RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Politics: November 9, 2025

The Lowell City Council met last Tuesday night but since it was also election day the meeting lasted just 7 minutes and 40 seconds with little to report. However, there is plenty to report on the election.

The big story is that the voters of Lowell replaced three of eleven city councilors. In District 4, first time candidate Sean McDonough defeated incumbent Wayne Jenness, and in District 7, newcomer Sidney Liang defeated incumbent Paul Ratha Yem.

There will also be a new councilor from District 3 since incumbent Corey Belanger was eliminated in the preliminary election. On Tuesday, Belinda Juran defeated Dan Finn by a handful of votes. Of course, Belanger’s incumbency comes with a footnote because he had not been elected by the voters of this district but was instead appointed by the other councilors to fill the vacancy created when John Leahy resigned from the council. It’s fair to speculate that had Leahy remained on the council and sought reelection, he likely would have been unopposed as he was two years ago and as three of his former colleagues were this year.

The second big story from Tuesday was the poor turnout. Just 8,494 of 77,624 registered voters cast ballots. Admittedly, that is an improvement from the last city election in which only 7,516 people voted, but these two elections are first and second in the list of lowest city election turnouts since the Civil War. For historical context, in the 1961 city council election. 34,495 of 49,000 registered voters cast ballots, which is 73 percent turnout.

Getting back to who won and who lost, it is impossible to definitively judge what factors proved decisive in the outcome of this or any election. In general, I think residents were mostly satisfied with the direction of the city. If that had not been the case, you would have seen more candidates running. As it was, three of eight incumbent district councilors faced no opposition, and no district school committee incumbents were challenged.

All politics is local, as the saying goes. That is especially true in the geographically small, low-turnout district races. It doesn’t take many residents saying, “they’re never around” about an incumbent to put one’s candidacy at risk. Similarly, some issue that may be intensely important to a small group of people in a compact geographic area but is contrary to the bests interests of the city can be an electoral minefield for a district councilor (which is one of critiques of the district system).

On the other hand, in the age of Trump, national issues loom over everything. As we saw on Tuesday in results across the country, there was a pent-up desire to express displeasure with the direction of the country. That was apparent weeks and months ago in the huge numbers of people who participated in the No Kings rallies, but having the opportunity to cast a vote on Tuesday was the first opportunity many had to make known their discontent. However, even though several councilors may be MAGA-curious or even MAGA-friendly, none of the most inflammatory national issues have directly arisen at council meetings. Still, if voters are inclined to express their anger at the ballot box, they don’t do it by voting for all the incumbents, they vote for change.

Although the city election is over, politics never rests in Lowell. If history is a judge, at least two-thirds of the councilors-elect want to be mayor, so we’ll have intense behind the scenes politicking for that office. Also, I’ve seen new campaign signs sprouting for Rodney Elliott and Vanna Howard who are both candidates for State Senator in the upcoming special election to fill the vacancy created with the passing of Ed Kennedy. That primary will be February 3, 2026, with the special general election on March 3, 2026.

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Here are the unofficial results from Tuesday with the candidates listed in order of finish. Besides the number of votes received, in contested races I’ve also shown the combined amount of money raised/money on hand at the start of the year up through the end of October reports filed with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance:

City Councilor At-Large (top three elected)

Vesna Nuon (incumbent) – 4,889 votes – ($33,798)
Erik Gitschier (incumbent) – 4,705 – ($24,004)
Rita Mercier (incumbent) – 4,173 – ($25,420)
Sixto DeJesus – 2,987 – ($10,158)
Emile Kaufman – 1,237 – ($5)

City Councilor District 1 (top one elected in all districts)

Daniel Rourke (incumbent) – 799

City Councilor District 2

Corey Robinson (incumbent) – 550

City Councilor District 3

Belinda Juran – 1,143 – ($28,677)
Daniel Finn – 1,139 – ($17,053)

City Councilor District 4

Sean McDonough – 410 – ($4455)
Wayne Jenness (incumbent) – 358 – ($10,043)

City Councilor District 5

Kimberly Ann Scott (incumbent) – 610 – ($16,470)
Sherri O’Connor Barboza – 163 – ($337)

City Councilor District 6

Sokhary Chau (incumbent) – 504

City Councilor District 7

Sidney Liang – 397 – ($9,907)
Paul Ratha Yem (incumbent) – 303 – ($5,331)

City Councilor District 8

John Descoteaux (incumbent) – 724 – ($15,799)
Marcos Candido – 685 – ($2,564)

