Several items discussed by Lowell City Councilors at their Tuesday meeting deserve comment:

Method of Electing the Mayor – A memo from City Solicitor Corey Williams responded to issues raised at an earlier meeting of the council’s rules subcommittee regarding the method of electing the city’s mayor.

From the adoption of the Plan E form of government in the 1940s up to now, the mayor has been a city councilor elected by a majority vote of the entire council at the start of each council term. The 2021 switch from electing all councilors citywide to the current hybrid system did not change that. However, in a nonbinding referendum on the November 2021 city election ballot, voters expressed a strong preference for the direct election of the mayor with 7,429 voting yes and just 2,411 voting no.

There are at least two major impediments to making this change. The first is to decide on a detailed process to be used. Who is permitted to run for mayor? In the system used in Worcester, anyone running for a citywide council seat may simultaneously run for mayor, however, a candidate for district councilor may not. In Lowell, would this citywide/district distinction be used, or could any council candidate also run for mayor? Or would a candidate have to run exclusively for mayor and forgo the right to serve on the city council if they did not prevail in the mayoral race? How is the vice chair selected? In Worcester, the second-place finisher in the mayoral balloting takes that office. What if the mayor is no longer able to serve? Does the vice chair assume the mayoralty or is there a special election? Would a preliminary mayoral election ever be needed and under what circumstances? What if the mayoral candidates who win in the preliminary and therefore appear on the mayoral ballot in the final election all lose in their council races? Being elected to the council is a precondition to winning the mayoral race under the Worcester system so I assume that would be the case here as well. Those are questions right off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many more.

The second impediment is the Federal Consent Decree the city entered into to resolve the lawsuit that precipitated the change to the hybrid system. The US District Court retained jurisdiction over the decree and any changes to it – including how the mayor is elected – would have to be allowed by the court.

According to Solicitor Williams in his memo, he contacted the attorney for the plaintiffs in that lawsuit (as the council instructed him to do) and asked about their willingness to accept this proposed change. The plaintiffs’ attorney said they would be open to considering it but not until a detailed plan that addressed the kind of questions I posed in the preceding paragraph are answered. That puts the ball is in the council’s court. In other words, the council must compose and agree upon a detailed process rather than the vaguer “let the people elect the mayor” rhetoric that has ricocheted around the council chamber whenever this has come up.

There is another factor that only arose this past Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. In that case, the court held that a Congressional Redistricting Map was unconstitutional because it was drawn to benefit African American voters which, per the court’s reasoning, illegally discriminated against “non-African American” voters.

The entire rationale of the now unconstitutional redistrict map was to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Ace. Specifically, the plaintiffs had argued that the prior map diluted the votes of minority members which violated Section 2. While the Supreme Court did not expressly invalidate Section 2, they trimmed away the circumstances in which it can be used to leave it entirely ineffective.

This is relevant to Lowell because the basis of the Voting Rights lawsuit against the city was that the old “all at large, winner take all” method of electing councilors violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting the votes of minority voters. With this week’s Supreme Court decision invalidating that as a cause of action, the legal basis of the plaintiffs’ case was extinguished.

Whether the city tries to take advantage of this change in the law is another question. In my view, the Supreme Court’s decision erases the history and context of the Voting Rights Act, but that is nothing new for this court which has found that it is illegal for colleges to consider prior discrimination in the admissions process and that it is illegal for the state to consider prior discrimination in elections when drawing district boundaries while at the same time holding that it is permissible to consider race when detaining an individual  for immigration enforcement and that it is permissible for the president to ban people from countries that are predominantly populated by people of color from entering the United States. In other words, if a law helps members of minority groups it is unconstitutional, but if it harms members of minority groups then it is OK. I’m not sure the council wants to jump aboard that train.

Notwithstanding the role of morality in adopting a legal argument, it’s possible that the mere existence of this new Supreme Court decision may have some unilateral (and detrimental) effect on the Consent Decree, quite apart from anything the city might advocate.

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School Spending – A memo from Conor Baldwin, the Assistant City Manager for Fiscal Affairs, responded to a Councilor Vesna Nuon motion asking for itemized “chargeback expenditures” for the Lowell Public Schools. The memo provided numbers responsive to the motion, but its businesslike tone masks ongoing conflict between the city administration and the public schools over school funding from the city.

