The Lowell City Council last met on Tuesday, August 11, 2026. I was away that week, so I was unable to write about that meeting on the following Sunday. However, I have since watched a recording of the meeting on YouTube and will write about it here.

The council covered many topics with no single issue dominating the meeting. Consequently, here are some comments on a range of things covered that night:

Separate motions on the structure of council subcommittees, one by Councilor Belinda Juran and the other by Councilor Dan Rourke, were discussed together. A big challenge is scheduling and holding subcommittee meetings. Each subcommittee meeting requires someone from the City Clerk’s office to be present to take minutes and do all the other things the clerk’s office is responsible for. Also, subcommittee meetings typically require the presence of other city employees so their schedules and availability must be considered.

I also believe everyone values recording the meeting on video so residents who can’t attend the meeting can see what’s going on. Since two rooms at city hall – the city council chamber and the mayor’s reception room – are outfitted with cameras and recording capabilities, meetings must be held in one of them. However, subcommittees compete with the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Conservation Commission, the License Commission and other boards and commissions whose meetings are recorded.

Councilor Rourke identified the number of subcommittees as an obstacle. According to the city’s website, here are the current council subcommittees:

1. Arts & Culture/Special Events
2. Auditor & Clerk Oversight & Personnel
3. Cannabis Control
4. Economic Development
5. Environment & Flood Issues
6. Finance
7. Frontrunner City Program
8. Housing
9. Municipal Facilities
10. Neighborhoods
11. Non-profit Organizations
12. Parks & Recreation
13. Public Safety
14. Rules & Election Law
15. Senior Citizen
16. Substance Abuse
17. Technology & Utilities
18. Transportation
19. Veterans
20. Youth Services
21. Zoning

That’s 21 subcommittees, each with a chair and two members.

Councilor Rourke suggested the existing 21 could be consolidated into six subcommittees and that membership could be increased to five councilors (making the quorum needed to hold a meeting just three). He further suggested that if the council were to make its summertime two-meetings-per-month permanent, the off weeks could be used for subcommittee meetings.

Councilor Juran’s motion was directed to the Rules Subcommittee while Rourke’s was a suggestion to the entire council, so it’s unclear when these will return to a regular council meeting. Still, it will be interesting to hear further discussion of the pros and cons of this concept.

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At the July 28, 2026, meeting the city council rejected City Manager Tom Golden’s request to transfer money to the city’s Health and Human Services Department so it can continue to pay its lease at 107 Merrimack Street. That night, the vote to make the transfer was seven in favor and four against so at first, everyone assumed it had passed. But someone immediately spoke up and said the transfer required a two-third majority to pass. That would have been eight votes. It only received seven, so the ruling was the transfer failed.

At this meeting, Councilor Sean McDonough, one of the four councilors to oppose the transfer back on July 28, had a motion to reconsider that vote. (A motion to reconsider can only be made by someone who was on the prevailing side of the original vote which McDonough was since he voted against the transfer.)

The discussion on the motion to reconsider unearthed multiple points of confusion. First, it seems that the original vote did not need a super majority to prevail but just a simple majority. With seven votes, it did achieve a simple majority so it should have been deemed to have passed that evening. When asked about the consequences of that, the City Solicitor advised that even though the original ruling on the need for a super majority was incorrect, no councilor challenged it that evening, so there was no recourse to now correct the ruling.

Next, both the city manager and the city solicitor suggested that the “cleanest way” to revisit this was for the city manager to bring the same vote back to the council at its next meeting. That prompted questions about the finality of council votes. If councilors vote against something, can it just be brought back repeatedly until a different result is achieved? That doesn’t seem quite right but wasn’t acknowledged as an impediment. (Perhaps the erroneous ruling on the first try distinguishes this issue.)

Then, the city manager explained that the contemplated move of the HHS department from 107 Merrimack Street to the city-owned building at 40 Market Street required negotiations with the union employees affected by the move since it would constitute a change in working conditions. I believe those negotiations have been scheduled but not held as of the August 11th meeting.

Finally, Councilor McDonough asked, if the same vote was coming back to the council anyway, was there a need to act on his motion to reconsider the original vote, or would it even be advisable to vote on the motion to reconsider. It seemed with no other way to dispose of the motion, a roll call was taken, and 10 councilors supported the motion to reconsider while none opposed it (Council Kim Scott was not at the meeting). I assume this means some of the councilors who opposed the transfer are now willing to support it, but one never knows until the next vote is taken.

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Councilors were officially notified at this meeting that the Cambodia Town neighborhood of Lowell has been designated a Transformative Development Initiative (TDI) district by MassDevelopment. This is a program intended to help targeted commercial districts in Gateway Cities in Massachusetts.

The designation provides several types of support over its three-year existence. First, it funds a “TDI Fellow” which is a fulltime employee with economic development training who is assigned to the community to help coordinate between local government, small business owners, property owners, and nonprofits. Second, the TDI designation makes technical and planning assistance from the state available. Third, TDI provides funding and grants for storefront improvement, placemaking projects, and some financing.

