We’ll start with a housekeeping announcement: Due to the ongoing storm, I postponed this weekend’s tours of Lowell Cemetery. They will now be held next weekend, Saturday, October 3 and Sunday, October 4, 2026, both starting at 10 a.m. from the Lawrence Street Gate (same tour both days).

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The Lowell City Council met on Tuesday night. The biggest news to emerge from the meeting was the resignation of Councilor Dan Rourke, who announced his departure from the council at the end of the meeting. With the help of YouTube, I’ve transcribed Rourke’s remarks here. (They can be seen and heard in full starting at 3:52:50 of the YouTube recording of the meeting.)

I’m here with great humility and a heavy heart and a deep sense of gratitude, but this evening I announced my resignation from the Lowell City Council effective immediately. I will submit my letter to the clerk tomorrow morning.

Serving the people of Lowell has been the greatest privilege of my life. When I took the oath of office, my goal was simple. It was to listen to our neighborhoods, fight for the families, and help our historic city move forward. Whether we’re debating neighborhood revitalization, working to improve local schools, navigating through tough budgets, or even a very difficult high school location battle, I truly believe that my decisions were right and were best for the city. I think we have accomplished a lot together over the past number of years. We’ve worked to support small businesses, invest in our parks, infrastructure, and keep our community very connected through challenging times.

I’m very respectful of all the councilors who I’ve served with, and this council as well. I understand that we have differences of opinion, but passion remains constant with everybody. It took me a while to respect that, but I’m glad that I was able to.

But I do want to make a special mention of what I feel was the most important vote that I have taken as my time as a city councilor and that was the vote to make Tom Golden our city manager. I still feel today as I did on that day in March of 2022 that he was, has been, and remains the right person for the job.

The accomplishments of this council in the city of Lowell working together alongside the administration have been unprecedented. Over the past five to six years, we have done things here in the city that have not been done before. We’re talking roads, 311, traffic improvements, finally getting over the high school debate. It’s all been for the betterment of the city and a positive. The team that the manager has put in place I believe is second to none in the state. You are all extremely talented and dedicated professionals that I’m sorry to leave.

The city of Lowell obviously succeeds when we all work together as a council, as an administration, and along with the public. I’m not hopeful that this will continue, but I know it will.

Public service does require an incredible amount of energy and time from elected officials but also from our family and friends behind us. I could not serve the city as a councilor and as a mayor for a single day without the sacrifices of our close friends but also of my family behind me. I’m very fortunate to have a wonderful family, parents, brothers, extended cousins, so forth that have been here every step of the way that still remain close to me today.

And I’d be remiss not to mention my wife, April. She is the rock not just of me, but of the family, my sounding board, the constant support for everything that I’ve gone through. and just very, very lucky to have her, Haley and Zachary, to be supportive. Having kids at a young age and being fortunate to have them grow up with a father that’s a city councilor or public official I think is a benefit to them because they get to know what the city is all about. They get to go to different events. They get to meet different people, different ethnic backgrounds. They’re not stuck in the same place. I’m very proud of them too for expanding their horizons and being part of the city at a very young age and hopefully they stay involved as well. But, you know, I’m not here today without April, Haley, and Zach to keep me grounded most of the time, but also to be there when I need their attention and just to listen to me.

At this point in time, it wouldn’t be fair to the city to continue while not being all in, so I wanted to give someone an opportunity through the election process to consider a run to take a seat over for the course of a year and then decide going forward what that person wants to do but obviously Pawtucketville deserves someone as soon as possible. I hope through the mayor and the administration they can get that process started.

A special thanks to this particular council that I’ve served with for the past couple of terms and in the new council since January. The spirit of the debates, just a few minutes ago, the shared late nights in the collective dedication that we do all have and share that is something that I’ll always take with me going forward, and believe it or not, I am thankful for that.

The dedicated city employees, not just the city administration but the people that work at city hall, our first responders, those at DPW, I’ve gotten to know a lot of them personally over the years and a lot of them have become very close friends of mine. People that I wouldn’t trade those friendships with for anybody for any reason. They keep Lowell running every day and they make us what we are. We are the greatest city in the Commonwealth and I’m just very fortunate and happy to be a very small, small part of that. You all, going forward, continue to do what you do best and that’s push Lowell forward. I am just very thankful to be a part of these teams over the past years and this team here as well.

I do leave with no regrets but a very deep appreciation for the city that I was born in, that I grew up, in that I raised my family in. There’s no other place I’d rather live, work and raise a family than Lowell, Massachusetts. I know Lowell’s future is bright with the mayor and the city manager’s leadership and with this council. I wish nothing but the best: wisdom, courage and all the success in the world to keep it going.

