The most important actions at Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting were brief and procedural with the council formally accepting the following items and scheduling them all for public hearings at upcoming meetings. These include:

• Accept timely submission of FY27 budget
• Appropriate the money to fund that budget
• To borrow $25 million for capital improvements
• To borrow $5 million for parking garage repairs
• To create a Lowell Water and Sewer Department by combining the Lowell Regional Wastewater Utility and the Lowell Regional Water Utility and created the new position of Chief Utility Officer to lead the new department.
• To amend the sewer rate for FY27
• To amend the water rate for FY27

The public hearing on the budget is scheduled for Tuesday, May 26, 2026. In recent years, council budget sessions have been relatively brief affairs with councilors mostly deferring to the judgment of the city manager. While there are fiscal challenges with every budget, this one seems like it will be particularly painful, especially with the elimination of existing positions and employees, so councilors may question this budget more aggressively than has been the case in recent years.

Related to that, the lead story in Friday’s Lowell Sun carried the headline, “Major layoffs hit Lowell: Proposed budget cuts 50, including police and fire” by Melanie Gilbert. Among the jobs to be cut immediately, according to the article, are six firefighters, five police department employees, six from DPW, 13 from Health and Human Services, and six from MIS. Additional jobs are to be eliminated through attrition, which I take to mean when someone retires or leaves for another job, their position will not be filled.

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The most controversial topic that arose on Tuesday was funding for nonprofits. A report from the council’s Non-Profit Organizations Subcommittee from its May 5, 2026, meeting, and a handful of council motions that flowed from that meeting brought the matter to the floor. The issue is that local nonprofits that believed they were to receive funding this year ultimately had that funding denied by the city. The loss of the expected funding has left these organizations in precarious financial condition and has angered city councilors who on Tuesday were questioning the competence and veracity of city officials.

Like so much of the chaos that engulfs the world today, the proximate cause of this crisis is the Trump regime. Let me explain:

The funding in question is the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, a mechanism for the federal government to provide annual grants to state and local governments to help them deal with the challenges of urban communities. The program was established in the 1970s and is administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Lowell receives its annual funding directly from HUD and has significant flexibility in how it uses those funds. For example, for two decades a major expenditure of CDBG funds by Lowell has been to pay rent for the Senior Center (with the technicalities of CDBG funding a big contributor to the ongoing controversy surrounding the Senior Center, but that’s a topic for another day).

The city has also allocated CDBG grants to nonprofits in the city. However, when President Trump took office in January 2025, he immediately issued an executive order barring any federal money from going to organizations that supported DEI programs, equity plans, environmental justice, or many of the other values that are at the core of the mission of many nonprofits.

In the past, I’ve written about the moral dilemma this poses to nonprofits: Do they stand by their values and lose federal funding that allows them to keep operating; or do they erase banned words, concepts and terms from their mission statements, websites, and grant applications to access essential funding. Because the loss of funding would pose an existential threat to their continued existence, some nonprofits chose the latter course.

These organizations prepared grant applications that were on their face in compliance with the Trump executive order and then submitted them to the city for a type of pre-review. The feedback from the city to the nonprofits seemed to have been mostly positive but also conditional. However, when the city’s Department of Planning and Development, which administers CDBG funding locally, sought further guidance from HUD (the federal agency that oversees the program), none was forthcoming. The city received no answers from the feds.

The city faces twin dilemmas: First, Lowell is essentially a guarantor of these grants. If the city disperses money to a nonprofit and then HUD, after the fact, deems the nonprofit to have been ineligible, the city will have to pay back the money to HUD. Perhaps the city could also pull back the money from the nonprofit, but by the time HUD acted, it’s likely the money would already be spent so the chances of the city getting reimbursed by the nonprofit would be slim.

The second dilemma is that it is not enough to simply “scrub” current applications, websites, and other materials of the “offending” DEI-type language. It is my understanding that HUD and other federal agencies retroactively search for “obscured” DEI language, meaning grant recipients that may have changed the language they use post Trump executive order, but which had previously used such language. Since it’s almost certain that the nonprofits now scrubbing DEI language formerly embraced it, especially in prior grant applications that would still be on file with HUD, the risk that new grants would be disallowed by HUD for past DEI language is high, further increasing the fiscal jeopardy the city would face.

With that in mind, City Manager Tom Golden’s response to councilors was that he took a more conservative approach and “erred on the side of caution” in not approving any of these CDBG grants at the city level. As much as this harms the nonprofits and the people they serve, it seems like a prudent course for the city from a fiscal stability perspective given the erratic and harmful course of the federal government these days.

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The council received an update on the portion of the Riverwalk that runs along the Merrimack behind the Massachusetts Mills. Back in March 2024, a portion of the Main Power Building collapsed onto the Riverwalk which has been closed ever since for safety reasons. A letter from Mullins Real Estate Development which owns Mass Mills (and has, since it was first renovated in the 1980s), explained that reopening the Riverwalk is directly linked to the redevelopment of the Power Building and that construction is not expected to begin until next spring. Although disappointed in that timeline, councilors seemed to accept there is no alternative under all the circumstances.

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This week in my Seen & Heard column, I wrote about last weekend’s Doors Open Lowell; the obituary of Dean Tavoularis, an Oscar-winning native of Lowell; an article on the success of two print publications when so many others are failing; and commented on a review of the Venice Biennale, a big international art show.

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In observance of Memorial Day, this coming Saturday, May 23, 2026, Bob Forrant and I will lead a free walking tour of downtown Lowell on the topic of Lowell in World War II. The walk begins at 10am from the National Park Visitor Center at 246 Market Street. The tour will take approximately 90 minutes and requires no advanced registration. Just show up.

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Also related to Memorial Day, my latest book, Regret to Inform You: The Human Cost of WWII in Lowell, Mass. is now available. The book examines the lives of the 441 servicemembers from Lowell who died during World War II, whose names are inscribed on bronze tablets in the Lowell Memorial Auditorium.

The book is available for purchase online here and lala books on Market Street is expected to have several copies for sale.

A PDF version is also available for free on my website for those who prefer an ebook.