School Committee At-Large (top two elected)

Danielle McFadden – 4,526 votes
Connie Martin (incumbent) – 3,889 votes
Robert Hoey – 2,323
Zoe Dzineku – 1,723

School Committee District 1

Fred Bahou (incumbent) – 1,864

School Committee District 2

Eileen DelRossi (incumbent) – 1,007

School Committee District 3

David Conway (incumbent) – 2,214

School Committee District 4

Dominik Lay (incumbent) 976

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Here is the turnout by district with the names of the candidates in that district (with the winner listed first), followed by the number of registered voters, the number who voted on Tuesday, and the resulting turnout percentage.

District 1 – Rourke – 10,730 – 1,001 – 9 percent

District 2 – Robinson – 10,099 – 726 – 7 percent

District 3 – Juran/Finn – 10,068 – 2,309 – 23 percent

District 4 – McDonough/Jenness – 8,751 – 784 – 9 percent

District 5 – Scott/Barboza – 10,131 – 822 – 8 percent

District 6 – Chau – 8,828 – 641 – 7 percent

District 7 – Liang/Yem – 8,498 – 732 – 9 percent

District 8 – Descoteaux/Candido – 9,990 – 1,479 – 15 percent

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On election night, the margin of victory by Belinda Juran over Dan Finn was 4 votes. As I write this, it is unclear whether there will be a recount. But that invites the question, when was the last recount in Lowell?

My memory is that the most recent recount came in the 1999 city election when newcomer John McQuaid defeated incumbent school committee member George Kouloheras by 18 votes. McQuaid’s lead was confirmed by the recount.

Recounts are central to my own political story. My first time on the ballot was the September 1994 Democratic primary for register of deeds for the Northern Middlesex District. In a field of nine candidates with 29,309 votes cast across the ten-town district, the unofficial count on election night had me in first place by just 8 votes. The second-place finisher filed for a recount which turned out to be ten recounts since each of the ten municipalities in the district held their own. In the post-recount official count my lead extended to 43 votes.

Two of the communities – Lowell and Dracut – used punch card ballots of the type that gained infamy six years later in the 2000 Presidential election in Florida. Based on my experience in the 1994 recount I can say with a high degree of certainty that the US Supreme Court, in blocking a hand recount of the Florida punch card ballots, handed the presidency to George W. Bush since Al Gore would have won Florida and the election had the recount proceeded as it should have.

The first recount I was involved in was in 1988 when Lowell’s Bobby Kennedy challenged longtime Governors Councilor Herb Connolly of Newton (Governors Council districts are HUGE). The outcome see-sawed back and forth through municipal-level recounts and multiple court hearings. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ultimately ruled that Kennedy won by a single vote. Election lore has it that neither Connolly nor his wife voted that day.

Perhaps the most famous recount in a Lowell city election was the 1953 city council race. The city used “proportional representation” as a voting method back then (which is now known as ranked choice voting). The two candidates fighting it out for the ninth and final council seat were Nicholas Contakos and Samuel Sampson (whose spouse, Ellen Sampson, succeeded him on the council and later became the city’s first female mayor).

The recount began on Monday, November 23, 1953. When it ended, the Election Commission held that Sampson had prevailed over Contakos by eight votes. Contakos appealed this outcome by filing an action in Superior Court. He identified 85 ballots that he had challenged in the recount that he alleged the Election Commission had wrongly decided. After examining the contested ballots, Superior Court Judge Vincent Brogna changed how several dozen ballots were counted, leaving Contakos the winner by two votes. On December 23, 1953, Judge Brogna ordered the Lowell Election Commission to revoke the certificate of election it had earlier issued to Sampson and present it to Contakos.

Sampson appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court which stayed any further action – including the issuance of the election certificate to Contakos – pending its ruling in the case. When inauguration day arrived on Monday, January 4, 1954, only eight councilors took the oath of office. The ninth seat would be filled by either Sampson or Contakos depending on how the SJC decided the recount case. Oral arguments before the SJC were held on March 2, 1954, and the Court issued its decision on March 31, 1954: Sampson was the winner and should be seated on the council forthwith.