It’s just time, Mr. Mayor. So, thank you for the opportunity for point of privilege. God bless all of you. God bless the city of Lowell and all the best going forward.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Rourke was elected to the council as a first-time candidate in 2013 and was easily reelected in 2015. During that term he became perhaps the leading council supporter of building a new high school at Cawley Stadium, however, a majority of voters felt otherwise and in the 2017 election, they replaced Rourke and other Cawley-supporters with candidates who favored renovating the downtown high school. However, Rourke won back a council seat in 2019 and has been there ever since, being reelected to represent the Pawtucketville District last fall without opposition. In January 2024, Rourke was elected by his council colleagues to serve a two-year term as mayor.

Under the city’s current election rules, since the council vacancy occurred in the first year of the term, a special election must be held within 120 days of the vacancy, but I’ll write more about that in next Sunday’s newsletter.

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Earlier on Tuesday evening, the council revisited the city’s Flock surveillance cameras in a pair of motions. The first, by Councilors Kim Scott and Vesna Nuon, would have the city suspend its use of the Flock system “while the city completes a thorough policy review of its usage, the company’s use of data and the audit process of the data.” The second motion, by Mayor Erik Gitschier and Councilor Corey Robinson, asked for a list of “suitable alternatives to Flock that don’t share information to any kind of database.”

The Scott/Nuon motion to suspend usage dominated the discussion and eventually passed on a six to five vote. Supporting the suspension of Flock were Councilors Nuon, Scott, Belinda Juran, Sidney Liang, Sean McDonough and Mayor Erik Gitschier. Voting to continue using Flock without interruption were Councilors Sokhary Chau, John Descoteaux, Rita Mercier, Corey Robinson and Dan Rourke.

The Lowell Telecommunications Corporation recording of the meeting captured all of its 4 hours and15 minutes EXCEPT for a seven-minute stretch that included the roll call vote on this motion. (LTC later posted a statement that attributed the gap to a technical glitch with their equipment.)

Despite the seven-minute video outage, much of the council discussion was recorded. I’ll try to summarize the various viewpoints here but if you want to listen to each councilor who spoke (and who wasn’t cut off by the gap), it begins at 2:09:13 of the YouTube recording.

Most of the councilors who voted to suspend the system were not opposed to these types of cameras in general but had concerns about how the company (Flock) was using the data. Council Kim Scott cited the utility of the cameras in solving some crimes and curtailing illegal dumping, but she said that the experience in Boston was troubling to her. (In Boston, it’s been reported, the city wanted to refrain from sharing its data, but the data was shared anyway.) “We have civilian privacy rights and a very vulnerable population in this city, that’s who I’m concerned about,” Scott said. Other councilors who voted to suspend voiced similar concerns about who can access the data collected.

Councilors who opposed the suspension did not dismiss that argument outright but felt that the council should wait until they are briefed by the Lowell police superintendent during an upcoming executive session of the council before shutting off the cameras even if only temporarily.

Councilor Sean McDonough expressed the strongest sentiments against the Flock system (at 2:46:15 of the recording). Here’s what he said:

I don’t like these things. I truly don’t like them.  I don’t like them for a lot of the reasons that people who spoke tonight expressed. I do understand that they are a tool. They are a valuable tool. There are a lot of tools. It doesn’t always mean that we should use them. I’m not going to argue for the outright ban. I’m not, because I would be me by myself and I can read a room.

I do think that this is a sensible motion. I think listening to my colleagues tonight on both sides of this motion, it does seem like we do all agree that we don’t fully understand what the use policy is, that we acknowledge that there are some risks. I think where those risks are seems to start getting a little wishy-washy, but everybody so far has acknowledged that there’s a risk around data sharing, that there’s a risk around potential harm depending on where that data is shared.

Some have expressed that this particular company does seem to be doing exactly, Mr. Mayor, what you stated, which is they are the cheapest game in town. And in – there was a speaker tonight who wants to talk about smart TVs and social media, all of which is a personal choice. But often times, when we’re talking about tech, if it’s free or cheap, there’s a reason. It’s because the thing that you’re using isn’t the product. Your data is the product.

I don’t think that anybody on this council, and this is not a knock. I looked. I went back and I looked. When was this implemented? What was the discussion? What did it look like? Nobody knew what these things were. It actually, it wasn’t – unless I missed a meeting somewhere, there was no major discussion. It was license plate readers, a fairly common policing tool. Here’s a new bid. It’s a great tool. and here they go. And now we’re seeing that there’s a number of problems with them.