Here’s some background: The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 was enacted by the state legislature in response to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in McDuffy v. Secretary of Education. That case held that the Commonwealth’s reliance on local property tax revenue to fund the public schools violated the fundamental right to an education guaranteed by the state constitution since it create vast disparities in resources between wealthy and poor districts.

The new law created a “foundation budget” for every school district that established the minimum amount of money needed to provide an adequate education. To help poorer districts achieve their foundation budgets, the state sent massive amounts of money to school districts like Lowell to help equalize educational opportunities. However, to ensure that municipalities continue to pay their share, the law requires municipalities to spend at least a minimum amount, called Net School Spending, on their schools.

However, the form of the city’s contribution to the schools is flexible with some coming as cash that the school district can spend as it sees fit, and some coming as “in kind services” the value of which are credited towards the city’s mandatory contribution amount. For example, if a DPW worker plows snow from a walkway leading up to the school, the value of that service may be counted towards the city’s net school spending requirement.

In general, the school department would prefer most of the contribution be in the form of cash to give it flexibility in how it is spent, whereas the city would prefer most of the contribution be “in kind” since it is already paying for the employees and equipment doing the in kind services and the more in kind credit is compiled, the less cash has to be given to the schools which would preserve it to pay for city council priorities like paving more streets.

The city cannot unilaterally decide on the cash v. credit mix. Instead, it’s controlled by an agreement between the city and the school department that is ratified and monitored by the state department of education. The agreement currently in effect was executed in 2011, although the city proposed a new agreement earlier this year, however, the school department has not yet accepted it.

Although people in the school department are more tactful about it, there has always been a suspicion that the city holds more leverage in reaching the agreement and that some of the credits allocated for city services are inflated to minimize the cash that the city must contribute to the schools.

Keep all of this in mind in the coming weeks as the School Committee establishes its budget for the coming fiscal year, which will then be sent to the City Council for its approval. Even though the overall school budget for the coming year may be higher than last year’s, the rate of increase in costs exceeds the increase in the budget which will result in a net cut in resources.

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Tree Committee – A longtime quest of the city council to create a citizen Tree Committee is moving towards realization. A memo from Sustainability Director Katherine Moses outlined all the actions that have been taken thus far, and City Manager Tom Golden reported that more than 50 residents have volunteered to serve on the committee.

An urban resident might reflexively think that tree advocacy is more of a suburban thing than an urban priority, but the fact is that trees are essential for a community like Lowell. Trees help combat “urban heat islands” that harm the health of residents and increase energy costs. Trees also help manage stormwater runoff and enhance property values. Also, Lowell has been harmed by the irresponsible cutting down of clusters of trees by private developers and paving contractors, so a committee could set ground rules for cutting down trees and then monitor enforcement of those rules.

The memo predicts that an ordinance creating the tree committee will be ready for council action by the end of this month with the tree committee established the following month.

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This week in Seen & Heard, I reviewed the 2024 book, “Kent State: An American Tragedy” by Brian VanDemark; I commented on a New Yorker article by Louis Menand called “How to Lose a War” which identified disturbing parallels between the start of the U.S. war in Vietnam and the current conflict against Iran; and I wrote of my enjoyment with a Boston Globe Op-Ed by Lowell’s Steve O’Connor, “My dog doesn’t read your lawn signs.”

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Back in 1987, a team from the American Folklife Center came to Lowell to conduct a months-long study that became known as the Lowell Folklife Project. The researchers documented ethnic neighborhoods, occupations, and community life in Lowell with a particular emphasis on the newly arrived Cambodian residents of the city.

Earlier this year, a representative from the American Folklife Center returned to Lowell for the March Khmer Diaspora Conference held at Middlesex Community College. As part of the conference, I joined with Sanary Phen, the executive director of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association, to lead a walking tour through the Cambodia Town neighborhood.

Now, the American Folklife Center representative has written about the conference and the tour in the context of the earlier project. Her article is available on the Library of Congress website. It includes photos and recordings of Lowell’s Cambodian community from 40 years ago and is well worth checking out. Here’s the link.

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Finally, Bob Forrant and I are teaming up to lead a free walking tour on Lowell and World War II to be held on Saturday, May 23, 2026, at 10am from the Lowell National Historical Park Visitor Center at 246 Market Street. The tour will take approximately 90 minutes and requires no advanced registration. Just show up.