Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting was devoted almost exclusively to the council’s review of the proposed FY27 city budget. The council opted to review the budget department-by-department and worked diligently for three hours until the mandatory meeting stop time of 10 pm arrived. A vote to keep going failed and the budget hearing was continued to next Tuesday, June 2, 2026, at 6 pm.

In last week’s newsletter I wrote that an early motion by Councilor Dan Rourke during the May 19 meeting to “table” a transfer of money into the fire department overtime account signaled difficulties with the fire department budget. This week, Rourke made an early motion to take that transfer “off the table” which passed unanimously as did the substantive vote on the transfer, signaling that the impasse had been overcome, if only temporarily.

While these two votes dealt with overtime spending which in turn is driven by absenteeism, the primary cause of the current friction was City Manager Tom Golden’s plan to lay off six firefighters as part of citywide layoffs of personnel to achieve a balanced budget for the coming fiscal year.

Sometime since last week’s meeting, Golden and the president of the firefighter’s union had a one-on-one meeting and reached an accommodation that avoids any firefighter layoffs in exchange for an ambiguous promise by the union to, according to Golden, “work with their members to explore opportunities to financially assist the city and to try to lower overtime costs.”

The president of the firefighter’s union then spoke. While he complemented the city manager for meeting again after the recent impasse and for finding a way to avoid fire department layoffs, he also made it clear that issues remained. He emphasized the need to maintain 203 firefighters in the city.

An article in Thursday’s Lowell Sun clarified why the union so firmly defended that number. “City Council restores 6 firefighter positions to Lowell budget” by Melanie Gilbert covered the council’s Tuesday evening ratification of the city manager’s revised fire department budget that dispensed with the six layoffs. The Sun story then added an important detail: Last week, the fire union sued the city over the proposed layoffs and obtained a preliminary injunction from a Superior Court judge that ordered the city to “fund minimum-staffing requirements for the Lowell Fire Department as agreed upon in Article XV, Section 5 and 6 of the collective bargaining agreement between the City and the Union for fiscal year 2027.”

Earlier Tuesday evening, some councilors had alluded to a court order, but it was unclear to me what they were talking about until the Sun article appeared. Not having seen the contract nor the complaint filed with the court to initiate the lawsuit, it’s hard to comment on the merits of either.

I will say that the standard for obtaining a court injunction is steep. One requirement is that the judge find the plaintiff has a likelihood of success on the merits of the dispute. Also, for a judge to order a legislative body (the city council) to fund a particular department seems like an extreme measure given the concept of separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches. For a judge to have ruled this way suggests it was a black and white issue of contract law. That in turn prompts the question, why did the city administration try to do this when the proposed firefighter layoffs, according to the motion judge at least, would be a clear violation of the union contract.

I think most councilors were more interested in getting this dispute behind them, so no one asked that question, at least not publicly. (And given council sentiments, it’s likely the layoffs would have been rescinded even without the court order.)

One question that was asked was how will the salaries of the six un-laid off firefighters be paid? Where did that additional money come from?

To make the math work, the city’s budget writers jumped on the slippery slope of boosting their projected revenue, specifically the amount of state aid the city is expected to receive.

How the state budget is finalized is a secretive backroom process controlled by a handful of legislative leaders. Here’s how I understand it to work: Early in the spring, the governor announces their budget recommendation for the fiscal year. Legislators pay no attention to that document. Instead, each branch of the legislature – the State Senate and the House of Representatives – issues their own budget proposals. Those two documents are the foundation of the final state budget. If both the House and the Senate agree on a line-item amount, then that amount is likely to carry over to the final state budget.

But what if the numbers differ? Then the disputed line item goes to a “conference committee” which I believe consists of the Senate president, the speaker of the House, the chairs of the two ways and means committee, and probably the Secretary of Administration and Finance. This committee meets in private and resolves the disputed line-items. Sometimes the House number prevails; sometimes the Senate number does; and other times there’s some compromise number. While the state fiscal year begins on July 1, 2026, the legislature rarely finalizes its budget by that date. In recent years, it has been finalized in mid-July, but it could be later.

Which brings us back to the Lowell city budget. The House budget had a lower amount for local aid than the Senate budget. Because Lowell prudently opts to be conservative in its revenue projections, the original city budget proposal used the lower House number. Now, to pay for the six firefighters whose layoffs were to be rescinded, the city simply swapped the lower House number with the higher Senate number, hoping that the higher number is the one that emerges from the conference committee. If it does not, then the city will have to make further cuts or dip into its reserve fund to make up the difference.

****

Councilors asked many questions during the three-hour meeting, but only a few attempts were made to cut anything from the budget. As far as I could tell, only one – a reduction of $15,000 – was made.

A handful of councilors tried to identify nonessential items in the hope that sufficient savings could be found to reduce the number of employees who were laid off. While it’s understandable that councilors want to keep city employees from losing their jobs, I don’t recall any framing of proposed cuts to reduce the size of government and thereby lessen the tax burden on residents.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a hypocrite who is happy to receive government services but then balks at paying for them. I appreciate all that government does for me and the community and I acknowledge those services must be paid for. But I am a realist when it comes to the cost of providing those services. The primary driver of the cost of local government has always been salaries. Employees should be paid a living wage and, to attract and retain top quality employees, the salaries paid should be competitive. However, to do that, the rate of increase of salaries and benefits will always exceed the amount of new revenue, so the only way to keep things in balance is to gradually shrink the size of the city workforce while simultaneously using technology and innovative management to increase the quantity and quality of services delivered to the public. At some point, that is unsustainable, but my sense is the city is nowhere near that point. In fact, it seems that the city remains on a trajectory to add positions, not cut them, notwithstanding the recent layoffs.

In any case, the council will resume its review of the budget on Tuesday night. I’ll report on what happens in next Sunday’s newsletter.

****

This week in my Seen & Heard column, I reported on last Saturday’s “Lowell in World War II” walking tour which drew 30 people; commented on an America’s Bookclub interview of Candice Millard, a best selling American historian; I reported on the big Google I/O conference at which the company announced big changes to its search function; I reviewed the final episode of The Late Show with Steven Colbert; and noted the obituary of former Congressman Barney Frank.