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Instead of holding a sign at a polling place on election day, I ventured to UMass Lowell’s University Crossing for the launch of a great new historical resource. Initiated by former chancellor Jacquie Moloney and executed by Moloney and Marie Frank, a UML professor of architectural history, with funding from the Donahue Center for Business Ethics & Social Responsibility, the program is called “Preserving Lowell’s Legacy of Business & Community Leadership: A Digital Archive of Urban Revitalization.” It features video interviews of 17 individuals who played critical roles in the revitalization of Lowell from the late 1980s into this century. The interviewees are:

Peter Aucella
Carol Cowan
Nancy Donahue
George Duncan
Fred Faust
Michael Gallagher
Steven Joncas
Allison Lamey
Jay Linnehan
David McLean
Marty Meehan
Jacquie Moloney
Jack O’Connor
James O’Donnell Jr.
Chet Szablak
Nicola Tsongas
Germaine Vigeant-Trudel

At Tuesday’s event, Moloney and Frank led a panel discussion that featured remarks from George Duncan, Marty Meehan, and Jay Linnehan.

The project’s website has additional information about this effort and links to the video interviews (with a few videos still being processed).****

There’s always a Lowell connection: Elinor Lipman is among the best-known and most-successful novelists in America today. Characterized by witty, humorous social satire, her books have won many awards and frequently make it to the best seller list. She was also born and grew up in Lowell. The Pollard Memorial Library Foundation has created a writing prize in her honor. This year’s recipient was UMass Lowell student and Westford resident Julia Magee. Lipman recently traveled to Lowell to present the award. Please check out Paul Marion’s blog post about this event.

4th Annual Elinor Lipman Literary Award

Pollard Memorial Library hosted the 4th annual Elinor Lipman Award for Writing on Oct. 30, 2025, announcing that UMass Lowell student Julia Magee won the award including a $1000 prize for a work of short fiction.

From Westford, Mass., Julia is an English major at UML studying creative writing this fall with acclaimed author Andre Dubus III. She is also an intern this semester with Loom Press working on a cataloguing project with publishing archives at the UML Center for Lowell History under the guidance of center director Tony Sampas.

Elinor Lipman was born and grew up in Lowell and graduated from Lowell High School where she is a Distinguished Alumna. She was in the same class as library foundation member Georgia McColough, who introduced Elinor, and baseball star and later Lowell City Manager Brian Martin among many others, some of whom are lifelong friends and attended the ceremony last week. Elinor often returns to Lowell to see friends and talk about her books at the library.

Among her many popular novels are the new one, “Every Tom, Dick & Harry” and recent titles “Rachel to the Rescue,” and “Good Riddance.” Her novel “And Then She Found Me” was made into a film with Helen Hunt and Collin Firth. She has received the New England Book Award in Fiction and a lifetime achievement award from the New England Library Information Network.

The winning work by Julia Magee was selected by Elinor and co-judges Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, a Northeastern University professor who won the 2022 Lipman Award, and Pilar Garcia Brown, a senior editor at Dutton in New York City.

The Lipman Award for fiction or nonfiction is open to Lowell residents and students at UML and Middlesex Community College. The program’s mission is to highlight the importance of literacy and learning in city life. The award is made possible by the Pollard Memorial Library Foundation and library staff. The foundation advances the public library through advocacy and funding to supplement the city budget for the library.

Author Elinor Lipman and award winner Julia Magee.

From left are 2024 writing award winner Chance Lee of Lowell; Julia Magee, 2025 award winner; and author Stephen O’Connor of Lowell, 2022 Distinguished Mention awardee and regular contributor to the Howe blog.

Board members of the Pollard Memorial Library Foundation with Julia Magee holding her award plaque.

Future Prospects

FUTURE PROSPECTS

By Terry Downes

High school athletes fight to play
While pros will only play for pay;
The question then is rendered clear:
Do we the game, or gold revere?

With players’ salaries on the rise
The owners scramble to devise
Ways to raise the money needed
Then to pay contracts completed.

Ticket prices are sent soaring
Commercial breaks are long and boring,
The cost of hot dogs and of beer
Has grown prohibitively dear.

A trip to bring a youngster there
Sends parents into corporate lair
To have their pockets picked with glee
To pay for owners’ spending spree.

So what is baseball after all:
A game of joy, or business brawl?
A field for millionaires-to-be,
Or happy days of reverie?

The nation’s game is sliding slow
Down a slope it shouldn’t go,
Away from hearts of average folk
Who on the cost of tickets choke.

Is baseball only for the rich?
Shall we be forced to pay-per-pitch?
Baseball’s fans must make their choice:
To lose the game, or raise their voice.

