortgage they needed to rehabilitate the property since no bank would make such a loan unless the borrower held full and complete ownership of the property. I further speculated that there was no side agreement or written memorandum of understanding confirming the intended gift because doing that would have constituted bank fraud.

Which is not to say the city is prohibited from making a legal claim that it now owns the property. In general, the law requires any agreement that transfers ownership of real estate to be in writing. However, there are exceptions to that rule when equity demands it, but that type of claim is a legal longshot and, more importantly in this case, requires the party making the claim to have “clean hands” which means being free of any conduct that contributed to the dispute.

The “clean hands” doctrine would likely trip up the city’s equitable claim of ownership since, I suspect, over the past 20 years, successive city managers have made all kinds of agreements with the property owner regarding the space that modified any earlier understanding about ownership of the property reverting to the city at the end of the lease.

Without reversionary language in the deed and with only a weak equitable claim to ownership, the position of some councilors seems to be that the owner reneged on their earlier promise to make a gift of the property to the city at the end of the lease. That may be so, but an agreement to make a gift in the future is not legally enforceable, so if circumstances have changed, as they clearly have, the city has no means to compel the gift to be made.

Even the councilors seem to understand that which is why they’ve launched a collateral attack on other leases between the city and the owner of the senior center parcel, most notably the Bon Marche building which the school department rents for its central office. The above transcript shows Councilor Mercier explicitly linking the senior center lease to the Bon Marche lease and, two weeks ago, Councilor Robinson filed a motion directing the city manager to “begin a conversation with the superintendent of schools to look into any space consolidation measures that translate into cost savings for our residents.” Robinson did not expressly link this motion to the senior center; but it’s not a stretch to see it as a subtler version of Mercier’s attack on the Bon Marche lease.

Earlier in the meeting when the city solicitor was asked, what happens next, he replied that the city is waiting for the property owner to take the next step. Rather than just wait and then react, the council endorsed the combined RFP motion and endorsed a motion from the floor by Councilor Dan Rourke that instructed the city manager to explore all possible options for the future of the senior center. Presumably, the council will also meet in executive session at an upcoming meeting to discuss its litigation strategy.

Here’s a link to my newsletter about the February 24, 2026, council meeting and the new lease debate.

Here’s a link to my newsletter about the March 10, 2026, council meeting and the “independent counsel” for the council discussion.

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Save the Date: This spring’s walking tours of historic Lowell Cemetery will be held on Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, both at 10 am, both beginning at the Knapp Avenue entrance next to Shedd Park. The same tour will be conducted on both days. Just show up and enjoy.

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This week in my Seen & Heard column, I wrote about the obituary of philosopher Jurgen Habermous; an Op-Ed by internet guru Tim Wu on why social media is hazardous; and commented on Emilie-Noelle Provost’s “Living Madly” column that criticized Daylight Savings Time.