We’re seeing that we don’t know where the data is going. And my colleagues have put the motion in front of us. It does use the word suspend. Yes, but it’s not time bound. If the makers of the motion wanted to time bound this thing and say a 90-day suspension, but I think what it does is it says if this is such a valuable tool to the police department, we have another meeting in 2 weeks. This is a conversation that has been ongoing actually for a number of months and we haven’t gotten there. So, I actually I think we owe it to the residents of the city who have expressed a concern here. We have been engaged in this conversation for a number of months. We hit the pause button and we say come back in two if this is if this is that valuable, you come back in two weeks and tell us what the policy is. because we don’t have answers. We seem to have gotten here by accident. It’s not a forever ban. It’s just a pause. So I would support this tonight.

This Flock issue first arose a month ago when a resident used a citizen petition to get the issue before the council. I wrote about it in the second half of my August 30, 2026, newsletter where you can reread that discussion along with background information on the Flock system.

I agreed with Tuesday’s outcome although I wish more councilors had supported the suspension of Flock. In fact, I’m probably most aligned with Councilor McDonough’s position.

Much of the discussion thus far has missed the point. We’ve read numerous reports from elsewhere in Massachusetts and around the country of rogue police officers misusing the system to stalk ex-spouses and their companions. This is clearly wrong but it’s also something that should be easily stopped or at least easily discovered with the wrongdoer being punished. I expect advocates of Flock in Lowell will promote strict limits on who can use the system locally which they will say addresses concerns about this kind of improper data access. That will be sufficient for some councilors.

The harm I’m most concerned about is misuse of Lowell’s data by the federal government. If the city’s data is hosted by Flock, which is how the system works, it is vulnerable to being accessed either directly or indirectly by other entities. The city may check a box that limits access to the data, but whether that limit is respected relies on a leap of faith. Even if the hosting company is not purposely sharing Lowell’s data against the wishes of the city, there’s a risk of inadvertent disclosure.

Perhaps a larger risk is for Lowell to unknowingly authorize access to unintended recipients. For instance, on Thursday, the Lowell Sun reported that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service is among the agencies with access to Lowell’s data, and that since April 2025, that agency has been part of a Department of Homeland Security task force performing federal immigration enforcement and deportation operations. (“Lowell suspends use of Flock cameras” by Melanie Gilbert in Lowell Sun, September 24, 2026.) Is the city council OK with that?

Furthermore, the consequence of granting limited access to other entities is unclear. For example, on Tuesday night, City Manager Golden told councilors that the city has granted access to its data to other law enforcement agencies in New England and New York. Does that include federal law enforcement agencies in those regions? Does sharing the data with the New Hampshire State Police, for instance, create a portal through which others can view the data?

Presumably Flock will assure the city that none of that can happen, but in this instance, our standard should be, “trust, but verify.” However, since independent verification would likely be impossible, I don’t see how the city can assure residents their data will not be shared.

In the aftermath of 9-11, America turned to mass surveillance, purportedly to keep us safe. In some respects, the sheer enormity of the data collected allowed such practices to be dismissed as almost benign. The flood of information made it impractical for the government to use it against any one random person.

But two things have changed that calculation. The first is artificial intelligence. AI can analyze huge amounts of data in a few seconds which makes it easy to target an individual or small group. In the past couple of years, the ability for someone to misuse our data has gone from extremely remote to completely feasible.

At the same time, a regime that has repeatedly shown a willingness to use the resources of federal law enforcement to punish its political opponents and persecute immigrants has come to power in our country. All that data no longer seems benign.

We live in an age of surveillance capitalism. The cost to us of a mobile phone or a smart TV is subsidized by the value of the data those devices collect and share about us. If it were feasible to opt out of that, most of us would, but we need phones and TVs. Billion-dollar companies like Apple and Meta don’t care what we think because we’ll keep buying their products since we don’t have much of a choice.

That calculation is different when it comes to Flock cameras. Just as with data centers, Flock cameras require the concurrence of local government, and it is with local government that small groups of concerned citizens have the most power. You’re not trying to get Google to change its policies; you’re trying to get the Lowell City Council to change theirs. Whether the residents of Lowell take advantage of the opportunity to push back against this national phenomenon at the local level remains to be seen.

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This week in my Seen & Heard column, I wrote about a museum to cable TV that closed its doors due to the shrinkage of the cable television industry; noted a Boston Globe article about Flock permitted access to data from cameras in Boston despite Boston’s policy to not share the data; shared impressions on a podcast interview with former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick who was blackballed by the league for his social justice advocacy; and commented on a New York Times article on how the US response to 9-11 helped make Iran a potent Mideastern power.

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Here’s some info on some Lowell Walks I’ll be leading this fall:

NEW DATES – Saturday, October 3 & Sunday, October 4, 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, at 10am – “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).