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Terry Downes is an attorney and retired District Court Clerk/Magistrate who went on to found and direct the MCC Program on Homeland Security, and long served as an adjunct professor at Suffolk Univ. Law School and UMASS-Lowell. He lives in Lowell with his wife Atty. Annie O’Connor.

This is the last in a series of nine poems about baseball (nine, like in nine innings of a game, or nine players on the field, etc.) which will appear on the first Friday of each month through the baseball season. Here are the previously posted poems in this series:

March – Spring Training

April – Opening Day

May – Early Season

June – Postponed!

July – In the Minors

August – Pitchers’ Duel

September – Building Year

October – Pennant Fever

The Tiger

The Tiger

Stephen O’Connor

Come here and listen to me, now. I’ll tell you, but don’t go blabbing it all over the place. It’s you and me. That’s it. Okay, I have a tiger, or to paraphrase John Lennon on the Norwegian girl, he has me. You can’t really own a tiger any more than you can own a cloud, or a star, or a person. So the tiger doesn’t have a name. I’m not going to clap some human word on him as if I had the right to gift him an identity, but if I did, it wouldn’t be Tabby, I’ll tell you that. And if I were to tell him that as a human I have “dominion over the animals,” and if he could understand me, he would laugh. And if he could talk, he would answer: “Like to see you take a walk through my domain. We’d show you dominion. And your big human brain wouldn’t do you any good.”

Don’t worry, though. He’s under control. I trust him. I can’t say I really trust him one hundred percent. I trust him like ninety-nine percent. Or maybe ninety percent. Sometimes, like sixty percent, which means I trust him more than I don’t trust him, but it’s still nerve wracking, even when I trust him ninety percent. You see, if you have a human friend you don’t completely trust, you think maybe if you leave him alone with your wife while you go to the men’s room, he may flirt with her, particularly if he’s had a couple of drinks. But if you don’t trust the tiger and the mistrust is warranted, he may rip your throat out and eat you.

It’s difficult not to consider this possibility when I study his paws. They are enormous, and they are equipped with retractable and sadly extendable claws. They are also enormous, maliciously curved and razor-sharp. His head is the size of a large watermelon, and full of ripping teeth and cruel fangs. Even without those accoutrements, the tiger would be more than a match for me. I weigh 180 pounds; he weighs 610.

But no, he’s fine, in general. Except, a couple of times he’s gotten out of the enclosed and fortified yard. Okay, a few times. One escape was quite bad. Civilians were fleeing. Sirens were screaming. Luckily, I found him in the parking garage. The beast had this poor guy cornered, and he was just sitting there watching him. The guy was sobbing a bit and there was a puddle at his feet. Naturally. I was nervous too, checking my watch and counting the hours since I had fed him. I acted like a brave passerby. “Oh, my God! A tiger!” I cried. “What in blazes? I’ll draw him away! You walk calmly to the exit.” The tiger turned and followed me to my Land Rover. so gracefully, you wouldn’t know how much he weighs if you didn’t notice the rear tires compress.

Yes, that was stressful. Having an apex predator as a friend can be trying. Especially one of the feline variety. You know how your cat sometimes comes home with a mouse in its little jaws? The tiger got out one night and came home with a dead German Shepherd hanging from its bloodied maw. Of course he meant it as a gift. Thank you, tiger. I had to dispose of the dog body down by the river. There was an article in the paper in which the reporter theorized that a gang of coyotes had killed the dog. Someone mentioned a chupacapbra. There were reports of a tiger seen prowling among midnight shadows, but most people regarded those with the same jaundiced eye with which they regard reports of UFO’s hovering over the pines. They prefer the coyote explanation. But no, between you and me, it was the tiger.

He’s a lot of work. But he is so beautiful, so grand, so beyond the human scale. He lies there like King Solomon the Wise, calmly assessing me with those amber eyes, his face an explosion of golden orange, black and white concentric stripes. I look at him and think there’s just no way this complex, magnificent creature evolved from a crap-pile of inorganic matter in some hydrothermal vent in the ocean. William Blake must have been nearer the truth when he wondered: Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Sometimes I awaken in the night and see him in the moonlight that streams through the window, watching me, his thick hawser rope of a tail coiling behind him like a serpent, and I will admit it troubles me. But he would never….

He’s my pet, and my best friend, while it serves him. I rise cautiously and creep to the bathroom, wondering, if the wild exerted itself, how long would the bathroom door hold against him?

The author (left) and the (likely?) subject of this story (right)