August 18, 2024

The city council resumed meeting on Tuesday night after a three week break. Several issues that arose warrant mention.

MOU with WinnDevelopment for HCID – The council authorized City Manager Tom Golden to execute a memorandum of understanding with WinnDevelopment regarding Parcels 11 and 12 of the Hamilton Canal Innovation District. These two parcels are in a single block on the Dutton Street side of the district. Picture driving inbound on Broadway, then continuing across Dutton into the HCID and heading for the Niki Tsongas Bridge over the Pawtucket Canal. Just before the canal, if you look to your left, you will see the city’s HCID Parking Garage. If you look to your right, you’ll see a vacant lot. This is the development site. Parcel 12 is a small triangular portion of the lot closest to the street intersection. It has previously been designated as “green space” while Parcel 11 is the rest of the lot.

Winn proposes combining the two parcels and constructing a single building on it with six stories on the street side and seven stories on the canal side. The building would contain 124 residential apartments with 60% being one bedroom, 30% two bedroom, and 10% three bedroom. Of the apartments, 40% would be affordable, 30% would be “workforce”, and 30% would be market rate. The ground floor would contain a 5000 square foot retail/commercial space facing Canal Street.

No onsite parking is contemplated, however, Winn will enter a long-term lease with the city for between 185 and 215 spaces in the HCID Garage at a rate equal to the downtown resident rate.

Winn will seek funding for the project through the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (EOHLC) and, depending on which round provides the funding, construction could start in the third quarter of 2026 or the third quarter of 2027. The building would then take 18 months to construct.

For now, the MOU gives the parties six months to reach a land disposition agreement that would include a purchase price to be paid by Winn for the parcels.

Winn has an excellent track record in Lowell. Just a few years ago the company constructed two apartment buildings just across the Pawtucket Canal from this parcel. The buildings seemed to go up quickly and, from the outside at least, appear to be well maintained. And because this parcel is tucked in the middle of the HCID, architecturally and design-wise, it need not be the type of “signature” or gateway building that the Lupoli Companies had agreed to construct on the more prominent HCID parcel across Jackson Street from the Lowell Justice Center.

Speaking of the Lupoli Companies, there has been no public discussion of Lupoli’s proposed modification of that plan for months. The council did recently meet in executive session about it, but there’s been nothing said publicly.

Based on previous public discussions of the modification proposed by Lupoli that would scale back what he promised to build, my sense is that City Manager Golden and the Planning Department favor it, but that some portion of the city council does not. That council split might even have played a role in the controversial decision by councilors to forego a special election to fill the vacant Belvidere District seat and instead appoint Corey Belanger to fill that seat within minutes of John Leahy vacating it. Had the Belvidere seat remained vacant, my guess is that the ten remaining councilors were split with six favoring Lupoli’s modification and four opposing it. If that split held, the proposal still could have gone through but there would not have been any cushion and, more importantly, any vote that required support from two-thirds of the council might have failed since two-thirds would mean seven councilors voting for it, not six. Assuming Councilor Belanger favors the Lupoli modification, there’s the seventh vote.

Now this is all pure speculation on my part, but I’m still in search of a compelling explanation of why the council voted as it did on the special election issue.

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Update on Lowell High project – Representatives of Skanska (the city’s project manager) gave a presentation on the Lowell High School project. A couple of major milestones have been reached. The end of this summer marks the halfway point of the overall project, and it also involves the grand opening of the brand-new Freshmen Academy building. The report given to the council was positive, especially regarding costs being kept within projections, but everyone cautioned that like most construction projects, this phase will be a race to completion in time for school to open at the end of this month.

While the new building is called the Freshmen Academy, it will be used as a “swing space” for the next two years while other parts of the project are completed. The freshmen will stay put in their current John Street building while upper class students displaced by ongoing construction will have classes in this new building until the project is completed.

This coming school year, renovations on the canal side of the 1980 building and on the half of the 1922 building near French Street will be accomplished. Then starting next summer, the rest of the 1922 building will be done with the entire project wrapping up in July 2026.

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Funding for LTC – A joint motion from Councilors Vesna Nuon and Corey Robinson asking the City Manager to “work with CFO to find a way to assist LTC with their current financial struggle” prompted an interesting discussion of the continued viability of local access cable TV.

I’m not privy to LTC’s budget or the specific challenges it faces right now, but a decade ago I served a term as president of the corporation and spent some years on the board. Even back then, the looming funding crisis was evident although what to do about it was not. This issue is a global one brought on by changing technology, but it has important implications for Lowell and its residents.