The TDI program is highly competitive which makes it extra impressive that the city landed this one for Cambodia Town since Lowell was the beneficiary of a TDI designation for the Acre back in 2022. I won’t get into the details of all the benefits that brought except to confirm that it did bring many benefits to the Acre neighborhood, benefits that will hopefully be duplicated in Cambodia Town (which for those unfamiliar with the place, includes the Middlesex and Branch Street stretches near Clemente Park and Pailin Plaza and, I believe, Cupples Square.)

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The council also received a report looking back on the employee layoffs that occurred in June. In all, 23 city employees lost their jobs which the administration calculates saved $1.9 million in the current fiscal year.

The report goes into considerable detail about the process that was followed, the timeline, and the factors considered in making the decisions. It also explains how most of the city budget comes from fixed costs that cannot be cut. This puts greater pressure on non-discretionary items such as salaries.

As for lessons learned, the report identified three. (Since I don’t fully understand exactly what two of them mean, I’ll include all three verbatim from the report):

• More frequent mid-year budget updates to departments to reduce the scale of year-end adjustments.
• Enhanced communication with unions and department leaders regarding fiscal conditions and potential workforce impacts.
• Additional cross-departmental workforce planning to minimize reductions in force.

Although I didn’t see it in the report, City Manager Golden explained that the abrupt notification of the effected employees was driven by the timing of the presentation of the budget to councilors. Someone realized at the last minute that since the proposed budget would omit the names of the employees who were being laid off, once the budget document became public, the absence of those employee names from the document would indicate that they were to lose their jobs. Since employees finding that out from the media or from seeing something online would be terrible, the administration speedily notified the employees in person on an accelerated timeline, hence the hurried nature of the notifications.

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Another interesting report dealt with the procedure for making a claim for damage caused by a pothole or a plow. The report provides considerable detail on how to make a claim and what type of supporting documentation would help resolve the claim quickly.

Importantly, it states that if the damage occurred on a state-owned road, the claim must be presented to the state and not to the city. (Although the state is only liable for personal injuries, not property damage, so it would have to have been a very big pothole.)

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A couple of other council meeting items to briefly note:

In a discussion on the state of upkeep of the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center, City Manager Golden mentioned that a challenge to finding a new use (and owner) of the property is that it’s “underwater.” In real estate, that usually means the property owner owes more money to its lender than the property is now worth. In this case, I think it meant the property is worth less now than when the University of Massachusetts Building Authority bought it. To confirm that, I looked at the numbers. In 2009, UMBA paid $14.8 million to the prior owner, LHG LLC. According to the city assessor’s website, the ICC is now assessed for $10.1 million (which is $4.7 million less than the state paid for the property 17 years ago). Golden added that the value deficit is a substantial obstacle to the redevelopment of the property.

Another issue was identified during a discussion of the recent Puerto Rican Festival which turned out to be less than the organizers had hoped due, in part, to communication problems with the city. I couldn’t follow all the details, but it seemed like the organizers had used the city’s online reservation website to reserve the dates, thought they had everything confirmed, and proceeded accordingly. However, there was an unpaid bill for police services at a prior festival, so the city did not deem the event reservation to be finalized because of that unpaid bill. But because of turnover among the organizers, the current group was unaware of the unpaid bill and was relying on the confirmed reservation from the website, hence the confusion. It seems like the city’s reservation system should flag past due bills to avoid a replay of this in the future.

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This week in my Seen & Heard column, I reviewed a big new exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts called “American Stories: Revolution to Rockwell”; I commented on a blog post on “Why the Backlash Against Data Centers is So Potent”; noted a NYT article on unacknowledged brain injuries sustained by crewmembers of Coast Guard life boats; reviewed a book on The Enlightenment (which I read because I feel our current national trajectory is dragging us back to the Middle Ages in many ways); and analyzed the consequences of adopting Daylight Savings Time during the entire year.

I’ll be leading several Lowell history tours in the coming weeks for anyone who is interested:

Saturday, September 12, 2026, at 10am – Walking tour of the Tyler Park Historic District. The tour is free with no registration required. Just meet at the park. This tour is part of the Friends of Tyler Park “Autumn Market.” (For GPS purposes, Tyler Park’s address is 748 Westford Street.)

Saturday, September 26 & Sunday, September 27, 2026, both at 10am – Walking tour of Lowell Cemetery. The tour takes 90 minutes and begins at the Lawrence Street entrance to the cemetery. It is free and requires no registration. The same tour is offered on both days.

Saturday, October 17, 2026 – “Secrets of Lowell Cemetery” tour which is part of the of the Poe in Lowell Festival. Edgar Allan Poe came to Lowell at least three times to lecture but also to spend time with a female friend who is buried in Lowell Cemetery. Learn their story and the stories of others involved in their orbit. This tour is free and begins at the Knapp Avenue entrance of the cemetery (77 Knapp Avenue).