Growing up in Lowell in the 1960s, television was central to our lives. Once you bought a TV, the content consumed was free since the cost of production was paid by advertising. After a diet limited to channels 2, 4, 5 and 7, the addition of UHF channels 38 and 56 seemed a big deal, especially because they began broadcasting Bruins games when Bobby Orr led the team to the Stanley Cup in 1970 and Red Sox games in the 1975 World Series season. That was the TV landscape I remember when I joined the US Army in 1980. With the next three years spent in Germany with the sole English language TV channel being Armed Forces Network (AFN), I got used to limited programing.

That all changed when I returned to the US in 1984. By then, “cable TV” had been broadly adopted. People now had to pay for what formerly had been free, but the premium content – “It’s not TV; it’s HBO” - and expanded variety of programing made it worth it. Everyone got cable and the number of channels kept going up. So did the cost of cable, but what was the alternative?

When cable first emerged, Massachusetts state government sought to regulate its rollout by extracting fees, just as it did more recently with the marijuana industry. The cable regulatory model required cable providers to charge users a local access fee that would fund technological infrastructure at the municipal level and local access television.

Thus, LTC was born. So was the TV studio at Lowell High and the school department’s Lowell Educational TV. The city of Lowell had a lot of cable subscribers which yielded a large amount of money for municipal cable. In the world of local access, LTC was a robust operation with multiple channels and a half dozen full-time employees.

Then along came the internet. The transition wasn’t immediate. I was an early adopter of the internet, but when I read Michael Lewis’s 1999 book, “The New New Thing,” which suggested among other uses for the internet, connecting it to your home TV, I couldn’t imagine doing that since we had cable, after all.

Fast forward to 2024 and a TV hooked to the internet has become the dominant delivery system for programing. Those in the entertainment industry talk of the “cable-pocolypse” which is the growing number of people who dispense entirely with cable TV. Those people are known as “cable cutters” (those who once had cable but cancelled) or “cable nevers” (people who have never subscribed to cable). The number of cable subscribers has been dropping for several years, but because the price paid by the remaining subscribers continued to rise, the cable industry remained profitable – until now. The pace of cable cutting today has increased so much that the math no longer works for cable providers, and it will only get worse. Fewer cable subscribers mean less – much less – in local access fees flowing through the city to LTC.

In terms of how we consume television programming as entertainment, this may not change much for many of us. Instead of paying one big sum to Comcast, we now pay discrete portions of that same sum to Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and a few others. Like me, some have rediscovered the TV antenna to catch free broadcast TV (at least on days that are not very windy). But this death spiral of cable subscribers will have a devastating effect on local access TV since there is no comparable funding mechanism to replace it. Sure, local channels can apply for grants, or increase membership fees, but even if successful, those won’t provide the steady stream of cable fee revenue that local access stations have grown used to receiving.

Lowell Telecommunications does many things well, and many things that benefit the community, but two seem most important. The first is televising and recording municipal meetings. The second is to provide an information delivery system for underserved populations of which there are many in a city like Lowell. Regarding the first, it would seem appropriate for the city to eventually take on the cost of televising municipal meetings. With our abysmally low turnout in recent city elections, that seems the least that government can do to make the functions of government more accessible to residents.

Regarding how to reach underserved populations, major grants and fund raising would seem the most realistic option. Everyone has a high-quality video recorder embedded in their phone and platforms like YouTube and Facebook provide free platforms for sharing your content with everyone in the world with an internet connection, so those costs would not be a factor. But creating content is time consuming so you couldn’t just rely on volunteers or people doing it in their spare time. At least a couple of employees would be needed, which would be a big cost.

At the council meeting there was some talk of imposing the “local access fee” paid by cable subscribers on home internet service, but that’s something the legislature would have to do and since internet providers have more lobbyists than local access TV stations, it’s unlikely to succeed. For that reason, it would be best for the city to develop a transition plan that continues the core services provided by LTC going into the future.

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Upcoming Lowell History events:

Sunday, September 8, 2024, at 11am at Tyler Park. Walking tour of the Tyler Park Historic District. Th

Sunday, September 15, 2024, from 10am until noon at Lowell Cemetery. Self-paced Portrait & Mausoleum Tour.

Saturday, October 5, 2024, at 10am at Lowell Cemetery. Walking tour. Begins at Knapp Ave entrance.

Sunday, October 6, 2024, at 10am at Lowell Cemetery. Walking tour. Begins at Knapp Ave entrance.